The Supply of Calories, Proteins, and Fats in Low-Income Countries: A Four-Decade Retrospective Study.

Vasilii Erokhin,Li Diao,Tianming Gao,Anna Ivolga,Jean-Vasile Andrei,Yuhang Zong

doi:10.3390/ijerph18147356

Abstract

Over the past decades, both the quantity and quality of food supply for millions of people have improved substantially in the course of economic growth across the developing world. However, the number of undernourished people has resumed growth in the 2010s amid food supply disruptions, economic slowdowns, and protectionist restrictions to agricultural trade. Having been common to most nations, these challenges to the food security status of the population still vary depending on the level of economic development and national income of individual countries. In order to explore the long-run determinants of food supply transformations, this study employs five-stage multiple regression analysis to identify the strengths and directions of effects of agricultural production parameters, income level, price indices, food trade, and currency exchange on supply of calories, proteins, and fats across 11 groups of agricultural products in 1980–2018. To address the diversity of effects across developing nations, the study includes 99 countries of Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa categorized as low-income, lower-middle-income, and upper-middle-income economies. It is found that in low-income countries, food supply parameters are more strongly affected by production factors compared to economic and trade variables. The effect of economic factors on the food supply of higher-value food products, such as meat and dairy products, fruit, and vegetables, increases with the rise in the level of income, but it stays marginal for staples in all three groups of countries. The influence of trade factors on food supply is stronger compared to production and economic parameters in import-dependent economies irrelevant of the gross national income per capita. The approach presented in this paper contributes to the research on how food supply patterns and their determinants evolve in the course of economic transformations in low-income countries.

Highlights

Established regression multitudes were calculated with all ten regressors to find the variance inflationary factor values and eliminate those Xn for which Variance inflationary factor (VIF) exceeds 5
Our study reveals the positive relationship between trade parameters X8–10 and the supply of calories, proteins, and fats in China to be one of the strongest among upper-middle-income countries
Diets in low-income countries evolve over time, being affected by diverse factors that interact in a complex manner to shape individual food availability and accessibility patterns in various income groups of economies in various regions of the world

Summary

Introduction

Dietary patterns in various parts of the world are affected by a complex mix of variables that evolve over time. Since the 1980s, many countries of the world have demonstrated significant progress in improving the food security status of their populations and lifting people out of extreme poverty. Over a third of the world suffered from extreme poverty four decades ago, while only one-tenth of people lived below the international poverty line in the mid-2010s [1], the lowest level in recorded history [2]. Food security policies and interventions focused on agricultural production in the world’s poorest countries allowed to substantially increase food supplies, improve the quality of nutrition, and

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Conclusion