Introduction

The topic our group decided to explore is global food insecurity. We chose to focus specifically on the causes of food insecurity in the East Africa region, more specifically in Somalia Kenya and Tanzania. We are focusing on the prices of staple food commodities (rice, maize, beans) as a preliminary indicator for food insecurity, and are trying to explore how climate, political, and regional disparities affect these metrics. Our group is anticipating that regional political and global events will impact food prices (and therefore, affordability), but that this region will be impacted by these events (COVID, for example) more drastically, since it does not have a strong infrastructure in place to fall back on. Our preliminary source is the Global Food Prices Database from the World Food Programme, which covers foods such as maize, rice, beans, fish, and sugar for 76 countries and about 1,500 markets, as well as provides the prices in the local currency. We used this data to pick out East Africa as our region of focus, since it had countries with the most affordability fluctuation over time, as well as the most expensive commodities. Using this information, we could narrow our research to investigate discrepancies in affordability.

Image Credit: Guide of the World