FAO and Johns Hopkins launch online dashboard for “better global food policies”

02 Jun 2020 --- The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and The Johns Hopkins Alliance for a Healthier World have launched an online tool called the Food Systems Dashboard designed to help decision-makers understand their food systems and identify levers of change. Well-functioning food systems can ensure the availability, accessibility and affordability of nutritious foods for healthy diets, the organizations flag, which are especially paramount in times of uncertainty.

The Food Systems Dashboard is a holistic resource intended for policymakers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses, civil society leaders and other actors to enable timely visualization of national food systems, understand the interconnections across multiple sectors, perform comparisons with other countries, identify key challenges and prioritize actions.

“The Dashboard has the potential to halve the time required to gather the relevant data, helping public agencies and private entities to grasp the three Ds more rapidly: Describe national food systems, Diagnose them to prioritize areas for action and then Decide on the action to take, based on plausible interventions that have been tried in other countries,” explains Lawrence Haddad, GAIN’s Executive Director.

The Dashboard houses food systems of more than 230 countries and territories by bringing together data for over 170 indicators from 35 sources. It will enable stakeholders to compare their food systems with those of other countries and will guide potential priority actions to improve food systems’ impacts on diets and nutrition.

“The FAO is contributing its extensive expertise in making complex food systems information more transparent and accessible to this project and looks forward to furthering collaboration with our partners and beyond to secure the success of this initiative,” explains Director-General Qu Dongyu.

Transforming food systems
The Dashboard is publicly accessible and will foster “much-needed cooperation” in changing global food systems, according to the organizations. “With the threats and opportunities presented by COVID-19, we need more collaboration between stakeholders who care about hunger, nutrition, livelihoods, climate, biodiversity and sustainable natural resource use. Working together and sharing information is also essential to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, which are now just ten years away,” Dongyu further states.

Food systems encompass an entire range of actors – including, but not limited to, farmers, traders, processors, wholesalers, distributors, retailers and consumers – and the processes that get food from the fields to markets to tables. 

“What struck us back in 2017 while working on the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition Report was the lack of accessible, organized, quality-checked information on food systems. Without that data, it’s difficult to identify the best evidence-based actions that could improve food systems,” says Jessica Fanzo, Johns Hopkins Global Food Ethics and Policy Program Director. 

“It was important to us, given the complexity and interconnections inherent to food systems, that the data be presented in an easily usable way – and that’s what the Dashboard does. Now decision-makers have easy access to both data and policy advice specific to their situations,” she explains. 

For example, a policymaker in the Ministry of Health can look at country-level data about people’s intake of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. They can also see nutrition and health outcomes, such as high blood pressure, which may indicate a correlation between lower intakes of these nutritious foods and a higher prevalence of high blood pressure. The data can be compared across countries by region, food systems type or income classification to inform public health policies to promote increased intake of these foods.

Policymakers would also be able to look at long-term average annual precipitation in their country and how this is changing over time in the face of climate change. This, paired with data on the percent of cultivated land equipped for irrigation, can help inform decisions about how to utilize their agricultural water sources best to increase yields of key crops.

Edited by Elizabeth Green