Global Food Balances - Food vs Feed

Data Gang Visualization Project COM-480


Note: this webpage, is better viewed on PC with full window size.

The data

Our Food Balance Sheet dataset contains four important features:
  1. the quantity of food supplied as well as consumed by either people (noted as “food”) or livestock (noted as “feed”)
  2. The aforementioned quantity of food specified by different food types
  3. The aforementioned quantity of food by different countries
  4. All across different years.
In light of this, two questions arise naturally:
  1. How much food is consumed by people or by livestock?
  2. What are the dominant types of food in each case?

The problem

Food is a major concern worldwide and it is a problem that is expected to get even worse year by year due to global warming and climate concerns. Nowadays, one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions comes from the agriculture sector. The world population is expected to grow by 2 billion in 2050, and feeding the world has become an increasingly concerning problem. Still, a big part of the grain harvested goes towards the meat industry, to feed livestock.

Our goal in this project will be to visualize the share of produced food that goes towards the breeding industry, and what is used to actually feed citizens. We would also like to show how food supply and distribution have changed in the past 60 years and to visualize dietary differences among countries.

Question 1. How much food ended up feeding the people, and how much ended up feeding the livestock?

Year: 2019
Type of Aliment
Food vs Feed
Daily Available Calorie Amount

The full bar represents 2500 calories (the recommended daily intake). The red portion represents the amount of food in kcal/capita/day available for human consumption.

North America
South America
Europe
Africa
Asia
Oceania

How to use?

Using this interactive map, you can visualize data for the entire world. For every country, you can see how well people are fed, how much food goes towards feeding people and how much goes towards feeding livestock. Using the slider at the bottom of the map, you can access data for every year recorded. On the side you can see a few charts containing global aggregates.

Click on any country to have more detailed information about it!

What does it show?

The most striking thing to do is to switch between the "Food" and "Feed" modes and see that many countries allocate a vast quantity of food to livestock. In the USA alone, for every person, 1000 tons of food are used to feed livestock every year!
It is interesting to see that this trend mostly applies to richer countries, the poorer ones tend to have a larger gap between food and feed amounts. Our charts on the right also show quite evidently that we have way more food than needed in the world, the main problem is how it is partitioned. Around a quarter of the production goes towards feeding livestock, and with this supply alone we could feed most of the population. Since 2010, every continent has enough calories per capita per day to feed their population. Unfortunately, we know that many people continue to lack access to food.




Question 2. What are the different types of food for people and for livestock?

How to use?

Using this interactive treemap, you can visualize data for the entire world. Select a continent to bring you to the country screen. For countries in the grids that are too small to fit the name, hover over the box and the country name will appear in the top bar. Choose food or feed to see the most common aliments allocated for people or for livestock. For any boxes without information in the box, hovering over it will display the information in the bar above.

What does it show?

This chart shows how much each continent and each country contributes to the global food consumption. By clicking on a country, you can see what proportion of the country's food supply is diverted to food and to feed. You can also see the most common types of food that are consumed by humans and by livestock. It is interesting to distinguish dietary staples by continent and by country. It is evident that these change heavily depending on the growth of the country.

👍 created by Lucas, Meghan, Tianzong @ Datagang group, EPFL