Rome: Food prices increased throughout 2022, pushing up the average cost of a healthy diet and as a result, some 35.4 per cent of the global population, equal to 2.826 billion people, were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2022, according to an innovative data set published in the 2024 edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, the flagship hunger report issued last week by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and four sister United Nations agencies.
That compares to 36.4 percent and 2.823 billion in 2019. However, this recovery to pre-pandemic levels in 2022 was achieved unevenly across regions, and, even though economic recovery and the ensuing positive income effects largely offset this. This implied that more than a third of the world’s population could not afford a healthy diet in 2022, and some regions have yet fully to recover from the harms wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the report, the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity remained virtually unchanged in Africa, Asia, and Northern America and Europe from 2022 to 2023, and it worsened in Oceania.
It further projected that 582 million people will be chronically undernourished at the end of the decade and that more than half of them will be in Africa. This is about 130 million more undernourished people than in a scenario reflecting the world economy before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In 2022, the number of people unable to afford a healthy diet dropped below pre-pandemic levels in the group of upper-middle- and high-income countries. In contrast, low-income countries had the highest levels since 2017,” the first year for which FAO has published estimates, said Maximo Torero, Chief Economist of FAO.
The finding highlights “a major structural problem of our agrifood systems,” said David Laborde, Director of FAO’s Agrifood Economics and Policy Division. He noted this part of the SOFI 2024 report revealed significant variation across and within regions that in turn, point to where national and international attention should be prioritized.
Key findings
The share of people in Africa unable to afford a healthy diet is 64.8 per cent. In Asia, the figure is 35.1 per cent; in Latin America and the Caribbean, 27.7 per cent; in Oceania 20.1 per cent; and in Northern America and Europe, 4.8 per cent.
In low-income and lower-middle-income countries, the number of people unable to afford healthy diets grew from 2019 to 2022, an outcome that reflects how post-pandemic economic recoveries were unevenly shared and how more advanced economies were better placed to cope with supply-chain shocks and worldwide inflationary pressure on food commodity prices.
The SOFI 2024 report details the methodology used to calculate the affordability of a healthy diet, defined as comprising diversity, adequacy, moderation and balance.
The main takeaway is that the prices, in purchasing power parity (PPP), rose significantly – a global average of 6 per cent in 2020 and 11 per cent in 2021 – but the impact was diluted where income growth was also robust and where food as a share of household budgets was lowest, as in higher-income countries with greater fiscal capacities.
“The uneven progress in the economic access to healthy diets cast a shadow of achieving Zero Hunger in the world, six years away from the 2030 deadline,” the SOFI report says.
“There is the need to accelerate the transformation of our agrifood systems to strengthen their resilience to the major drivers and address inequalities to ensure that healthy diets are affordable for and available to all. But there is also a need to assure people that they can access and consume healthy diets,” said Torero.
Mapping the details
The global average cost of a healthy diet rose to 3.96 PPP dollars – a measure that compares purchasing power parity (PPP) across economies – in 2022.
Subregional variations were considerable, ranging from a high of 5.34 PPP dollars in Eastern Asia to a low of 2.96 PPP dollars in Northern America. For Africa, the average price was 3.74 PPP dollars; for Asia 4.20 PPP dollars; for Latin America and the Caribbean 4.56 PPP dollars; for Oceania 3.46 PPP dollars and Northern America and Europe, 3.75 PPP dollars, with a sizable difference between Southern Europe, at 4.15 PPP dollars and Western Europe at 3.01 PPP dollars.
1.677 billion people living in lower-middle-income countries cannot afford a healthy diet, and the same holds for 503 million people living in low-income countries. Combined, these account for 77 per cent of people unable to afford healthy diets.
People who cannot afford the least-cost healthy diet in their countries are likely facing at least some degree of food and nutritional insecurity and thus face the risk of swelling the ranks of the hungry as measured in SOFI’s traditional measures of chronic hunger as well as chronic conditions such as stunting and wasting.
FAO’s ongoing foray into gauging and tracking the cost of affordable diets offers an early warning indicator of sorts. As the alarm is greatest where countries’ fiscal capacities are weakest, and where the cost burden perpetuates itself by dragging down economic growth, the data in SOFI 2024 highlight the need for greater and more innovative investments in agrifood systems, the topic of the second section of the flagship report.
– global bihari bureau
Image by Trang Pham from Pixabay
