Land use for alcohol production and its implications for food security and public health: A case study of the United States

Although the U.S. alcohol industry is a major economic sector, alcohol consumption has long been associated with a wide range of detrimental health, social, and economic outcomes. Simultaneously, increasing land use conflicts and climate change-induced yield reductions are contributing to food insecurity. The purpose of this study is to evaluate a potential approach to addressing both the negative externalities of the alcohol industry and the growing problem of food insecurity by reconsidering agricultural land allocation – specifically, shifting land currently used for alcohol crops towards human food. For this land-use re-allocation, this study develops a new method by determining alcohol-related crop land area, caloric yield, and quantifies human feeding capacity for four scenarios: (i) lives saved by mitigating alcohol-related harms by elimination of alcohol consumption and (ii) additional lives that could be supported through increased caloric availability from food crops grown on the same land for hops, grapes, barley and corn for two scenarios: (iia) ingesting food directly rather than alcohol conversion and (iib) replanting with higher yield food crops. Eliminating U.S. alcohol could prevent an estimated 178,000 deaths/year. These life savings, however, were small compared to the implications for food security. Results showed repurposing (scenario iib) America’s alcohol-dedicated cropland to potato cultivation yields the greatest potential human feeding capacity – an estimated 641.65 million people annually, exceeding the baseline of eating alcohol crops directly by over 50%. Only 2.1% of American alcohol-related crops would need to be converted to eliminate global hunger-related mortality entirely. By making small land use changes to eliminate alcohol consumption in favor of food production, public health policy could eliminate human starvation globally and save millions of lives annually.