PNNL

Abstract

The Food Balance Sheet (FBS), compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is a cornerstone dataset for studies on agricultural development, food security, and dietary health, providing a broad overview of global and regional food systems. However, its limited transparency and scalability hinder its robust applications in empirical analysis and multisector dynamic modeling. Here, we present a traceable FBS dataset built from detailed Supply Utilization Accounts (SUA) data using a new Primary Commodity Equivalent (PCe) aggregation approach. This framework ensures that product flows can be consistently aggregated across years, producer and consumer countries, and processing chains, consolidating over 500 SUA products into 57 PCe commodities for 195 regions over the 2010–2022 period. The traceable FBS closely aligns with FAO-FBS at aggregate levels for dietary energy and macronutrients while offering finer sectoral detail, enhanced traceability, and revealing key differences in other accounts (e.g., feed, trade, stocks). By improving methodological transparency and scalability, the traceable FBS enhances the robustness of food system studies while promoting future research and collaboration in the open-source community.