‘Feast or Famine’ Podcast Series – Episode 5, Interview with Dr Jayati Ghosh
16 December 2025
This short series of video interviews with experts in food and agriculture explores key ideas and concepts at the heart of fostering more sustainable food systems — ones that deliver food security and nutrition while respecting human rights and planetary boundaries. This series is part of a graduate course on “Global Food Politics” at Sciences Po University, Paris, taught by Adjunct Professor Mr Chris Hegadorn.
Interview with Dr. Greg Sixt & Pr. Kenneth Strzepek
Understanding Food Trade Vulnerabilities in a Globalized World
In this episode, Ivan Gligorov, a Sciences Po graduate student in the Environmental Policy master’s program, specializing in food and agricultural policies, speaks with Doctor Greg Sixt, Director of the Food and Climate Systems Transformation (FACT) Alliance at MIT, and Professor Kenneth Strzepek, Research Director for Food and Climate Systems at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS).
Together, they discuss the newly developed Jameel Index for Food Trade and Vulnerability, a first-of-its-kind tool that measures countries’ dependence on food and animal feed imports, their ability to pay for those imports, and the reliability and robustness of their food-trade supply chains. The Index currently analyzes historical trends in food-trade vulnerability at national, regional, and global scales. New global change scenarios, including climate-related projections, will be released in 2025.
Throughout the conversation, Dr Sixt and Dr Strzepek explore why global food systems have become increasingly interdependent and fragile; how the Jameel Index blends agronomic, economic, climatic, and geopolitical data; what its first results tell us about global inequalities in food access; and how this tool can support governments, international agencies, and researchers in building more resilient and sustainable food systems.
For more information and to explore the Jameel Index visual platform, please visit: https://jameelindex.mit.edu/