OXFAM: The Food Index
January 2014
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what-we-do/good-enough-to-eat

Overview Excerpt
Interactive snapshot of 125 countries showing the best and worst places in the world to eat, and the challenges people face getting enough of the right food. Around the world, one in eight people go to bed hungry every night, even though there is enough food for everyone. Our graph illustrates how overconsumption, misuse of resources and waste are common elements of a system that leaves hundreds of millions without enough to eat.

Eight established global data sources were identified that capture aspects of the food market relevant for this index. The statistics are from different years, but all the figures are the most recently available from global data sources, such as the World Health Organisation, Each of the sources used different scales in measuring the countries, requiring a process to standardise them so that they could be compared. The standard MIN / MAX rescaling method was used, generating re-scaled values of 0-100 where 0 points is the minimum score (best) and 100 points is the maximum score (worst). The process is based on identifying the countries with the minimum and maximum scores in the original data, scoring them 0 and 100 respectively and then measuring how far every other country is from these maximum and minimum values.

All countries with data for each measure were included in the re-scaling process to ensure that the final result was a globally comparable one. However, only the countries that had data for all eight measures were included in the final index, with one exception. For most developed countries, there is no data available for the underweight children measure. For those countries that achieved the minimum score for the undernourishment measure they were assumed to also be amongst the best in the world for measures for underweight children. The Good Enough To Eat database therefore includes 125 countries. That some of the measures do not include minimum or maximum scores illustrates that there are countries that are better or worse but are not included in the index because they do not have data available for the other measures.