FAO, GAIN, and Johns Hopkins launch online dashboard to inform food policy

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), and The Johns Hopkins Alliance for a Healthier World have launched the Food Systems Dashboard—an easy-to-navigate online tool designed to help decision-makers understand their food systems, identify their levers of change, and decide which ones to pull.

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. Well-functioning food systems can ensure the availability, accessibility, and affordability of nutritious foods for healthy diets.

The Food Systems Dashboard is a unique holistic resource intended for policymakers, non-governmental organizations, 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.

“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,” said Jessica Fanzo, Johns Hopkins Global Food Ethics and Policy program director, in a press release. “Without that data, it’s difficult to identify the best evidence-based actions that could improve food systems. It was really important to us, given the level of complexity and interconnections inherent to food systems, that the data be presented in a way that is easily usable—and that’s what the Dashboard does. Now decision-makers have easy access to both data and to policy advice that is specific to their situations.”

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.

Policy makers 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 such as how to best utilize their agricultural water sources to increase yields of key crops.