FOODSECURE

The global food system is under increasing pressure from population growth, unequal income distribution, natural resource constraints, climate change and biomass demand for energy and chemical uses. Excessively high food prices may reoccur more frequently, with severe impact on the poor and vulnerable. A long-term policy framework on global food and nutrition security and a stable food system is urgently needed.

The FoodSecure project aims to design effective and sustainable strategies for assessing and addressing the short and long-term challenges of food and nutrition security. The MAGNET model forms a key part of the project’s long-term toolbox that will be used to assess the impact of policies on food and nutrition security to 2050. MAGNET is extended along four dimensions to better capture food and nutrition security effects: (i) an improved representation of technological change as a key driver of the future food system, (ii) the inclusion of nutrition indicators to show the impact on diets, (iii) the inclusion of multiple households types for key developing countries (using the MyGTAP model, mygtap.org) to identify vulnerable households, and (iv) improved land-use modelling. The extended model will be used to evaluate a range of stakeholder-specified future scenarios and assess the impact of biofuel, farm support, aid and trade policies on food and nutrition security. The findings of the research are available from FOODSECURE.