Abstract
Food security is usually identified as a desirable outcome depending on a variety of factors such as food availability, access and distribution. Food self-sufficiency is one of the key factors when it comes to evaluating food availability. Furthermore, food self-sufficiency is not only a national concern but also relevant on a sub-national scale. A consumption-oriented approach is proposed to measure the degree of self-sufficiency on a regional scale. In our proposal, exports are subtracted from domestic supply to assess the share of domestic production in domestic consumption. By doing so, the effects of regional specialization in export crops on our estimates are avoided. Due to its increasing relevance in consumption patterns, the food industry is included as a separate group of food items. Owing to their small size, high density of human activities, specialization in tourism, and remoteness from the European continent, the Canary Islands are an interesting laboratory for illustrating the advantages and shortcomings of measuring food self-sufficiency on a local scale.
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Notes
To estimate the total food supply available for domestic consumption, variations in stocks should be considered. However, as this information is frequently not available, an average of the yearly figures for several years is usually calculated to reduce the degree of inaccuracy.
Given that prices result from market transactions, a note of caution about price formation needs to be sounded when non-commercial or subsistence production account for a significant part of total consumption, as usual in developing countries.
The term “apparent food consumption” is applied to avoid confusion with the term “apparent consumption”, which is commonly used in the literature as a measure to indicate the supplies available for all uses, including non-food uses (FAO 2017: 7).
As FAO explains, particularly when analysing FBS for countries with very unequal income distributions, it is important to keep these distributional limitations of the FBS in mind (FAO 2017: 7).
Monaco et al. (2017) is an interesting approach to assessing self-sufficiency for several city regions through a combination of data sourced at both the regional and national level.
Besides non-food usages of production such as seeds or animal feed, the primary products or even processed products used as inputs for the food industry to obtain a different final product are also subtracted in order to obtain gross supply.
If prices are different for the domestic and imported product, a ratio could be calculated to express the proportion of domestic production in the value of total supply. However, this information is not available for the Canary Islands.
Household waste and losses of meals not eaten at home account for a part of purchased food. Unfortunately, this information is not available for the Canary Islands. Additionally, due to the significant share of food consumption by tourists, by definition outside households, losses in these catering activities might be relevant but are also without data coverage.
A more detailed description is available upon request from the authors.
Domestic meat supply is obtained from records about carcass weight in slaughterhouses, whereas statistics for imported production distinguish between carcasses, half-carcasses and other cuts, with bone-in or boneless. As information about commercial formats for domestic supply is not available, all productions are expressed in terms of fresh boneless equivalent weight.
The statistical office criteria about what is “local” have several limitations. First, the participation of imported food items, raw materials or energy might be important enough to think about the convenience of adjusting the relative relevance of local production in local consumption. Second, the total value of local production would be lower if the value of these imported inputs were subtracted. Furthermore, the value of local production at retail prices does not totally accrue to local agents (capital ownership). In addition, the criterion based on the location of production has particular weaknesses for activities such as fisheries that might take place in international waters.
The use of local milk, mainly goat milk, is identified as a quality signal in local cheese making. In fact, official data show that local milk supply is nearly entirely used for processing.
This supply regime, explained in section five, is especially relevant for legumes and cereals, beef, pork and chicken meat, and for food industry products such as several types of flour, food preparations based on flour and fruits, powdered milk, butter, eggs not in shell, margarine and different types of vegetable oils, or sugar.
As commented for local supply, only 10% of imported flour of wheat or other cereals is assumed to be used for final consumption. Furthermore, with the exception of olive and sunflower seed oils, the whole imported supply of other non-refined oil types is assumed to go to processing. Similar assumptions are made for imports of cottonseed, rape, and castor oils.
Methodological details are shown in Estadística de Precios de Venta al Público. Metodología, published by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. For food items not included in this database, a unit value is obtained as a weighted average of unit retail prices for the Canary Islands according to the national Spanish Household Survey. If this is not possible, an alternative unit value is calculated from a price database provided by the Canary Islands Statistical Institute or from the unit value of imported supply.
In the document Technical Conversion Factors for Agricultural Commodities (FAO 2000), the waste of supply percentages cover waste and losses occurring between the level at which production is recorded and the household, that is, waste in storage and transportation.
For example, according to firm managers interviewed, distribution losses are over 10% for some fresh products such as sliced bread.
See the web page http://www.bedca.net/bdpub/index.php. For most primary crops and for eggs, conversion factors from commercial weight into edible weight have been obtained from Moreiras et al. (2011).
See Annex I (Food composition tables) in FAO (2008).
For meat and edible offal, expressed in terms of fresh boneless equivalent weight, such a weight is considered to be the edible weight. For fisheries, conversion factors are obtained from yield tables in FAO reports (see FAO 1989; FAO 2014). Note that the ratio of edible weight to commercial weight can exceed 1 for some seafood items. Such a ratio is calculated by multiplying the ratio live weight/commercial weight and the edible flesh portion of the live weight. In this way, all quantities are expressed in comparable terms of edible flesh weight and the same energy conversion factor can be applied.
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Funding
This research has been carried out within the project “Food self-sufficiency in the Canary Islands: a statistical measuring proposal”, funded by the Canary Islands Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Water, and the Canary Islands Statistical Institute.
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Godenau, D., Caceres-Hernandez, J.J., Martin-Rodriguez, G. et al. A consumption-oriented approach to measuring regional food self-sufficiency. Food Sec. 12, 1049–1063 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-020-01033-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-020-01033-y