Are Healthy Diets Affordable? Using New Data on Retail Prices and Diet Costs to Guide Agricultural and Food Policy

This Policy Seminar will feature Food Prices for Nutrition project leaders and participants around the world, who will discuss how policy analysts and researchers can use the new methods and data in their own work. New Food Prices for Nutrition data in the SOFI 2022 report launching on July 6th uses retail food prices to compute diet costs and the number of people who cannot afford a healthy diet globally. Underlying costs by food group will be published simultaneously on a new Food Prices for Nutrition DataHub hosted at the World Bank, and subnational data are being used for a wide range of in-country research across Africa and Asia. The new data and methods showcased in this seminar are key tools for policy analysis and monitoring in global and national food systems, measuring food access using retail prices of the most affordable items available at each place and time in quantities needed to meet global nutritional standards for an active and healthy life.