Kuwait is the first Arab in the world according to the first global map of food sustainability

Little West

Researchers in a global study developed the first map of its kind to assess the sustainability of food systems in all countries of the world based on a set of indicators related to food production, including for the first time economic and social variables. New Zealand topped the list of the most sustainable food countries in the world, and Kuwait was the first Arab.

Social and economic variables
Increased awareness of how human diets are exacerbating climate change - while failing to feed more than 800 million people properly - has made better understanding of diets a global priority. Many global initiatives have called for a change in our diet to help make diets “sustainable”.

But researchers at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and their colleagues believe that socio-economic variables should also be included if we are to better understand the sustainability of our diets. For this purpose, they have reviewed the literature on dietary systems over the past two decades.

They then identified 20 indicators available to 97 countries from low-, middle- and high-income regions, and designed a global map to assess the sustainability of diets worldwide.

The authors classified the 20 indicators into four areas: environmental, economic, social and food variables, covering a wide range of factors including greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, the size of the female workforce, fair trade, food price volatility, and food and waste loss.

The authors of the study, published November 25 in the journal Scientific Data published by the journal Nature, say diets that include the entire food production and consumption network - from pre-production to food waste - remain a relatively new area of ​​research.

For this reason, the indicators used by researchers, governments and international development organizations appear to be heterogeneous or often unavailable. Therefore, one of the objectives of the study was to explore the development of standard terminology and methods to assist in further research on diets.

Kuwait is the first Arab
The results of the study show New Zealand tops the list of the most sustainable countries in its diets with a sustainability of 0.73, followed by Switzerland, Canada and the United Kingdom. Bangladesh, India and Madagascar are bottom.

According to the map completed by the researchers, 11 Arab countries in which the data for the 20 indicators used in the completion of the map are available, namely Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Sudan, Jordan, Kuwait, UAE and Yemen.

Kuwait topped the list of 31 Arab countries in the list of most sustainable food systems with a sustainable rate of 0.57 in 2017.

Algeria recorded the best rise for this index between 2000 and 2017 to reach 0.31, down from around 0.16. Jordan also witnessed a significant development in the Food Sustainability Index, which jumped from 0.19 to 0.26 during the same period, a slight improvement for other Arab countries.

Researchers acknowledge that because of the multidimensional nature of the degree of sustainability, there is no “natural / theoretical” limit that can determine whether a country is sustainable.

The importance of this work is not to help people or experts to classify countries as “sustainable / unsustainable” in relation to the state of their diets.

Instead, it provides an important tool for comparing the sustainability levels of diets, not only between countries, but also the evolution of their sustainability over time in a given country or group of countries. The authors provide examples of four countries - Algeria, India, Chile and Togo.