Nutritious Food Market Transformation: Analysis of Non-communicable Disease Dynamics and Prevention

摘要

This paper examines, at a meso-economic level, challenges and opportunities for policy actions that transform healthy living behaviour. We examine how policies and other decisions, made by various types of actors (i.e. consumers, industry, agriculture, government, NGOs, and global institutions) at multiple levels, evolve as they interact and collectively shape healthy living behaviour over time. The transformation of such a dynamically complex socio-economic-system, characterized by multiple feedbacks and long-term delays, and involving disjointed public and private level interactions, produces counterintuitive behaviour. Such behaviours include tipping-points and "worse-before-better" behaviour. To develop an in-depth understanding of the major challenges and identify high-leverage strategies in transitioning away from low nutrition / high motivational based food system we have developed a behavioral dynamic model with a broad and further expandable scope. Key actors in the models include consumers, individual and collectively oriented food producers, and policy-makers. In this paper we describe the model and carry out simulation experiments designed to examine barriers to self-sustaining market shifts between supply and demand factors. In particular, we show that collective action among producers to improve nutrition, while important in achieving nutritional change, are slow to build up and failure prone, due to a range of compensating supply and demand feedbacks. We analyze and discuss differences across different initiatives, including those oriented around marketing and R&D. We conclude by discussing the importance of coordination and commitment across actors and propose important model extensions.