Assessing Food Security in Europe: Unravelling Challenges and Vulnerabilities

Paper's objective and research background:The main objective of the presented paper is assessing current food security situation among European countries.To achieve it was necessary first to produce an objective indicator for evaluation food security level in Europe.It is assumed that the overall level of food security in Europe will be good with some disparities across regions.In process of development of consistent food security indicator for specific European conditions was applied food security definition according to FAO, with four pillars: Availability, Access, Stability and Utility.Final indicator was based on 12 variables representing these four pillars.Data/Methods: From the list of all available indicators in the food security section of FAOstat could be used only 9 variables, which were supplemented by 3 variables from World bank database to ensure equal number of indicators in every pillar: Average dietary energy supply adequacy, Prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity in the total population, Food Production Index (WB), Gross domestic product per capita, Gini index (WB), Consumer price index (WB), Political stability and absence of violence/terrorism, Per capita food supply variability, Coefficient of variation of habitual caloric consumption distribution, Minimum dietary energy requirement, Incidence of caloric losses at retail distribution level, Percentage of population using safely managed sanitation services.All variables were obtained for 38 European countries in year 2021 which was the latest available period.The reason for the smaller number of selected indicators was that variables included in FAOstat database were focused more on developing countries and their values were not available for European region or had very small variability in developed countries.To produce composite food security indicator with objective weights in European conditions was used Data envelopment analysis with dummy input.Advantage of this approach is, that overall level of indicator is based on current situation and countries are benchmarked at European level.Results/Conclusions/Value added: The added value of presented paper has more dimensions.First, the paper suggests a methodological framework based on data envelopment analysis for creating objective composite indicators usable for measuring and identification of food security issues in European countries.The paper also shows evaluation of food security and its disparities among European countries in 2021.Which was year when COVID 19 pandemic spread across Europe.Paper offers deeper insight into food security conditions in European countries in this period.Best performing countries were Luxembourg, Switzerland, Belgium, Ireland, and Austria.On the other hand, the most problematic countries are Belarus, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, and Ukraine.