The cost of a healthy diet is shooting up, with people in lower-income countries most at risk of being unable to afford proper nutrition, according to new data from the World Bank.
“The cost of a healthy diet is estimated to be over 50% higher than the bank’s extreme poverty line,” Aart Kraay, a chief economist at the bank, said at a seminar on Thursday. “The fact that a person could be considered not poor, according to these poverty lines, but yet be far from able to afford a healthy diet, let alone other essentials, should give us pause.”
Trend reversal: In 2020, the global average daily cost of a healthy diet was $3.54, up from $3.31 a year earlier, at purchasing power parity — while the extreme poverty line is $1.90 a day. Nada Hamadeh, a manager at the bank’s development data group, said 112 million more people were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2020, taking the total to 3.1 billion, and “reversing the previous downward trend.”
Worryingly, this data was crunched before 2022’s sharp upward pressure on food prices — which will only make matters worse.
Where it hits: Poorer countries were most at risk of not being able to afford a healthy diet, with 70-90% of the populations affected. Notably, upper-middle-income countries paid the most for a nutritious diet, while lower-middle-income countries saw the highest increase in cost, with an 8% annual spike, Hamadeh said.
What’s ahead: Johan Swinnen, the director general at the International Food Policy Research Institute, warned about current trends in food prices. “We have to start looking at these things much more from a resilience perspective rather than a stable environment perspective,” Swinnen said at the seminar, adding that “the norm is instability.”
The new data tools will equip governments and development agencies with ways to measure diet cost affordability to improve food systems interventions, Kraay said.
About the author
Shabtai Gold
Shabtai Gold is a Senior Reporter based in Washington. He covers multilateral development banks, with a focus on the World Bank, along with trends in development finance. Prior to Devex, he worked for the German Press Agency, dpa, for more than a decade, with stints in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, before relocating to Washington to cover politics and business.