Making the Global Food System More Sustainable Could Save $10 Trillion A Year, Study Finds
The major economic analysis says widespread adoption of healthier, more sustainable diets could spare trillions of dollars in health, nutrition, and environment-related costs.
A major new study has revealed that the global economy could save up to 10 trillion USD every year if we moved towards a more sustainable food system.
Led by leading economists and scientists as part of the Food System Economic Commission (FSEC), researchers developed an economic model that maps for the first time two projected futures of our global food system. One maps the pathway if we keep to current trends, while the other follows a pathway that incorporates a sustainable transformation of the food system.
The results show that not only is a transformation of food systems “urgently needed”, but doing so would offer “enormous” economic benefits.
While there are many studies that have looked into the positive effects of making diets more healthy and plant-focused, this new research is believed to be the most comprehensive study of food system economics so far.
Diets Could Help Solve Key Threats
Our current global food system is the source of some of humanity’s key threats, including hunger and undernutrition, the obesity epidemic, environmental damage, and climate change.
Now, according to FSEC’s economic analysis, this human suffering and planetary harm is costing well over 10 trillion USD every year, which is crucially more than what food systems contribute to global GDP.
These figures, the study says, reveal that our food systems are destroying more value than they create.
“If the food system continues business as usual it will produce trillions of dollars of avoidable economic costs that will limit future economic growth and development,” explains Dr Steven Lord, of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, who contributed to the study. “This analysis puts a first figure on the regional and global economic opportunity in transforming food systems. While not easy, the transformation is affordable on a global scale and the accumulating costs into the future of doing nothing pose a considerable economic risk.”
The health costs of our current food system, for example, are estimated at 11 trillion USD. Measured through their negative effects on labor productivity, the research shows an estimated 770 million people are living with obesity (and therefore have a higher prevalence of diseases like diabetes and hypertension), while around 735 million people are facing undernutrition.
By using the study’s economic modeling to look at what the future might look like if no action is taken, then the global adoption of diets high in fats, sugar, and ultra-processed foods would increase the number of obese people worldwide by 70 percent to an estimated 1.5 billion in 2025.
But if we take the second pathway of adopting a more sustainable food system - in the study referred to as the Food System Transformation (FST) pathway - then these figures can be positively transformed. The economic model shows that the FST could eliminate undernutrition by 2050, and save 174 million lives from premature death due to diet-related chronic disease.
How Can We Achieve A Transformed Food System?
The researchers say that one particularly striking finding from their analysis was the economic opportunity from changing diets alone.
Global adoption of a predominantly plant-based diet accounted for around 75 percent of the total health and environmental benefits from food system transformation, according to the findings. This would also have a positive effect on the economy, with an additional 2 percent per year to global GDP on average. In short, if the majority of the world ate more plant-focused diets then the positive impact on global health, the environment, and the economy would be huge.
The research acknowledges that such a transformation is not easy, however, and efforts will work in different ways for different countries. Government action plans could include taxing the most unsustainable foods, subsidizing farmers to produce healthy foods, and investing in more sustainable and efficient agricultural technologies.
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