1) Durable domestic capacity
How much of the population's protein needs can the country produce at home, and can that production be sustained without exhausting the land, water, fisheries or other biological resources on which it depends?
The Protein Sovereignty Index
2026 edition
What is Protein Sovereignty?
"A population's ability to sustain affordable access to enough protein to meet its nutritional needs, even through disruption to production, trade and critical inputs."
Food security has traditionally been measured in calories. Global calorie supply has grown faster than population for half a century. Protein is different. It is the most expensive and structurally complex part of most diets, and it's the part that depends most on a handful of exporters, sea lanes and imported inputs to fill the plates of a nation's people. The world produces enough protein overall. The risk lies in how reliably it reaches each country. When supply chains strain, the pressure shows first in protein prices, and the poorest households feel it first.
Governments have started treating protein as a matter of national security. This index measures it directly: protein-first, country by country, with public methods and named sources.
The geography of protein.
Calories can be grown almost anywhere, but protein production is concentrated. Regions where land, water and feed are cheapest become protein powerhouses. Protein then travels to everyone else through a small number of exporters, ports and sea lanes.
Two countries, Brazil and the United States, supply around 85 per cent of the world's soybean exports. One ocean current, running up the coast of Chile and Peru, supplies roughly half the world's . Argentina's Pampas grow the grain that feeds much of the world's livestock. The protein on every continent's plates begins in remarkably few places.
This wasn't designed. It evolved, because letting the places with the cheapest land, water and feed produce for everyone else was the fastest way to feed a world whose population has doubled since 1974. Fishmeal crossed the oceans first, then soy. Meat, eggs and milk followed, reaching billions of people who had rarely eaten them. Specialisation delivered abundance, and for decades it worked.
The cost of concentration.
Our current protein systems were built for efficiency. They delivered affordable protein at planetary scale, but resilience came second. With so much supply from so few places, a single shock travels far. A hurricane that closes ports on the Gulf of Mexico, or floods that cut roads in Brazil, could push up protein prices on several continents within weeks.
Over a quarter of the world's soybean exports pass through the Strait of Malacca, and around a fifth through the Panama Canal. Add Hormuz, Suez, Bab el-Mandeb and the Bosphorus, and more than half of the world's traded soy, grain and fertiliser passes through at least one narrow sea lane on its way to market.
In the past five years, we have seen how these risks can manifest: the JBS ransomware attack that halted one of the world's largest meat processors; the avian influenza tearing through poultry flocks; and a war that shut the Black Sea grain corridor. Importers have usually found other suppliers when a route closes, but rerouting takes time and money, and not every country has both. Stockpiles of feed ingredients are kept relatively thin, which means when the flow of ingredients stops for long enough, producers are forced to cull breeding animals and populations can take years to rebuild after trade is restored.
Nowhere starker than the Gulf.
Around 85 per cent of the food eaten in the Gulf states is imported. Roughly 70 per cent of it arrives through a single waterway: the Strait of Hormuz. Conflict has made that strait effectively impassable since March 2026.
The Gulf's answer has been to own food production outside the country instead of buying on the open market. Sovereign wealth funds have acquired land in Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia and Ukraine to grow food for home. But owning the farm only goes so far. The harvest still has to leave a country that can ban its export, and still has to come home through the same blocked strait.
The region has been stress-tested before. When Qatar's neighbours closed its only land border in 2017, Doha airlifted dairy cattle and rebuilt its supply lines within months, a demonstration of what sovereign wealth can buy in a crisis. But wealth buys time. It has not yet bought the region full sovereignty over the strait it depends on.
Governments are taking notice.
Washington marked food and agriculture as critical national infrastructure in a November 2022 security memorandum. In 2026 it went further, invoking the Defense Production Act, which was written for the Korean War, to secure fertiliser and herbicide supply.
Beijing has written grain self-sufficiency into statute, backed by . Harvests have stayed above 650 million tonnes since the law passed, yet the country still grows barely one in every six tonnes of soy it consumes.
In July 2026, Brussels set its first target for home-grown feed protein. Its Protein Action Plan aims to raise the share grown in the EU from a quarter to 35 per cent by 2035, which would still leave two-thirds imported.
Three of the world's largest economies legislating on the same problem within four years may appear to be coordinated, but it's a symptom of fractured players that are each trying to protect themselves against the risks embedded in a system they each helped build.
Running out of room.
Every one of those policies seeks to move protein production within sovereign soil, but there's a more difficult question that they don't address: can the world's resource base continue to grow to meet ever-rising demand? Roughly a third of crop calories are grown to feed animals rather than people. The world now farms more seafood than it catches, yet the wild fish that feed those farms are a stock that has already peaked.
Nowhere is this clearer than in : it is the fastest-growing way humans farm protein, and the one most dependent on other protein to do it. Close to 90 per cent of are already fished at or beyond their sustainable limits, and grinding what remains into meal to feed farmed fish only worked while the ocean had slack. That is no longer the case.
A changing climate tightens these limits further. The last El Niño cut Peru's fish catch by a third and brought drought to maize in southern Africa and rice in Indonesia. Another is now building, and this year Peru set its lowest anchovy quota in a decade.
The Protein Sovereignty Index
The index measures both problems, country by country: how exposed each one is to the few places its protein comes from, and how close it is to the limits of its own land, water and fish. Each country gets a single score and a tier.
Production alone does not settle it. One nation can farm enormous volumes of protein on imported feed, fertiliser and genetics, only to find all three fail in the same crisis. Another can import most of what it eats, but from suppliers so varied that it can usually find another source when one fails.
Every score is built from public data, and every assessment shows its sources. Forty-three assessments cover every country on earth. The map below shows where each one stands. Select a country to see why.