25 nations where high food prices could crush governments

The Nomura Food Vulnerability Index also speaks about which countries’ governments, apart from Tunisia and Egypt, could be toppled in a food crisis.

Nomura describes a food crisis as a prolonged spell of price rise, and calculates the economies that have the most to lose by a formula that has:

Nominal GDP per capita in dollars at market exchange rates.
The share of food in total household consumption.
Net food exports as a percentage of GDP.
For a sample of 80 of the world’s largest economies that Nomura undertook for the report, it normalised each of the above three data series by subtracting the mean and dividing the resulting value by the standard deviation.

From the normalised series, NVFI is calculated for each country as a weighted composite index:

NFVI = 100 –   0.25*(GDP per capita) – 0.25*(food/household consumption) + 0.5*(net food exports/GDP)