Multidimensional Food Security Index
Our proposed Multidimensional Food Security Index (MFSI) was composed of
12 dimensions (principal components) that cover very different aspects
of food security and explained up to 70% of the whole variance
contained within the 38 variables for both years (2006 and 2017, Table
S1 and S2). Economic poverty was by far the most important dimension
followed by socioeconomic inequality (see Table2 and Tables S1 and S2).
More than half of the variance of the MFSI is attributed to the
remaining 10 dimensions but with little contribution of each one,
individually. There was a shift in the rank of importance of dimensions
and small changes on the components - or variables, of each dimension
between years. For example, the third most important dimension in 2006
was made by variables linked to the financial stability in food
production alone, however, in 2017 gender inequality (an availability
variable) had a more important role in this dimension. Environmental
protection was placed at 12th dimension in 2006, increased its
importance in 2017 and was ranked as the 4th most important dimension.
Many other changes alike happened between years suggesting that food
security can be secondarily influenced by many different drivers across
time (Table 2).
Table 2. Principal Components of the food security index for 2006 and
2017 and the percentage of explained variance. Numbers refer to the
order of importance of each principal component and the names are the
author’s interpretation of the subset of variables loaded for each
principal component.