EXPENSIVE food items can lead to malnutrition and stunting, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (Ifpri) and the Human Development Network (HDN).
In a World Bank data blog, Ifpri Senior Research Fellow Derek Headey and HDN Consultant Harold Alderman said poor diets are now considered as the top risk factor in the global burden of disease worldwide.
Headey and Alderman said stunting in children is more prevalent in places where milk prices are high, while expensive egg prices encourage higher consumption of “less nutritious staples” such as rice, wheat and corn in developing countries.
“Too little nutrient-dense fruits, vegetables, dairy, eggs, meat and fish are associated with wasting, stunting and micronutrient deficiencies in early childhood; all killers in early life [mostly in lower income countries]. Poor diets are therefore at the epicenter of a diverse range of health problems in a diverse range of places,” Headey and Alderman said.
Using the World Bank’s International Comparison Program (ICP), Headey and Alderman said they used the “relative caloric price” of a given food.
Based on their computations, Headey and Alderman said egg calories in Niger are 23.3 times as expensive as a calorie from a staple food, such as rice or corn. In contrast, egg calories in the US are just 1.6 times as expensive as staple food calories.
In the Philippines, nutrient- dense eggs are 4.43 times more expensive than rice. This means nutrient-dense eggs in the country are more expensive relative to a food staple compared to the US.
Further, in terms of milk prices, in the Philippines, milk has a relative caloric price (CPR) of 4.37 times the food staple. The stunting rate in the country is at 32.1 percent.
In other countries like Niger, the CPR of milk is 17.91 times that of the staple. With that, the stunting rate in the country is 43 percent.
“The problem in less developed countries is that poor people also live in poor food systems: nutrient-dense foods like eggs, milk, fruits and vegetables can be very expensive in these countries, making it much harder to diversify away from nutrient-sparse staple foods like rice, corn and bread,” Headey and Alderman said.
Options
Headey and Alderman said countries need nutrition-focused food policies in the hope of making healthy food options more accessible to the public.
For one, there is a need for governments to address the low and declining cost of unhealthy foods. Addressing this can be done by increasing taxes for these food items.
However, more needs to be done. The authors said the consumption of unhealthy food items implies the need for better nutrition education and improvements in food labeling.
“One thing is for certain: reducing the immense global health burden of poor diets will be a huge challenge in the 21st century, and fixing the global food system must be at the very center of efforts to meet this challenge,” they said.
In the Philippines, the poorest Filipinos are very sensitive to food prices. National Statistician Claire Dennis Mapa said this can be explained by the difference in the inflation felt by all households and the inflation experienced by the bottom 30 percent or the poorest Filipinos.
He explained that the weight of food in the basket of goods used for the computation of the inflation experienced by the poorest 30 percent is 70 percent, against 39 percent for all the households.