Analyzing Food Price Dynamics and Affordability:

A Case Study of the UN World Food Programme Price Monitoring

View project on Tableau Public

The project is using the UN WFP food price database to investigate how price and affordability of staple foods change across countries over time and their relationship with a country’s economic development, official inflation rate, and food availability.

Our most recent food price crisis began in February 2022, when Russia initiated a war in Ukraine. With two of the world's largest exporters of wheat and other essential crops involved in conflict, numerous countries, particularly those already vulnerable, now grapple with heightened food insecurity and a rapid surge in food prices. The constant topic of conversation these days is the rising cost of food.

This project seeks to provide a broader perspective on this pressing issue by analyzing the dynamics of food prices and affordability across various countries over several years, with a particular focus on the world's most vulnerable regions.

Currently, there is no major data provider that routinely measures and collects data on food affordability across various countries. Therefore, this project combines multiple data sources in an attempt to understand the global context of food price dynamics and highlight the major weaknesses in the existing monitoring system.

Data Sources:

1. The UN World Food Programme prices monitoring database
2. The UN WFP food prices data
3. Global food prices
4. International Labour Organization(ILO): Average annual earnings by country
5. Food and agriculture organisation in the UN: Number of undernourisched people by country
6. The World Bank: Annual consumer price inflation
7. The World Bank: GDP per capita
8. The World Bank: Population by country

Content:

Project brief
Web scraping
Data preparation
Data manipulation
Data analysis