World’s poorest people could be spending half their income on food by 2050, study warns

By 2050, the poorest people in some parts of the world could be spending roughly half their income just on food while the wealthiest spend about 5%, according to a major new modelling study

Researchers have projected that the world’s poorest households could face far heavier food, water and energy costs by 2050, with some spending close to half their income on food alone.In the UK, around 10 to 15% of most peo

ple’s household income goes on food.But according to a fresh study cobbled

by researchers from MIT, Tulane University, Stanford among others, some of the world’s poorest communities could be looking at figures closer to 50% by 2050.The research team ran 3,735 different s

cenarios through an existing global model called GCAM, tweaking 12 major variables including population, GDP, income distribution, land use, trade conditions and energy consumption to see how access to food, water and energy might shift by 2050 across 32 regions of the world.Where the biggest gaps showed upThe reg

ional picture that came out of t

he modelling was stark, according to the researchers. In southern Africa, they modelled that the poorest 10% of the population by income could end up spending about 49.6% of their earnings on food, compared to 5.5% for the wealthiest 10%. In western and eastern Africa the projected food burden for the bottom 10% was 48.4% and 42.5%, respectively.To put that in context, the same income

group in western Africa was spending about 25% of their income on food back in 2015, according