SUSTAINABLE AND HEALTHY DIET RECOMMENDATIONS. THEIR IMPLICATIONS ON THE ENVIRONMENT AND THE COMPETITIVENESS OF THE NATIONAL AGRI-FOOD SECTOR

The need to satisfy an increased food demand while producing more sustainably is one of the main challenges that the agri-food sector is currently facing. The agri-food sector needs to move from a phase at the expense of the environment toward a stage of sustainably increasing agricultural productivity, being, at the same time, competitive and sustainable under the constant changes of climatic and socioeconomic settings. Simultaneously to these challenges in production, the need for healthy and nutritious diets to face the global problem of malnutrition, obesity, overweight, cardiovascular issues, or deficient intake of micronutrients has translated into critical food consumption challenges. This context has created a global concern that has translated into scientific-based recommendations about universal reference diets that ensure to achieve a broad set of human health and environmental sustainability goals. However, there are still gaps between recommended and actual intakes in developed and developing countries where compliance is not entirely satisfactory. In this sense, governments and policymakers have applied different interventions for dietary changes to reach sustainable and nutritious goals. There is an extensive body of literature that has assessed dietary, health, and welfare impacts as well as strengths and weaknesses related to different food policy types. However, most research on food and nutrition security has historically been unrelated, either focusing on food production by agricultural sciences or consumption patterns, diets, and health by the nutrition sciences. Thus, these approaches neglect many other implications that both dietary recommendations and consumer side interventions have on the agricultural sector, focusing mainly on the demand side, without explicitly tracking the induced changes in prices, trade, or agricultural production. This proposal aims to fill this gap by tracking future consequences of dietary policies on the productivity, prices, and trade of the agri-food system. It relies on a methodological framework integrating mathematical and econometrics tools to analyze agricultural and food purchase decisions. This framework will be enforced through different scenarios on dietary targets to reach sustainability and health goals simultaneously. The project will focus on both the Chilean consumers and its agri-food system, considering their macro-regional differences, representing the diversity of food habits and productive systems. Within this project it is expected three-fold results: i) to assess if the national agri-food system should change to satisfy dietary recommendations; ii) to estimate demand for different food groups and to identify the gaps between recommended and actual national intakes; and iii) to assess future consequences of dietary policies on the productivity, prices, and trade of the agri-food system. The demand estimation of food’s group and the identification and assessments of likely consequences of consumer interventions can inform about the affordability of improving diets at the national level and the effects of healthier food patterns on the national agri-food supply system.