**7.2 Global food security index**

Food Security Index at the global level is another way to measure food security on a national level. It is based on a number of different factors. It was thought up and made by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which is one of the many parts of the Economist Group, a publicly traded multinational company. The project was paid for by the company DuPont. A total of 30 different variables were used to provide a standard for comparing the food security of different countries. These indicators are split into three groups: availability, affordability, and quality and safety, each of which has 10, 6, and 14 indicators [34].

The Global Food Security Index assesses the success of countries in accomplishing food security, much like other national-level metrics; however, it does so by utilizing quantitative and qualitative measures that represent not only food availability but also food access (for example, food intake as a proportion of total household expenditure and proportion of population living below or close to the global poverty line, food costs) and diet quality such as dietary availability of micronutrients. The GFSI is adjusted every quarter to account for changes in the data about food prices.

The Global Food Security Index is computed on a regular schedule in response to changes in the data on food prices. The GFSI uses data from the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Food Program, the Economist Intelligence Unit, analysts and expert panels, and public as well as academic sectors. These experts give the subjective scores that are used to make many of the qualitative indicators that are used to make the index. They also decide which indicators will be in the index and how much weight each one will have. The reliance on consensus and expert opinion is different from the methods used by FAO and IFPRI. However, personal data interpretation is often used when making food security measures, as explained below. Because of the complexity of food security indicators and the need for context to understand them, some institutions focus on consultative methods when making the tools for measuring food security.

FAO, the World Food Program, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development have come up with signs for food security in the past few years [23]. Several indicators describe each aspect of food security. A lot of work is also being done to combine these indicators into indices. These were chosen from many different indicators based on how important they were, how easy they were to get, and how often they were measured.
