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70 SIWA MSANGI AND MARK W. ROSEGRANT Since halting or altering urbanization, population growth, and income growth


is not a plausible policy instrument for influencing consumption behavior, the only avenue that policy can take is to influence consumers themselves to diversify their diets and move away from a meat-intensive regime. Nutrition education, as part of a long-term health education program that strives to target diverse demographics, could be a useful instrument toward that end. Such a program’s influence, however, would only be realized gradually over time, similarly to the patterns seen in other health-oriented education efforts such as AIDS-awareness campaigns. A more direct means to exert influence would be to promote healthy diets


within government-sponsored feeding programs (for example, relief efforts or school lunch programs), although the benefits would be limited to the intervention’s target population. While taxes on meat have been proposed as an additional mechanism to encourage consumers to change their eating habits, no effort has been success- ful in richer countries due to inevitable political resistance from powerful interests supporting ranching operations and meat production.


Conclusions Dietary diversity is a key driver of change in food systems, and it can have a variety of effects on the evolution of food prices, consumption, and other future world food market dynamics. A strong shift toward less-meat-intensive diets significantly decreases the price and consumption of livestock products, as well as cereal com- modities used for animal feed. Reducing high meat consumption in fast-growing countries—like China—has an even bigger impact than reducing meat consump- tion in high-income, OECD countries. If we expanded the scenario with diet change in China and Brazil to include other emerging economies like Indonesia, India, and the faster-growing countries within Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, we might see these effects further multiplied. Encouraging diets richer in pulse-based proteins, fruits, and vegetables could have other benefits—aside from just reducing meat consumption—not captured in our analysis. Aside from the obvious nutritional and health benefits, greater consumption of healthier foods in both developed and developing regions could lead to further welfare improve- ments through farmers’ additional income earned by supplying fresh horticultural fruits and vegetables to wealthier countries. This is already the case in a number of developing tropical regions. While diet changes in developed and rapidly growing countries can make a


significant impact, this alone cannot bring about long-term improvement of global food security. Instead, significant progress on malnutrition in developing countries will require economic growth that generates employment and reduces inequal- ity and poverty; investments in agricultural and rural development, agricultural


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