This study was conducted to develop a food security index that enables cross country comparison and reflect situations of grain importers including Korea. Since the index was calculated by sub-category, it corresponded to the expanding concept of food security.

The previous mixed type indexes developed in Korea provide only Korea’s index so that they do not have criteria or other country’s index to evaluate its adequacy. Global food security indexes such as the Global Food Security Index of The Economist and the Rice Bowl Index of Syngenta are possible to compare across countries. However, they are largely affected by income levels and do not well reflect our domestic situation heavily depending on grain imports.

Therefore, the new developed Food Security Index (FSI) adopted a mixed type approach that has merits of an equation based approach and a score card approach. The new FSI corrected those demerits of previous Korea and global mixed indexes of food security.

By a process selecting sub-indicators the new index consisted of 3 areas (availability, accessibility, and safety and nutrition), 7 sub-areas, and 19 sub-indicators. In calculation of the composite index, weights of sub-indicators was decided after the expert group’s review, based on the weight of previous studies.

As a result of the calculation of the new FSI, Australia was the highest among G20 countries in 2012, followed by Canada, the US, France, and Germany. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s FSI was the lowest, because its level of per capita GDP was low and it earned a relatively low evaluation on safety and nutrition. Korea is in the middle ranks in accessibility, safety, and nutrition. Nevertheless, it has a low availability due to its low self-sufficiency rate, and thus its FSI ranks 16th among G20 nations.

Unlike previous studies, this study reflected the grain importers’ sensitivity to the conditions of global grain supply and demand in the index by differently applying the international grain availability according to each country’s self-sufficiency rate of grain. Therefore, compared to The Economist’s Global Food Security Index, the high ranking countries (mostly grain exporters) were similar. On the other hand, in this study, grain importers like Korea, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia ranked lower than in The Economist.

This study aimed at developing the new food security index that corrects demerits of existing food security indexes and calculated the indexes of G20 countries. Further studies are needed to expand the range of nations compared, set up a critical value that enables the judgment about food security crisis, and prepare countermeasures to prevent the food crisis.

Researchers: Kim, TaeHun and Kim, Jiyeon
Research period: 2013. 9. - 2013. 12.
E-mail address: taehun@krei.re.kr