How food secure are the green, rocky and middle roads: food security effects in different world development paths

Hans van Meijl,Paul Lucas,Andrzej Tabeau,Jonathan Doelman,Elke Stehfest

doi:10.1088/2515-7620/ab7aba

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) address food and nutrition security with goal number two. Food and nutrition security is a complicated issue, and understanding its future requires insights into (i) food availability, (ii) food access, (iii) food utilisation, and (iv) food stability. Not all these dimensions are covered by the SDG2 and its indicators. A unique feature of this paper is that it focuses on the first three dimensions of food security in addition to the prevalence of undernourishment (SDG indicator 2.1.1). Here we explore future food security in the absence of dedicated policies, to derive the ‘policy gap’ for this goal. The internationally agreed shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) are quantified using a computable general equilibrium model (MAGNET) coupled with an integrated assessment model (IMAGE) that enable a linkage between income and expenditures given segmented labour markets. Based on the three dimensions of food security our results showed a less optimistic outlook than based on previous studies. Food availability is projected to improve in all 5 SSP scenarios, except South Asia in SSP3 due to serious land constraints. As a result, the number of undernourished people decreases in most scenarios, becoming increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. However, undernourishment stays high in SSP4 (550 million people) and increases to over two billion people in SSP3. Food access generally improves due to higher agricultural and non-agricultural wages of unskilled workers. However, due to lock-in effects the wages of unskilled agricultural workers might decline, leading to reduced food access in SSP3, SSP4 and SSP2. The indicator of food utilisation shows food security problems for Sub-Saharan Africa in SSP3 and SSP4. Our results indicate that food security problems remain and that effective policies are needed to achieve food security for all.

Highlights

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and possible impacts of climate change and climate change mitigation (Hasegawa et al 2015, 2018, van Meijl et al 2018) put long-run food and nutrition security high on the political and scientific agenda
Food production almost doubles in SSP5 due to high demand for agricultural products caused by high income growth in this scenario, higher level of food waste and high preferences for meat in diets
A unique feature of this paper is that it focuses on three dimensions of food security within long-run shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) scenarios that are often used in the field of climate change

Summary

Introduction

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and possible impacts of climate change and climate change mitigation (Hasegawa et al 2015, 2018, van Meijl et al 2018) put long-run food and nutrition security high on the political and scientific agenda. The interest in potential impacts of climate change and climate mitigation on food security has created the need for model-based analysis of future food security. These studies on the likely impacts of climate change or mitigation generally focus mostly on future food supplies, sometimes translated to the number people at risk of hunger (Hasegawa et al 2015, 2018, van Meijl et al 2018, 2020). Uneven distribution of income growth in favour of richer people is one of the driving forces behind this result

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Conclusion