Policy strategies to achieve zero hunger by 2040 at the country-level

Abstract

Sustainable development goal 2 aims to end hunger in all its forms by 2030, achieved through a joint policy strategy on raising food production and food access. Most model-based projections on undernourishment towards 2050 focus on sustainably producing enough food, rather than on ending hunger. We compare policy strategies on food supply and food access to lower undernourishment in 2040 for 151 countries. Here, we show that in a Business-as-Usual scenario (BaU) 3.3% of the world population is undernourished by 2040. We develop 27 regional policy target-scenarios on Producing More Food (PMF), Raising average Caloric Consumption (RCC) and within-country Equal Food Distribution (EFD). RCC lowers undernourishment to 2.2%, followed by EFD (2.6%) and PMF (2.7%). For world regions results are mixed, with either RCC or EFD generating the strongest reduction in undernourishment. For individual countries, 90 countries achieve SDG2 in 2040 in the BaU-scenario. In PMF, 18 additional countries achieve SDG2, versus 30 countries in EFD and 38 countries in RCC. Both food supply and food access policy strategies can achieve SDG2, but raising food access results in greater progress at all scales. Long-term food security studies should move beyond environmentally sustainable agricultural policy strategies, as socio-economic policies on food access and inequality policies will determine the future of food security.

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“…IFs is an integrated assessment modeling platform with representation of 188 countries and capability to forecast out to 2100. It features numerous endogenized and interconnected sub-models with coverage of the following systems: agriculture [26], economics, education [27], energy, environment [28], demographics, governance [29,30], health [31], infrastructure [32], international politics [33], and technology. IFs is open-source and is free to use online or to download for offline use.…”

“…Building on variables from and interactions across the demographic, general equilibrium economic, and partial-equilibrium agriculture models, IFs forecasts the prevalence of malnutrition as a function of available calories per capita, a coefficient of variation, and a minimum dietary energy requirement. The partial-equilibrium agriculture sub-model represents crop, meat, and fish production and trade and therefore calorie and protein availability [26], while the economic model generates consumption potential and calorie demand per capita as functions of GDP per capita and food prices. Demographics shape total country demand levels.…”

“…The shape of the distribution is determined by the caloric coefficient of variation, which is driven by income growth, inequality, and social inequality, as represented by female labor participation and the youth dependency ratio. Data from the FAO are used to initialize the prevalence of malnutrition as well as calories per capita, the coefficient of variation, and the minimum daily energy requirement [26]. This analysis is focused on population-wide malnutrition to provide the broadest picture of progress toward eliminating hunger.…”