Nutrition Transition and Population Growth: Implications for Land Use and Food Prices

The nutrition transition happening in the development world is putting pressure on world agricultural production. As countries become wealthier, people are adopting a more diversified diet, shifting from dominantly starch staples to vegetables, fruits, and animal protein. The goal of this paper is to study the implications of the nutrition transition driven by income growth in developing countries. Drawing inspiration from a new strand of modeling approaches proposed by Costinot, Donaldson, and Smith (2016), we build up a succinct, transparent, yet powerful partial equilibrium (PE) model capable of analyzing isolated or combined effects of nutrition transition and population growth under different counterfactual cases. The model yields country-specific equilibrium projections, e.g., to 2050, including food and crop prices and land use changes, for each supply-demand scenario, offering clear insights into impacts of possible scenarios and policy responses.