Browsing by Person "Boysen-Urban, Kirsten"

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Scenario analysis of global food security within CGE models: The role of caloric equivalents
(2023) Korovin, Vladimir; Boysen-Urban, Kirsten
In the last decade, the topic of food security attracted significant attention from the research community, politicians, and the general public. This is not surprising, as every person should have a guaranteed physical and economic access to safe, nutritious and a sufficient amount of food all year round. Including the aim to eradicate all forms of malnutrition, each of these food security elements is an integral part of the agenda for Sustainable Development defined by the UN in 2015. Nonetheless, full achievement of the agenda’s ambitious goals is far from being easy in the near future. On the contrary, recent years have shown an increasing number of undernourished people around the globe. This is certainly a worrying sign. The future socio-economic development, rising population, resource scarcity, changing demand patterns, diminishing increase of agricultural yields; each of these aspects further exacerbate the uncertainty of food security. They underline how important it is to assess the prospect challenges to feeding the world. Within the broad spectrum of methodological approaches used for projection studies, the computable general equilibrium (CGE) models occupy a strong position. However, as CGE models are essentially economic models and use monetary indexes by default, the direct application of CGE models for the evaluation as well as communicating results on dietary and food security issues remains fundamentally challenging. With this in mind, this thesis provides a state-of-the-art overview on the design and implementation of the forward-looking exercises within the CGE modeling framework with an explicit focus on food and nutrition security. As a part of this work, the author elaborates whether and how caloric equivalents can be included in CGE models, underlining their relevance for the modeling framework in general, as well as defining plausible scenarios for the future global and regional food security trajectories in particular. The centerpiece of this thesis is a comprehensive modeling framework that is capable of analyzing the development of future regional food security and facilitating discussions on various aspects of long-term projections within CGE models. An important element of this framework is the integrated calorie module that contributes to the reporting as well as the validation of the model’s results. The empirical analysis conducted with the help of this extended modeling framework underlines the importance of such caloric metrics and identifies benefits of their application in scenario analysis. It also shows the advantages for intercomparison of modeling outcomes at the stage of sensitivity analysis as well as across different studies. The simulation results reveal the potential for further elevation of the average consumer’s energy intake in all regions under the central scenarios. However, the expected increase in calorie availability is neither regionally uniform nor scenario specific. Some regions do not show a substantial improvement in energy intake though, indicating that a substantial share of their population could remain food insecure. Both central scenarios emphasize a tendency in emerging and industrialized countries toward more energy-dense diets, containing more animal-based products, sugars, and oils. This, in turn, imposes the risk of unbalanced diets and overconsumption. This thesis and the presented method of integrating caloric information into the CGE model provides a solid basis for further research. It makes a substantial contribution to the discussion of scenario analyses and application of CGE models in the area of food security modeling. In this regard, the calorie module has proven itself to be a valuable diagnostic tool and a central element for food security assessment. The approach of integrating caloric equivalents presented in this work is very general and can easily be extended to include other macronutrients, such as fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. The free accessibility of the data sources used and the transparent implementation process are evident strengths of the approach that might further motivate its use. Moreover, the proposed modeling framework offers an interesting and effective tool for analyzing various research questions concerning dietary trajectories and food security policies in long-term scenario analyses. The study of policy mechanisms targeting the adverse developments of dietary shifts might be one such interesting research direction.