Herforth et al., 2022
World Bank, adapted from Herforth, A., Venkat, A., Bai, Y., Costlow, L., Holleman, C. & Masters, W.A. 2022. Methods and options to monitor globally the cost and affordability of a healthy diet. Background paper for The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022. Rome, FAO.
OWID made an interactive thing
Updated on 11th July 2022 with updated figures from the latest food prices release from the World Bank.
Using data on prices for locally-available food items from the International Comparison Program (ICP) matched to other data on food composition and dietary requirements.
To assess prices and the availability of food, the authors used the World Bank’s International Comparison Program dataset which provides food prices in local currency units (LCU) for 680 foods and non-alcoholic beverages in 170 countries.
- The researchers define ‘affordability’ by whether someone can afford it if they spend 52% of their income on food.
- 381 million people could not afford the most basic energy sufficient diet in 2017
- A calorie-sufficient diet cost an average of $0.83
- The cheapest healthy healthy diet cost an average of $3.54 per day across all countries (healthy defined by regional guidelines)
- In many of the world’s poorest countries – particularly across Sub-Saharan Africa – it’s unaffordable (or not producible) for most of the population.
An important question is how subsistence farmers fit in. They are included in these numbers: the income measure used to calculate the affordability of diets does take the value of subsistence farming (i.e. home production) into account. When the FAO report states that these smallholder farmers cannot afford a calorie-sufficient diet, they’re really saying that they cannot produce one.