Quantifying the Cost and Benefits of Ending Hunger and Undernutrition: Examining the Differences among Alternative Approaches

How much would it cost to end chronic hunger globally? Many have tried to answer this question—the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) produced estimates as early as 1949. But estimating the cost is complicated by the multiple interrelated goals on the global agenda. While the end of hunger must be central to any vision of sustainable development, none of the SDGs can be achieved in isolation. Hunger (SDG2) and poverty (SDG1), while not synonymous, are both causes and consequences of each other.1 Agriculture heavily impacts climate change and vice versa (SDG13).2 And responsible production and consumption (SDG12) are critical for sustaining food security in a world of resource scarcity.3 Indeed, policy makers must consider how investments and expenditures to end hunger would fit within efforts to achieve all SDGs and what kinds of trade-offs may present themselves.

different investment strategies considered, and varying assumptions about the role of different sectors in reducing hunger.
A variety of investment strategies can contribute to ending hunger-including investments to end poverty, increase agricultural productivity, target hungry households, and address undernutrition-each associated with different costs, uncertainties, and economywide benefits.Examining the different impacts of these strategies, as these models do, presents an interesting opportunity to consider the policy pathways that could be followed toward ending hunger and more.New models of the benefits of ending hunger and of the costs of ending malnutrition in all its forms through investments to improve dietary diversity likewise contribute to our understanding of these pathways.
The models reviewed here also lead to different estimates because they are built with distinct targets-for example, most but not all use 2030 as the target year, in line with the SDGs.These models also use different measures of the end of hunger.
Most consider a country to have achieved this goal when the share of undernourished people is less than 5 percent of the population-a prevalence seen currently in the United States and many countries in Western Europe.Others aim for zero hunger, with correspondingly higher costs.

DIFFERENT COSTING MODELS, DIFFERENT QUESTIONS, DIFFERENT OBJECTIVES
Four recent efforts have estimated the cost of ending hunger and undernutrition. 4Each asks a different question and uses a different approach (Table 1).
The Achieving Zero Hunger approach 5 from FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the World Food Programme (WFP) takes aim at hunger by way of ending poverty-thus the investments are focused on ensuring that people have adequate income and resources to get the food they need.To achieve this by 2030 would cost an additional US$265 billion per year for social protection and pro-poor investments and expenditures, public and private, in agriculture and rural development.To estimate the social protection expenditures required, the model calculates the transfers needed to raise all incomes to 40 percent above the poverty line of US$1.25 (PPP) a day, along with markups for administrative costs and leakages, leading to costs of US$67 billion per year.Unlike other models, Achieving Zero Hunger aims for absolute-zero levels of hunger by funding income transfers to the poor in perpetuity.However, the bulk of the costs in this approach come from investments designed to generate rural income-namely, investments in improving primary agriculture and natural resources; agroprocessing operations; infrastructure; institutional frameworks; and research, development, and extension.Achieving Zero Hunger assumes that over time these investments will raise incomes and thus reduce income transfers.Among those reviewed, this model produces the highest cost estimates.

Investments included
Hunger

RESEARCH FRONTIERS
Modeling the benefits of ending hunger and malnutrition Acknowledging that food security is a human right, the main benefit of eliminating hunger and malnutrition is ending unnecessary sources of human suffering.Moreover, living in a world free from hunger would have many other wide-ranging and important advantages.Several studies show that ending hunger and malnutrition leads to increased productivity and better health, more peaceful and stable communities and households, and improved educational attainment. 12Some of these benefits can be expressed in economic terms, which is useful for advocacy and policy prioritization.
Eliminating hunger and improving nutrition status generates immediate and long-term gains by allowing undernourished people to escape the nutrition-based poverty trap.In the short run, higher calorie consumption allows the undernourished to raise their productivity and increase their resilience to disease.In addition, addressing the nutritional constraints facing pregnant women and children allows the subsequent generation to achieve higher levels of physical and mental development, which leads to higher levels of human capital and incomes.A strong and positive linkage between caloric intake and labor productivity at the family farm level was demonstrated more than 30 years ago. 13 IFPRI's IMPACT model asks a slightly different question-what are the effects of boosting agricultural productivity on food security and the environment?Climate change will increase the number of people at risk of hunger, thus partially offsetting gains that would be realized by investments in productivity in the absence of climate change.The IMPACT work provides a global-scale analysis, 6 with a focus on Africa, 7 where the impact of climate change is expected to be pronounced and where hunger is most prevalent.The analysis finds that increased global investments in agricultural research, resource management, and infrastructure to increase agricultural productivity-expected to reduce hunger through increased incomes and food availability-would cost an average of US$52 billion annually until 2030.The IMPACT model uses the 5 percent hunger threshold as a global goal, but even under this package of investments about 10 percent of people in Eastern and Central Africa would remain at risk of hunger.Among the studies reviewed in this brief, this is the only one that considers the future impact of climate change.Ending Hunger: What Would It Cost-a joint project of IFPRI and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)-uses the MIRAGRODEP dynamic global model 8 to provide the most direct estimate: we can end hunger by 2030 with an additional US$11 billion, on average, invested annually from 2015 to 2030. 9Under business-as-usual rates of progress, 73 countries would still find more than 5 percent of their populations hungry-the threshold for elimination of hunger used in this study-by 2030.For those countries, the model minimizes the cost of ending hunger through new public expenditures in three categories of interventions: (1) social safety nets directly targeting consumers through cash transfers and food stamps; (2) farm support to expand production and increase farmers' incomes; and (3) rural development that reduces inefficiencies along the value chain and enhances rural productivity.Like Achieving Zero Hunger, MIRAGRODEP assumes that these investments will raise incomes and reduce income transfers.Because MIRAGRODEP combines a multicountry, multisectoral model with household surveys, it allows for including targeted interventions based on the precise characteristics of hungry households (instead of national averages, which are more commonly used).Because of this targeting approach, along with its exclusive focus on ending caloric hunger and no other development goals, MIRAGRODEP's cost estimate is among the lowest of all models reviewed.Indeed, it is the only study that targets ending hunger exclusively.With a clear focus on public interventions and the international donor community's role, this cost estimate does not include the private investments triggered directly or indirectly by public action.The Investment Framework for Nutrition from the World Bank estimates the cost of improving nutrition outcomes and practices to move toward some of the World Health Assembly goals by 2025.The goals targeted in the analysis are: (1) reducing the number of stunted children by 40 percent; (2) reducing the number of women of reproductive age with anemia by 50 percent; (3) increasing the rate of exclusive breastfeeding up to 50 percent; and (4) reducing and maintaining child wasting to a level of less than 5 percent.According to this framework, it would cost an additional US$7 billion annually from 2015 to 2025 to reach these goals. 10The package of investments includes targeted nutrition-specific interventions, such as micronutrient supplementation and promotion of good infant and young child nutrition and hygiene practices, and "low-hanging fruit" investments, such as staple food fortification.None of the interventions involves primary agricultural production or investments in rural development-necessary investments for eliminating hunger and undernutrition.Moreover, this approach does not aim to end hunger.As such, the estimated costs are the lowest among the models reviewed.The Investment Framework also attempts to estimate the economic returns to these investments in nutrition in order to develop benefit-cost ratios (BCRs) for each target.To arrive at a global estimate of US$10.50BCR from preventing stunting, the analysis uses a seminal micro study in Guatemala along with averted deaths; the estimated losses from not breastfeeding (BCR: $12.10); earnings gained via increased productivity from reduced anemia (BCR: $34.70); and economic benefits of reducing wasting based on estimated mortality reductions (BCR: $3.60). 11Source: Adapted from D. Mason-D'Croz et al., "IMPACT Projections of Investments in Agriculture and Implications for Reducing Hunger in Africa by 2030: Results from the IMPACT Model, Version 3.3," project report, Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2016.

Table 1 :
Overview of four costing exercises , IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development), and WFP (World Food Programme), Achieving Zero Hunger: The Critical Role of Investments in Social Protection and Agriculture (Rome: FAO, 2015).Rosegrant et al., Quantitative Foresight Modeling to Inform the CGIAR Research Portfolio, project report for USAID (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2017.Mason-D'Croz et al., "IMPACT Projections of Investments in Agriculture and Implications for Reducing Hunger in Africa by 2030: Results from the IMPACT Model, Version 3.3," Project Report (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2016).
Some attempts have been made to model the cost of ending malnutrition. 15The difficulty lies in linking broad food-and agriculture-based investments with nutrition outcomes.The World Bank's attempt in the Investment Framework highlights this difficulty by ignoring agricultural interventions in lieu of more easily quantifiable, nutrition-specific interventions.How-FAO6 M. W. 7 D.