The social welfare value of the global food system

Simon Dietz, Benjamin Bodirsky, Michael Crawford, Ravi Kanbur, Debbora Leip, Steven Lord, Hermann Lotze-Campen and Alexander Popp

Ecological Economics, 2026, vol. 239, issue C

Abstract: The global food system provides nourishment to most of the world's eight billion people, generates trillions of dollars of goods and services, and employs more than one billion people. On the other hand, it generates substantial dietary health costs and environmental harms. Policymakers are asking about the overall contribution of the global food system to social welfare and how much larger it might be on a sustainable path. This paper describes our efforts to answer these questions. We couple multiple domain-specific models into a large-scale integrated assessment modelling framework capable of quantifying the outcomes of different food-system scenarios for incomes, health and the environment up to 2050, at a highly disaggregated level. We take these multi-dimensional outcomes and value them using a system of nested utility functions, building on recent work in environmental economics. We find that, relative to current trends, the bundle of measures in a Food System Transformation scenario would provide a large boost to global social welfare equivalent to increasing global GDP by about 7 %. Changes in income, environment and health all contribute positively. Measures to change diets are particularly beneficial, although a caveat is that our welfare estimates exclude possible consumer disutility from dietary changes. The results are robust to changes in key utility/damage parameters.

Keywords: Global food system; Sustainable development; Social welfare; Integrated assessment modelling; Food policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q01 Q18 Q24 Q56 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092500254X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: The social welfare value of the global food system (2026)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:239:y:2026:i:c:s092180092500254x

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108771

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().