Most people assume that producing more food leads to better food security. However, the relationship is not always that simple. This story uses five interactive visualisations to explore why some countries achieve much better food security outcomes than others, even when they produce similar amounts of food.
The visualisations show that while global food production has increased significantly, production alone does not guarantee food security. Wealth appears to play an important role, but even countries with similar income levels can experience very different outcomes. The story also highlights countries that perform better than expected and examines how economic stress may affect food security.
This topic is relevant because food insecurity continues to affect millions of people despite ongoing improvements in agricultural production. By combining interactive visualisations with a simple narrative, the article encourages readers to think beyond food production and consider the economic and social factors that influence access to food.
Global food production has increased across all regions since the 1960s, although the pace of growth seems to vary. Sub-Saharan Africa has improved substantially but still trails many other regions. While increased production is promising, producing more food does not necessarily mean people have better access to it.
Source: sateasinpedas (2025).
Countries with similar levels of food production often achieve very different food security outcomes. This suggests that production alone cannot explain why some populations are better nourished than others. If food production is only part of the story, perhaps wealth plays a larger role.
Source: sateasinpedas (2025).
Food security generally improves as GDP per capita increases, indicating that wealthier countries are better able to provide access to food. However, countries with similar income levels can still achieve very different outcomes. This suggests that some countries are doing better than their wealth alone would predict.
Source: sateasinpedas (2025).
Some countries achieve far better food security outcomes than their income levels would predict, while others perform considerably worse. This suggests that policy, institutions and food distribution systems can be just as important as wealth itself.
Source: sateasinpedas (2025).
Countries experiencing greater economic stress generally report lower levels of dietary adequacy. Economic conditions can influence food affordability and government capacity to support vulnerable populations. Food security therefore depends not only on production and wealth, but also on broader economic stability.
Source: sateasinpedas (2025).
This use of generative AI tool Chatgpt (OpenAI, 2026) was used to debug and organise existing code in the RMarkdown file whilst developing visualisations all remaining work during this assignment was completed independently by myself.
OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT (GPT-5.5) [Large language model]. https://chatgpt.com
sateasinpedas. (2025). Global Geo-Economic Stress Indicators [Data set]. Kaggle. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/sateasinpedas/global-geo-economic-stress-indicators