With markets becoming increasingly interconnected, international trade in food is on the rise. Trade is an important component of food consumption; a lot of food we have on our plate every day comes from abroad. There is, however, little we know about the impact of trade and trade policy on diets and nutrition and, vice versa, how the latter influences consumption, production, land use and trade. This was the topic of a seminar organised by LEI (International Trade section) on 19 October 2010 in The Hague. Its relevance is underscored by the fact that currently about 800 million people worldwide are undernourished, while 1.2 billion people are overweight. The latter number is on the rise, and especially so in developing countries. As a result, the pattern of diseases is shifting from one dominated by infectious to one dominated by chronic diseases, with developing countries increasingly suffering from a so-called ‘double burden’. The human suffering and high and rising economic cost of such trends are evident.
The seminar was a follow-up to a meeting in London on the interactions between agriculture and health. The new Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) aims to develop a research track in this area and is looking for collaborations with others across the various disciplines. Marcus Keogh-Brown visited from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) to talk about opportunities for collaboration with LEI.
Concrete outcomes of the seminar are that, first, LEI is going to look into developing its food security work and research in the area of international trade liberalisation in the direction of diets and nutrition. This implies going beyond the impacts of international/macroeconomic developments on the value of food consumption, into detail in terms of quantities consumed of different types of food, and into detail in terms of nutrients. It also implies more detail at the household level, which requires the combination of macroeconomic with microeconomic models (e.g. computable general equilibrium (CGE) models with micro-simulation models). A second outcome is the aim to start up a research track on the implications of healthy diet norms on consumption, production, land use and trade, using MAGNET (Modular Agricultural GeNeral Equilibrium Tool) of the International Trade section, which is a global CGE model based on the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model. This fits in the foreseen investment to improve the consumption side of the model. The final outcome of the day is the intention to make a collaboration between LEI and LCIRAH in this area more concrete, given that clear synergies exist (LEI being strong in agricultural modelling and LCIRAH being strong in health). This will be done, amongst others, via participation in workshops and joint exploration of funding opportunities and proposal writing.