France is the most sustainable country, showing high scores across nutritional challenges, sustainable agriculture and food loss and waste.
France is the top high-income country in the 2018 Food Sustainability Index (FSI), which ranks 67 countries according to their food system sustainability. These countries represent over 90% of global GDP and over four-fifths of the global population. The FSI was developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit with the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition Foundation (BCFN), Italy, as part of a research program commissioned by BCFN. The FSI’s 2018 edition focuses particularly on best practices in food sustainability that help to reach sustainable development goals.
According to the report, France is the most sustainable country, showing high scores across the FSI's three pillars—nutritional challenges, sustainable agriculture and food loss and waste. Its performance is particularly strong in the food loss and waste category. In a world where a third of all food produced globally is either lost or discarded, according to estimates from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, France has been in the vanguard of policies and measures to reduce such losses via best practice legislation requiring supermarkets to redistribute leftover food to charities serving poor communities.