Ultra-processed foods lead to $7 trillion in hidden health, environment costs globally: Report

Unhealthy diets, high in ultra-processed foods, fats and sugars drove a huge hidden cost of over $7 trillion a year on our health, environment and environment, according to a new report.

The losses attributed to such food products, which cause obesity and non-communicable diseases and lower labour productivity, were particularly elevated in high- and upper-middle-income countries, according to the 2023 edition of The State of Food and Agriculture released on November 6, 2023. 

Overall, our current agrifood systems impose hidden costs equivalent to at least $10 trillion a year, representing almost 10 per cent of the global gross domestic product (GDP), according to the analysis by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, covering 154 countries.

Consumption of highly processed foods was increasing in peri-urban and rural areas of some countries, driven by urbanisation, changes in lifestyle and employment profiles of both women and men, as well as increasing commuting times. 

This new evidence also challenges the conventional thinking that purchase patterns between urban and rural areas differ markedly, as, the researchers found, the diffusion of processed foods across the rural-urban continuum was similar and quite extensive for both high- and low-food-budget countries. 

On average, the share of total processed foods and food away from home was 29 per cent in high-food-budget countries and 25 per cent in low-food-budget countries, according to the report. Penetration of highly processed foods was observed in rural areas, even those 1-2 hours or more from a city or town.

While consumption of processed foods, including highly processed foods, is already advanced in Asia and Latin America, it is spreading quickly in Africa as well. 

The prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity at the global level remained unchanged for the second year in a row after increasing sharply from 2019 to 2020, but was still far above pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels. 

About 29.6 per cent of the global population — 2.4 billion people — were moderately or severely food insecure in 2022, of which about 900 million (11.3 per cent of people in the world) were severely food insecure, the authors of the report noted. 

“It is estimated that between 691 and 783 million people in the world faced hunger in 2022. Considering the midrange (about 735 million), 122 million more people faced hunger in 2022 than in 2019, before the global pandemic,” they added.

The extensive 316-page report also projected that almost 600 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030. This is about 119 million more than in a scenario in which neither the pandemic nor the war in Ukraine had occurred, and around 23 million more than if the war in Ukraine had not happened.

Among the nine south Asian countries, India had the third highest prevalence of undernourishment (233.9 million) in the total population, after Afghanistan and Pakistan, the analysis showed. The share of undernourished people in India, however, had come down from 21.4 per cent of the population in 2004-06 to 16.6 in 2020-22.

“In the face of escalating global challenges: food availability, food accessibility and food affordability; climate crisis; biodiversity loss; economic slowdowns and downturns; worsening poverty; and other overlapping crises, the future of our agrifood systems hinges on our willingness to appreciate all food producers, big or small, to acknowledge these true costs, and understand how we all contribute to them, and what actions we need to take,” said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu. 

Low-income countries were the hardest hit by hidden costs of agrifood systems, which represent more than a quarter of their GDP, as opposed to less than 12 per cent in middle-income countries and less than 8 per cent in high-income countries. 

The report made the case for more regular and detailed analysis by governments and the private sector of the hidden or ‘true’ costs of agrifood systems via true cost accounting, followed by actions to mitigate these harms.

The report urged governments to use true cost accounting to transform agrifood systems to address the climate crisis, poverty, inequality and food security. 

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