WUNRN
The Economist
CORRELATION BETWEEN WOMEN'S ECONOMIC
ACTIVITY & FOOD SECURITY
July 11th
2012, By K.N.C. |
FEEDING
people isn't easy.
A new
index on food security released this week by the Economist Intelligence
Unit (EIU), commissioned by DuPont, a large chemicals and materials firm,
uncovers a few fascinating findings. The most interesting is a strong
correlation between women's economic opportunity and access to affordable, safe
food. The Global Food Security Index shows a hefty 0.93 correlation with
the EIU's Women’s Economic Opportunity Index, which measures female economic
participation (scattergraph below).
As the
report states: "The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that
if women had access to the same productive resources as men—better seeds,
fertilisers and fungicides—they could increase their yield by 20% to 30%. As
women make up 43% of the world’s farmers, this would increase total
agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5% to 4%, and reduce hunger
globally by 12% to 17%, according to the FAO."
Interestingly,
the correlation between food security and EIU's Democracy Index was only 0.77,
a much weaker link than with women's labour equality. This suggest that what
happens in the political sphere is a bit less important than what happens on
the social sphere, in terms of food.
The
EIU's index ranks 105 countries with a model that analyzes 25 individual
indicators in the areas of affordability, availability and quality and safety.
(An interactive website
is here; the underlying data is here.)
Among
the other interesting findings are that landlocked countries show only a modest
increase in food insecurity, on average seven points lower on a scale to 100.
Also, the country that had the least annual volatility of farm output over the
past 20 years was China (explained by generous subsidies that create a floor
for food commodity prices), while the North African countries of Morocco, Tunisia
and Algeria had some of the most variance.
The good
news is that several of the countries at the very bottom of the index, notably