The (un)affordability of healthy diets in South Asia and the implications for nutrition-sensitive food policies

Cost and affordability of healthy diet metrics are critically important new indicators of food insecurity, and reveal that balanced nutritious diets are relatively expensive and unaffordable for many South Asians. • The share of people unable to afford the global healthy diet in the 2018–2022 period varies between 5 percent in Bhutan to 21 to 57 percent in other South Asian countries. In total, more than 1 billion South Asians cannot afford the global healthy diet. • There are three major barriers to achieving convergence of actual diets to healthy diets: poverty (low incomes), the high cost of nutrient-dense foods, and weaker preferences for healthy foods compared with unhealthy foods. • “Healthy diet poverty” is still the main barrier for many South Asians, highlighting the importance of inclusive economic growth as well as the need to scale up nutrition-sensitive social protection with more appropriate coverage, size, nutritional adequacy, and comprehensiveness of transfer packages, and increased intensity of complementary nutrition education interventions. • High prices are problematic for some nutrient-dense foods, especially fruits, vegetables, and animalsource foods, but there is scope to reduce prices through diversified agricultural investments, improvements in transport, storage, and logistics infrastructure, and more nutritionally oriented trade policies. • As incomes in South Asia grow, so too does the preference problem: Even though many South Asians cannot afford a healthy diet, factors such as poor nutrition knowledge, convenience, taste, advertising, and status considerations also inhibit consumption of healthy diets. Nutrition education and behavioral change interventions are needed at scale, and throughout the life course, including “double duty” interventions that increase demand for healthy foods and decrease demand for unhealthy foods.