Interventions and innovation can lower the price of individual foods, but healthy eating depends on access to a mix of foods from diverse sources. How has the overall cost of meeting dietary needs changed over time worldwide, and in Africa and South Asia specifically? What determines the cost of a healthy diet? And how does affordability affect dietary intake and health status in different locales?

To answer these questions, Changing Access to Nutritious Diets in Africa and South Asia (CANDASA) has been using new food price indexes that account for food substitutions to meet nutritional needs to evaluate food systems all over the world, including in Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Malawi, and Tanzania.

This seminar will present the outcomes of CANDASA’s work to date, with a panel discussion featuring field researchers from each country to discuss the local and global implications of their results.

Research by Tufts and IFPRI on this topic is supported by UKAid and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Speakers

• Anna Herforth, Independent Consultant (Video)
• William A. Masters, Professor, Tufts University (Video)

Discussant

• Derek Headey, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI (Video)

Panelists

• Fantu Nisrane Bachewe, Research Coordinator, IFPRI (Video)
• Yan Bai, PhD Candidate, Tufts University (Video)
• Stevier Kaiyatsa, Economist, Ministry of Finance, Planning & Development, Malawi (Video)
• Fulgence Mishili, Senior Lecturer, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania (Video)
• Kalyani Raghunathan, Research Fellow, IFPRI (Video)
• Daniel Sarpong, Associate Professor and Dean, School of Agriculture, University of Ghana (Video)
• Kate Schneider, PhD Candidate, Tufts University (Video)

Moderator

• Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Director of Communications and Public Affairs & Chief of Staff in the Director General’s Office, IFPRI
• Q&A Video

Click here to view the presentation slides.