This presentation was delivered by Timothy Sulser, Scientist at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), working with the Global Futures and Strategic Foresight initiative of the CGIAR. 

This presentation describes IFPRI’s IMPACT (International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade) model to look at future scenario analyses. IMPACT is an integrated system of linked economic, climate, water, and crop models that allows for exploration of the future of supply, demand, trade, and critical aspects of the global agricultural system. IMPACT generates projections for over 60 commodities produced in 158 countries out to the year 2050. 

Fruits and vegetables (F&V) are a critical element of future diets that face particular challenges. Baseline projections indicate that total global consumption will nearly double from 2010 to 2050 while average per capita availability will only increase by about 40 percent. Most of this growth takes place in the developing world.

The daily World Health Organization (WHO) healthy diet target of 500g of F&V per person per day is achieved, on average, by 2030 across most of the globe except in Africa South of the Sahara (SSA). While other regions continue to improve general availability of F&V out to 2050, SSA is projected to lag behind and continues to fall short of this target. In addition, distributional effects are important in all regions as significant portions of the population will not be able to consume adequate amounts of F&V even if the regional average meets the WHO target.

Modeling the future of F&V and their role in healthy diets presents interesting challenges for the IMPACT development team. Better representation of the different types of F&V is being actively pursued. How to model healthy diets and the distributional effects in a structural model, such as IMPACT, is an important area of development in addition to working on how to best communicate these results and their implications to policy-makers.

This presentation was part of at an event titled "Aligning the Food System to Meet Dietary Needs: Fruits and Vegetables," which took place on June 2-3, 2017, at the UC Davis Conference Center.