Can economic development be a driver of food system sustainability? Empirical evidence from a global sustainability index and a multi-country analysis

Despite representing a growing element of the international community’s discourse, the sustainability of food systems and the challenge of its empirical measurement are still highly debated. In this paper, we propose to address this gap by computing a global food system sustainability index which we then use in a cross-country analysis covering 94 countries in low-, middle- and high-income regions. The analysis reveals a strong non-linear but positive correlation between the food system sustainability index and countries’ individual GDP per capita. This relationship suggests some possible degree of endogeneity between food system sustainability and economic development. We then use the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways framework and Individual Conditional Expectations modeling techniques to explore how the sustainability of food systems is projected to evolve in the future as countries move up the economic development ladder. The projections indicate that for lower income countries, the change is usually more significant than for higher income countries. The analysis also reveals that the different dimensions of sustainability will not all contribute equally to future improvements in food system sustainability. In particular, investments targeting social and food security & nutrition dimensions are projected to have a greater effect on the sustainability of food systems than investment/interventions aiming at the environment or economic domains. For countries located at the lower end of the economic development spectrum, this would imply that, even with limited resources, policy-makers could substantially improve the sustainability of countries’ food systems by prioritizing (sub)national policies and interventions focused on social and food security & nutrition domains.Author summary: How sustainable are our food systems? Answering this question is important from both a research and a policy perspective. Without a better understanding of how sustainable (or unsustainable) our current food systems are, and what drives this (un)sustainability, decision-makers are left with little information on what to do -or what to prioritize- to overcome malnutrition and hunger while at the same time reducing the environmental or social impacts of our food systems’ economic activities. In this paper we aim to address those questions. For this purpose, we build a global food system index that “gauges” how sustainable food systems are, and we apply this index to a set of low-, middle- and higher-income countries across the globe. We then use modeling techniques to predict how the sustainability of food systems as we observe them today may evolve in the future as lower income countries move up the economic development ladder. We conclude with specific reflections on the importance of this work for policy prioritization amongst the trade-offs that characterize food system interventions.