Jameel Index for Food Trade and Vulnerability

Global changes spurred by social and economic transitions, energy and environmental policy, regional geopolitics, conflict, and of course climate change, can impact food demand and supply. Despite the crucial need for more secure food systems, significant knowledge gaps exist when it comes to understanding how different climate scenarios may affect both agricultural productivity and global food supply chains and security.

The Jameel Index for Food Trade and Vulnerability is a comprehensive index assessing countries’ food security vulnerability, designed to better understand and analyse food security, measure countries’ dependence on global food trade and imports, and assess how regional-scale threats might affect the ability to trade food goods across diverse geographic regions. 

Launched in 2022, a main outcome of the research will be a model to project global food demand, supply balance, and bilateral trade under different likely future scenarios, with a focus on climate change. The work will help guide policymakers over the next 25 years while the global population is expected to grow and the climate crisis is predicted to worsen.    

The Jameel Index is a foundational project for the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS)-led Food and Climate Systems Transformation (FACT) Alliance. Phase one of the project will support a collaboration between four FACT Alliance members: J-WAFS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI, which is also part of the CGIAR network), and the Martin School at the University of Oxford. An external partner, United Arab Emirates University, is also assisting with the project work.