What’s your favourite food fix – sushi, Weet-Bix, a coffee on the go? We take our daily serve as a given, but what if you couldn’t get yours? The sushi train out for maintenance, supermarket shelves nothing but crumbs, the local café reduced to selling hot milk.

The COVID era has perhaps taught us to take nothing for granted. However other factors such as the rising cost of living, climate change events, and regional conflicts are also challenging the global supply chain right now. Accustomed as we are to a land of plenty, it might not seem so obvious that food importation is a massive part of that.

We thought this was a great opportunity to demonstrate how data allows us to gain a better understanding of where we get our most precious resources from, while also outlining the benefits of data visualisation.

Data visualisation is an extremely effective way to draw out useful insights from the data that you collect as an organisation, and many different types of visualisations can be produced from a simple data set.

Understanding the dashboard at a glance

To help show you the power of data visualisation, we’ve gathered a sample of publicly available data on the biggest cash crops around the world. Using data from 2019, or “the old normal”, this dashboard gives us an overview of the top 10 crops in each region of the world (based on production in tonnes).

The visual at bottom left is a scatter plot used to chart production by area and tonnage. The markers in the upper right area are the big players and, not surprisingly, we can see that globally the biggest production crops are staples such as rice, wheat and maize.

For extra visual effect, bubble size has been used to show total revenue, and colour has been used to indicate yield per hectare. We can see total revenue is largely linear with production, while sugar crops provide the most return on land usage.

The bar chart at bottom right is an alternative view of the “cash” in cash crops, the ones with the highest dollar return per hectare of harvested area. These tend to be direct consumption items rather than grains, dominated by berry categories, and trumped by truffles.

Note that the above dashboard is interactive. Try clicking a different region.

So, what conclusions can we gather from this cash crop data?

It’s nice to know that truffles are an efficient and lucrative harvest, however they are hardly the basis for a healthy balanced diet, let alone regional economy.

To the question posed at the beginning of the article, in the middle of the dashboard is a view of the items most at risk in the event of a supply chain breakdown. They have been identified from a selection of “top crops” for which the focus region contributes a minimal amount to the world supply. Here is where we start to see how our every day could be affected.

With Asia producing about 90% of the world’s rice crop, it follows that every other region would face a rice shortage.
Africa, in particular South Africa, would lose their wheat import, about half of which comes from the Americas.
Coffee drinkers would be returning to tea across Asian countries.
The Americas, the US specifically, would be faced with a mountainous stockpile of soy beans, representing about one fifth of their crop export.
Europeans would miss out on the humble banana, an import sector that skyrocketed during the 2010s.
Finally, we’d be hard pressed for tomatoes down under, where up to two thirds of national demand are met by imports.

Of course these ‘at risk’ items are open to enquiry. The substitutability of grains has not been factored in, nor the specific requirements of local diets. This is part of the beauty of data visualisation – we continue to ask questions, and investigate ways to answer them. That may be by transforming/cutting the raw data in different ways, revising assumptions and definitions, or getting more data. The important thing is that we’re closer to a solution, whatever the problem may be.

Think of the business implications of this in your business, where you substitute ‘crops’ for factors like ‘staff’, ‘projects’ and ‘products’ within your business.

This just goes to show the power of data visualisation in helping to uncover the important insights that could easily be overlooked when only considering the data in tabular form, so-called ‘reports’. Done well, it’s a simple-to-digest format that prompts thinking of not just ‘what happened?’, but ‘why did it happen and what can we do about it?’.

If you’re now considering the potential of this kind of exercise for your business, talk to the team at White Box today to tap into their experience in data strategy, data science and data visualisation solutions.

As your partner in data visualisation, we’ll help you to realise the full potential of your data and maximise your business success through advanced and innovative solutions that make all the difference. Get in touch today for your free data strategy consultation.