MIT study finds poorest households could spend half their income on food by 2050

A new study co-authored by MIT researchers has found that the poorest households in some parts of the world could be spending around half their income on food by 2050, with particularly acute affordability pressures projected across parts of Africa.

• Researchers modeled 3,735 scenarios to examine how access to food, water and energy could develop across different regions and income groups by 2050.
• In southern Africa, the poorest 10% could spend 49.6% of income on food, compared with 5.5% for the wealthiest 10%.
• The analysis considered 12 variables including population, GDP, income distribution, land use, agricultural trade, energy consumption and water use.

Published in Earth's Future, the research brought together scientists from MIT, Tulane University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Stanford University and Tufts University.

Rather than attempting to predict a single outcome for 2050, the researchers modeled thousands of combinations of economic, agricultural, environmental and social conditions to identify where future resource insecurity could become most severe.

"For a lot of these outcomes, the lower-income groups see much worse potential insecurity," said Jennifer Morris, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and the MIT Energy Initiative and co-author of the paper.

"Anything that's taking up half of your income is potentially destabilizing for your entire life because it leaves so few resources for the other critical needs and basic life necessities," Morris added.

The researchers used version 7.1 of the Global Change Analysis Model, which represents interactions between energy, economies, water, land and climate across 32 global regions, 235 water basins and 384 land-use regions.

They examined 12 factors connected to resource availability, including population, GDP, income distribution, carbon intensity, land use, agricultural trade and different projections for energy consumption and water use.

The resulting 3,735 scenarios revealed particularly large disparities in future food affordability.

In southern Africa, the poorest 10% of the population could spend 49.6% of income on food by 2050, compared with 5.5% among the wealthiest 10%. The projected food burden among the poorest 10% reaches 48.4% in West Africa and 42.5% in East Africa.

The researchers also compared the projections with 2015 data contained within the model.

For the lowest-income group in West Africa, food accounted for around 25% of income in 2015. Depending on how the different factors develop, that could range from approximately 20% to 75% by 2050.

In southern Africa, the lowest-income group spent around 20% of income on food in 2015, while the scenarios for 2050 produced a range of approximately 25% to 65%.

"This study shows that there is no single driver of future food, energy, and water insecurity," said Gi Joo Kim, a research scientist at Tulane University and co-author of the paper. "Income is important, but regional conditions, land use, energy systems, water availability, and consumer behavior all shape the risks people face."

The researchers stressed that the wide ranges do not represent conventional forecasts. Instead, the modeling was designed to identify which combinations of circumstances could create particularly high levels of resource insecurity.

"Regional averages can make future resource-security risks appear more manageable than they actually are," Kim said. "This means analyses that stop at the average may miss exactly the populations most vulnerable to future change."

The paper, Identifying Key Uncertainties and Drivers of Future Resource Security Outcomes Through a Multisector Scenario Ensemble, was authored by Kim, Morris, Brian O'Neill and Marshall Wise of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, John Weyant of Stanford University and Jonathan Lamontagne of Tufts University.

The research was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Stanford University and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

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