FoodCost - FOOD Costing and Internalisation of Externalities for System Transition

Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing its environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. In current food systems many of the costs of harmful foods and benefits of healthful foods are externalized, i.e. are not reflected in market prices and therefore not in decision making of actors in food value chains. Solving the externality problems means to determine current costs of externalities and redefine food prices (true pricing) to internalize them in daily practice. Policy makers, businesses and other actors in the food system, lack sufficient information and knowledge to internalize externalities to achieve a sustainable food system. The recently started Horizon Europe Project FoodCost (spans from 2022 – 2026) responds to this challenge by designing a roadmap for effective and sustainable strategies to assess and internalise food externalities. FOODCoST provides approaches and databases to measure and value positive and negative externalities, proposing a game-changing and harmonised approach to calculate the value of climate, biodiversity, environmental, social and health externalities along the food value chain based on economic cost principles.

Source: Figure 6 - FOODCoST Integrated toolbox for the impact assessment, FoodCost Proposal

FOODCoST provides an analytical toolbox to experiment, analyse, and navigate the internalisation of externalities through policies and business strategies providing tools and guidance to policy makers and businesses to assess the sustainability impact of their internalisation actions. MAGNET CGE model is an important element in the FoodCost integrated toolbox as it can provide a broader macroeconomic assessment of the impact of policies effective in internalizing externalities.

Contact: Zuzana Smeets Kristkova, Hans van Meijl, David Cui