Two in Five People Cannot Afford Healthy Food
Latest U.N. report on food security and nutrition has insightful but grim statistics
If you’re wondering why this week’s issue is almost a day late, well I blame London. More accurately, the London commute. I spent nearly a full work day’s worth of hours on trains and buses this week. Good to be back in my little cubby hole.
It’s that time of the year, when five key U.N. agencies dealing with food, agriculture, health and children come together to present the flagship annual report that gives an indication of global hunger levels and whether we are on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 2 - “Zero Hunger”.
The 2023 edition of SOFI, as it is commonly referred to, actually has some surprising statistics and not all of them are bad. So let’s start with the good news.
The number of people going hungry globally remained relatively unchanged between 2021 and 2022, but increased by 122 million compared to 2019.
Yes, it’s terrible we haven’t eliminated hunger, but this time last year, with commodity prices skyrocketing after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we were expecting it to be significantly higher.
Remember also that we were still recovering from COVID-19 when that war broke out. In addition, the world suffered multiple weather-related shocks last year, including floods in Pakistan and drought in parts of Europe, U.S., and Australia.
This shows the global economy is getting back on its feet. But progress is uneven.
Hunger levels went down in parts of Asia and Latin America, but it is still on the rise in Western Asia, the Caribbean and all subregions of Africa.
In fact, Africa has the highest ratio of hungry people: 1 in 5. This is more than twice the global average.
The global average is about 1 in 11 or 9.2%.
In terms of absolute numbers, we’re talking about between 691 million and 783 million people who are hungry.There are gender and geographical dimensions to hunger too.
Globally and in every region, women tend to have higher food insecurity than men (27.8% versus 25.4%). Similarly, people living in rural areas fare worse compared to their urban counterparts.
What that means is that more women and more rural communities are cutting back on what and how much they eat or skipping meals altogether.Access to healthy food is a real problem.
More than 3.1 billion people – or 42% – couldn’t afford a healthy diet in 2021. That’s nearly half the world’s population! Also, it now costs nearly 7% more for a healthy diet compared to pre-pandemic levels.
If you look at continental levels, this comes up to 78% of Africa, 44% of Asia, and 23% in Latin America and the Caribbean who cannot eat healthily.
“Low-income households in peri-urban and rural areas are especially disadvantaged, as they would need to more than double their food expenditure to secure a healthy diet,” the report said.
Why is this a problem? Because unhealthy diets are killing us.
In a statement, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) called out governments and the food industry for “failing to get decent, healthy food to where it is needed”.Age-old assumptions about rural areas being self-sufficient and eating locally are being upended.
New evidence for 11 Western, Eastern, and Southern African countries shows that large percentages of rural households living 1 to 2 hours (56%) and more than 2 hours (52%) from an urban centre now buy food from markets.
In fact, households’ own production is not the main source of food in these countries, “dispelling the notion that rural populations in Africa rely primarily on subsistence farming”. These communities are also consuming processed foods, including highly processed foods.
There are multiple implications to this.
We already know that in urban areas, nutrition-related non-communicable diseases such diabetes and hypertension have caused a larger proportion of death and disability compared to hunger. Well, rural populations are now having to deal with both hunger and obesity.
This also means “farmers and rural populations are more exposed to food price volatility and hunger than previously thought”, said IPES-Food.
The Global Diet Quality Project which has so far collected data on dietary intake in 56 countries, also found that there wasn’t an urban/rural difference in the consumption of ultraprocessed foods in South Asia either.
Zooming In
I want to focus on the last two statistics because I think the media tend to emphasise headline figures when it comes to hunger statistics and miss the longer-term trends and issues around food systems.
I asked David Laborde, Director of Agrifood Economics Division at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), to help make sense of these numbers.
Q: David, the fact that 2 in 5 people couldn’t afford healthy diets in 2021 is worrying, no? (Note: The 2022 data is not available so this data is for 2021)
A: Yes, it is. The overall story of the last three years is the COVID-19 crisis that was a major economic shock, with people not working or working on lower incomes. Then food prices increased and both due to the nature of different value chains and the channels of distribution, we can see that healthy diets are now more expensive. This is something you see all over the world including in advanced economies.
Of course animal products are becoming more expensive because feed is more expensive. In a number of economies we also had avian flu and the price of eggs increased a lot.
Actually, the affordability of diets to some extent can be underestimated in the SOFI report because we don't have all the information yet… we are seeing people who have to cut expenditure on food just to pay for annual heating. Households have to make difficult choices more and more.
Q: Despite challenges in getting updated data, the FAO and the World Bank Group monitor the cost and affordability of healthy diets, and you calculate the lowest cost of a healthy diet depending on what’s available in a given country. Page 27 of the report (Table 5) shows this at continental and regional levels. But it is a based on purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars. Can you explain what that means?
A: So the idea of PPP is to make them comparable. It’s like international dollars to make sure that we correct all the prices based on the cost of living around the world. Because at face value, having $2 in India and $2 in the US are not the same things.
Q: And the table essentially shows that costs have been increasing everywhere except Northern Africa since 2019. But the increase is the smallest in Northern America and Europe and that is also where a healthy diet is the second cheapest.
A: Well, these countries are rich and they are more efficient to produce more or less of everything - vegetables, milk, etc - and they have a better distribution system too. For instance, in the U.S., you have a lot of industrial farming and this is efficient from an economic point of view. In poor countries, the goods may not be available in the local market and you have to go farther which increases the costs.
Q: What are the implications of the findings that rural communities also buy food from markets, including highly-processed foods?
A: Everywhere in the world, when you start to have a more developed economic system, you purchase more and more food and you are less and less self-sufficient. That's normal. You and I are not producing our own food because we are specialised in other things.
Even farmers get more and more specialised. Let's say you produce cocoa and you can do it in a very efficient way. Next you are going to sell 95% of your cocoa and buy other food products with this money. Also you may not want to process all the food at home. So if you produce potatoes, you may not want to peel the potatoes or cook the potatoes. This is not bad in itself.
Traditionally, it was always women who were staying in the kitchen. Now there are economic opportunities and women have less time to cook. So sometimes they prefer to buy partially or fully processed food.
And as the value of your time increases, it makes more sense to ask someone else to cook for you or process the food for you. You may even like to cook but some people may prefer to go and buy vegetables that are pre-sliced and that’s still processing. So we should not panic.
Now, where we start to have concern is if we have people that buy more and more highly processed food of which they don't really even understand the nutritional content in them. We see potentially asymmetry of information and that's where the nutrition problems start to occur.
Me Still Talking About Copa-Cogeca
The cool kids at The Europeans invited me to talk about our investigation into the giant farm lobby. Katy and Dominic are lovely and their podcast is a fun one if you want to know what’s happening in this continent. Have a listen here.
Three Good Reads
Keeping with the theme of this week’s issue, here are three good pieces on the SOFI report.
More people can't afford nutritious food and 148 million children are stunted by hunger, UN says - AP
Number of people going hungry has risen by 122m since 2019, UN says - The Guardian
With 735 million people hungry, UN says world is 'off track' to meet its 2030 goal - Reuters
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