Food System Transition | MAGNET

CGIAR Initiative - Sustainable Healthy Diets

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Food systems are not providing sustainable healthy diets for everyone, everywhere. Healthy diets are unaffordable for 3 billion people, and poor quality diets are associated with all forms of malnutrition and 11 million premature adult deaths each year. Diets are rapidly evolving due to changes in income, women’s employment, and urbanization and developments in technology, food marketing and public policy. These changes, happening in urban and rural areas, contribute to shifts in food environments, which are increasingly promoting ready-to-eat, convenient, cheap and often ultra-processed foods associated with poor health.

This is the only CGIAR Initiative with the main goal of ensuring sustainable healthy diets for all through food systems transformation. Starting from an innovative, consumer-focused perspective, this Initiative aims to identify effective policy options through research; strengthen capacity and develop robust metrics and tools that support stakeholders’ decisions when developing pathways to transform food systems toward sustainable healthy diets, improved livelihoods, gender equity, and social inclusion.

Wageningen University & Research, together with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), is leading the implementation the Sustainable Healthy Diets initiative. Wageningen Economic Research is active in work package 4, which deals with the analysis of trade-offs and synergies associated with the transformation to healthy and sustainable diets. The MAGNET model, in combination with microsimulation modelling, will be used to support the development of country strategies in Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia. The project has a time horizon of two years with a possibility for extension.

Contact: Michiel van Dijk, Thijs de Lange

FoodCost - FOOD Costing and Internalisation of Externalities for System Transition

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing its environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. In current food systems many of the costs of harmful foods and benefits of healthful foods are externalized, i.e. are not reflected in market prices and therefore not in decision making of actors in food value chains. Solving the externality problems means to determine current costs of externalities and redefine food prices (true pricing) to internalize them in daily practice. Policy makers, businesses and other actors in the food system, lack sufficient information and knowledge to internalize externalities to achieve a sustainable food system. The recently started Horizon Europe Project FoodCost (spans from 2022 – 2026) responds to this challenge by designing a roadmap for effective and sustainable strategies to assess and internalise food externalities. FOODCoST provides approaches and databases to measure and value positive and negative externalities, proposing a game-changing and harmonised approach to calculate the value of climate, biodiversity, environmental, social and health externalities along the food value chain based on economic cost principles.

Source: Figure 6 - FOODCoST Integrated toolbox for the impact assessment, FoodCost Proposal

FOODCoST provides an analytical toolbox to experiment, analyse, and navigate the internalisation of externalities through policies and business strategies providing tools and guidance to policy makers and businesses to assess the sustainability impact of their internalisation actions. MAGNET CGE model is an important element in the FoodCost integrated toolbox as it can provide a broader macroeconomic assessment of the impact of policies effective in internalizing externalities.

Contact: Zuzana Smeets Kristkova, Hans van Meijl, David Cui