Abstract
Can we feed the nine billion people in 2050? This is perhaps the most fundamental question related to future food security. So far our projections show that average food consumption will continue to increase in the future given the trends in key drivers of the global farm and food system discussed in earlier chapters. Although this is the most common approach in the literature, looking at the average rate of consumption alone is highly unsatisfying in world vast disparities where many households are now over-consuming food, even as others remain under-nourished. This chapter begins by looking at how food security is defined and measured, discussing the potential limitations of these metrics. In particular, we focus our discussion on the issue of food accessibility and how this is incorporated into the United Nations’ framework for calculating the incidence of hunger and caloric malnutrition worldwide. This gives rise to an approach based on the distribution of food consumption in each region. We will then revisit the historical trends in hunger and malnutrition as a prelude to our projections of the future distribution of food consumption and nutrition those households facing nutrition shortfalls using a modified version of the SIMPLE model. We conclude by taking a closer look at how these nutritional outcomes are influenced by future trends in agricultural productivity, biofuels and climate change.
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Notes
- 1.
Mathematically, the undernutrition incidence and gap are equivalent to the poverty index and gap measures as proposed by Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke (1984). Given this, we can use the concept of poverty-growth elasticities in our model implementation to link these measures to the changes in average per capita dietary energy intake. Widely used in the poverty literature, these growth elasticities measure the percent changes in the indices of poverty and poverty gap given a one percent change in average per capita income (Bourguignon, 2003; Lopez and Serven, 2006).
- 2.
To account for dietary upgrading towards healthier diets (i.e. lower calories per gram of food), we directly link changes in caloric content of food to per capita incomes. Higher incomes may result in fewer calories - -> per dollar spent on a given food type—as observed in crops and processed foods—as well as consumers’ shift to a leaner and higher quality diet.
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Hertel, T.W., Baldos, U.L.C. (2016). Food Security and Nutrition. In: Global Change and the Challenges of Sustainably Feeding a Growing Planet. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22662-0_10
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