Project title: Gap between national food production and food-based dietary guidance highlights lack of national self-sufficiency

Published in Nature Food: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4 (DOI: 10.1038/s43016-025-01173-4)

Project description: This project aims to assess national capacities to achieve dietary guidelines based on domestic food production. It explores past and futures trends of self-sufficiency and identifies countries where low self-sufficiency is couples with overdependence on few countries for imports. The findings shed light on countries' reliance on food trade and their capabilities to respond to global shocks.

1. Introduction

Project team: Jonas Stehl, Alexander Vonderschmidt, Sebastian Vollmer, Peter Alexander, and Lindsay M Jaacks.

2. Data sources

All data used in this project is publicly available or provided in this repository:

Public datasets:

• FAOSTAT Food Balance Sheets (accessed on 24.07.2024): https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FBS
• FAOSTAT Trade Data (accessed on 18.06.2024): https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/TM
• United Nations World Population Estimates 2024 (accessed on 23.07.2024): https://population.un.org/wpp/
• World Wildlife Fund’s 2023 ‘Eating for Net Zero’ Technical Report (accessed on 07.06.2024): https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-05/Eating_For_Net_Zero_Technical_Report.pdf
• OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2023-2032 Data (accessed on 01.07.2024): https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/agriculture-and-food/data/oecd-agriculture-statistics/oecd-fao-agricultural-outlook-edition-2023_3f870a2b-en
• Food waste at the household and edible portions (04.07.2023): https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/10388b16-5f1a-45d0-b690-e89bb78d33bb/content

Other data available in "SelfSufficiency/data":

• Food group recommendations: foodgroups_wwf.xlsx
• Agricultural Outlook FAO FBS matching data: Outlook_FAOFBS matching.xls
• Conversion factors from Gustavsson: conversionfactors.dta
• Shapefiles: _worldmap.dta

3. Installation and setup

Install the following STATA packages: wbopendata, spmap, kountry, grc1leg2

4. Usage

Change the file paths accordingly.

Run the STATA do.files in the following order:

1. 0.1_projections.do

   Uses:

   • Agricultural Outlook Database: HIGH_AGLINK_2023-2023-1-EN-20240109T100123.csv

2. 0.2_processing.do

   Uses:

   • Food group recommendations: foodgroups_wwf.xlsx
   • Population data: WPP2024_POP_F01_1_POPULATION_SINGLE_AGE_BOTH_SEXES.xlsx
   • Agricultural Outlook FAO FBS matching data: Outlook_FAOFBS matching.xls
   • FAO Food Balance Sheets: FoodBalanceSheets_E_All_Data_(Normalized)/FoodBalanceSheets_E_All_Data_(Normalized).csv
   • Conversion factors: conversionfactors.dta

3. 1.2_analysis.do

4. 2.1_timetrends_projections.do

   Uses:

   • Agricultural Outlook Database: HIGH_AGLINK_2023-2023-1-EN-20240109T100123.csv

5. 2.2_timetrends_processing.do

   Uses:

   • Food group recommendations: foodgroups_wwf.xlsx
   • Population data: WPP2024_POP_F01_1_POPULATION_SINGLE_AGE_BOTH_SEXES.xlsx
   • FAO Food Balance Sheets: FoodBalanceSheets_E_All_Data_(Normalized)/FoodBalanceSheets_E_All_Data_(Normalized).csv
   • Conversion factors: conversionfactors.dta

6. 2.3_timetrends_analysis.do

7. 3.1_trade.do

   Uses:

   • FAO Trade Data: Trade_DetailedTradeMatrix_E_All_Data_(Normalized).csv

8. 4.1_maps.do

Uses:

• Shapefiles: _worldmap.dta

5. Contact

For any questions or concerns, please contact Jonas Stehl (jonas.stehl@uni-goettingen.de)