Measuring food access using the cost and affordability of a healthy diet: Insights from retail price

This seminar summarizes findings from the new approach to measuring food access adopted since 2020 by the FAO and other UN agencies, the World Bank and other organizations. This new Cost and Affordability of Healthy Diets (CoAHD) metric tracks food access using the cost per day for the least expensive locally available items that would meet dietary guidelines for each population. Global CoAHD reveals that 2.8 billion people worldwide cannot afford even the least-cost items needed for lifelong health, while national monitoring reveals significant spatial and seasonal variation within countries. The CoAHD is a new kind of price index, providing a new operational target for global development efforts that is also useful as a diagnostic tool to distinguish between three possible causes of unhealthy diets: (a) unusually high prices or unavailability of items in all food groups needed for a healthy diet, (b) insufficient income to buy enough of even the least expensive items in each food group, or (c) displacement of healthy foods by less nutritious items. Using modeled diets to track the cost and affordability of healthy foods can help guide many kinds of intervention to improve diet quality, identifying the least expensive healthy options so as to understand why people often consume unhealthy foods instead. The CoAHD methodology was developed by the Food Prices for Nutrition project, through more than 20 peer-reviewed articles and updated software tools available online here: https://sites.tufts.edu/foodpricesfor...