A Simulator to Determine the Evolution of Disparities in Food Consumption between Socio-Economic Groups: A Brazilian Case Study

Pedro Gerber Machado,Adam Hawkes,Celma De Oliveira Ribeiro,Julia Tomei

doi:10.3390/su12156132

Abstract

Food is a fundamental right that deserves attention but is usually dealt with from the supply side in aggregated models that use macroeconomic variables to forecast the demand and the required supply. This study challenges this paradigm by developing a simulator to analyze food consumption from the demand side and estimate the evolution of disparity in food consumption over time with respect to region, sex, ethnicity, education, and income. This novel approach was applied to Brazil using household expenditure surveys to feed serial neural networks. Results show that the ‘poorer’ north and northeast of Brazil encounter the lowest consumption of food and are therefore the most food vulnerable regions. This trend continues to 2040. The ‘richer’ south and southeast regions have higher food consumption, which varies according to sex, ethnicity, education, and income. Brazil has contrasting issues with some groups having considerably higher food consumption, while other groups still have less than the threshold for healthy consumption. Now, the country not only has to deal with the food access by the most vulnerable due to the latest economic declines but also to deal with excess consumption, the so-called “double burden of malnutrition”.

Highlights

Since the 1960s, global food production has more than doubled [1]
Building on the successes and failures of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in 2015 the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which is underpinned by 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Brazil continued to face food inequalities in 2009, with 35.5% of Brazilian households experiencing some form of food insecurity [9], the country was moving towards the achievement of SDG2, reducing the prevalence of undernourished people in the population [10,11]

Summary

Introduction

Since the 1960s, global food production has more than doubled [1]. This has been driven by a rapid increase in the global population, average daily per capita calories consumed (from 2196 kcal/capita/day in 1961 to 2874 kcal/capita/day in 2013 [2]), and the result of higher living standards [3,4,5].Until 2015, reductions in inequalities in food have been the result of several global initiatives that have sought to end hunger [1]. Target 1C of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which ran from 2000–2015, aimed to halve the proportion of people who suffered from hunger. Brazil made good progress on this target, reducing the proportion of the population suffering from hunger from 14.8% in 1990 (or 22.6 million people) to less than 5% in 2015 [6,7]. Brazil continued to face food inequalities in 2009, with 35.5% of Brazilian households experiencing some form of food insecurity [9], the country was moving towards the achievement of SDG2, reducing the prevalence of undernourished people in the population [10,11]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion