Poorest Households Could Spend Half Their Income on Food by 2050, Study Warns

How the world will feed, hydrate, and power itself in the coming decades is one of the defining questions of the twenty-first century, and a new study co-authored by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that the answers will differ dramatically depending on where people live and how much money they earn. Drawing on an unusually broad ensemble of future scenarios, the research projects that by 2050 the poorest households in some regions could be devoting roughly half of their income to food alone, while the wealthiest households in the very same regions spend only about five percent. The findings, published in the journal Earth’s Future, point to deepening inequalities in access to food, water, and energy even in futures where average global conditions appear relatively stable.

The study, titled “Identifying Key Uncertainties and Drivers of Future Resource Security Outcomes Through a Multisector Scenario Ensemble,” was led by a team including Jennifer Morris, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and the MIT Energy Initiative, alongside Gi Joo Kim of Tulane University, Brian O’Neill and Marshall Wise of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, John Weyant of Stanford University, and Jonathan Lamontagne of Tufts University. According to Morris, the central message is stark: for many of the outcomes examined, lower-income groups face far worse potential insecurity than regional averages would suggest. “Anything that’s taking up half of your income is potentially destabilizing for your entire life because it leaves so few resources for the other critical needs and basic life necessities,” Morris said in announcing the findings.

Methodologically, the research fills a persistent gap in the field of long-term resource security modeling. Most prior studies have relied on so-called shared socioeconomic pathways, a small set of broad global narratives about how populations, economies, and policies might evolve. While useful, those frameworks rarely resolve how resource access could shift across income groups within specific regions. Two years ago, the same team published a paper calling for more socioeconomically specific scenario analysis centered on outcomes for human well-being. The new study is their attempt to build that kind of modeling from the ground up, disaggregating projected burdens by income bracket rather than stopping at national or regional averages.

To do so, the researchers adopted the Global Change Analysis Model, version 7.1, an integrated framework that represents the interactions between energy systems, economies, water resources, land use, and climate. The model divides the world into 32 regions, 235 water basins, and 384 land-use regions, and incorporates adjustments for estimated commodity prices over time. The team then identified 12 major variables connected to resource availability, including population growth, gross domestic product, income distribution, carbon intensity, land-use change, agricultural trade, and multiple alternative energy consumption and water-use trajectories. Running the model across 3,735 distinct scenarios allowed them to map the full range of possible resource security outcomes by 2050, rather than committing to a single prediction.

The regional contrasts that emerge from the ensemble are striking. Food insecurity in 2050 appears most acute in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, while energy insecurity is projected to be most severe for low-income residents of parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Within southern Africa, the modeling suggests that the poorest ten percent of the population could be spending 49.6 percent of its income on food by mid-century, compared with just 5.5 percent for the wealthiest ten percent. In West and East Africa, the projected food burden for the bottom income decile reaches 48.4 percent and 42.5 percent respectively, meaning that even within a single continent the specifics vary enormously from one subregion to the next.

The comparison with historical data sharpens the picture considerably. Benchmarking against model results for 2015, the researchers found that the lowest-income group across western Africa then spent about 25 percent of its income on food, whereas the projections for 2050 range from roughly 20 percent to as much as 75 percent of income. In southern Africa, the lowest-income group spent about 20 percent of its income on food in 2015, but the modeled range for 2050 spans 25 to 65 percent. That wide spread does not reflect uncertainty about the past; it reflects genuine uncertainty about the future, spanning scenarios of divergent economic growth, climate stress, trade conditions, and policy choices. The breadth of possible outcomes is itself one of the study’s most important findings.

Energy burdens tell a parallel story of inequality. In parts of the Middle East, the residential energy burden in 2050 is estimated at just 1.7 percent of income for the highest income bracket but 18.9 percent for the lowest. In Eastern Europe, the lowest-income bracket could face an energy burden of 11.3 percent of income, while the highest-income bracket remains under five percent. These disparities mean that even regions with abundant energy resources or favorable average statistics may harbor pockets of deep deprivation. “Regional averages can make future resource-security risks appear more manageable than they actually are,” Kim warned. “This means analyses that stop at the average may miss exactly the populations most vulnerable to future change.”

The research also underscores that no single factor drives future insecurity. “This study shows that there is no single driver of future food, energy, and water insecurity,” Kim said. “Income is important, but regional conditions, land use, energy systems, water availability, and consumer behavior all shape the risks people face.” For policymakers, that complexity carries a practical implication: vulnerability arises from specific combinations of factors that differ from region to region, and effective interventions must therefore be tailored to local configurations of economic, environmental, and infrastructural conditions rather than derived from one-size-fits-all global narratives.

The authors are careful to emphasize that uncertainty is inherent to any attempt to model the global economy and its resource systems decades into the future. Yet they argue that their approach provides a more detailed outlook on social conditions in 2050 than has previously been available, precisely because it embraces uncertainty rather than collapsing it into a single central estimate. “At the very least, it’s highlighting areas of concern and showing that they differ in different parts of the world,” Morris said. “One of the outputs of this type of study is to map that out and provide that kind of insight. That can also inform the focus of further studies into specific regions and concerns.”

Ultimately, the researchers view the work as a roadmap for decision-makers concerned with long-term resource provision across entire societies. Because the method was designed to identify the conditions that produce different resource security outcomes, rather than to forecast one most likely future, it can reveal which levers most strongly influence whether the poorest households sink deeper into insecurity or find relief. “Our method was designed to identify the conditions that produce different resource security outcomes, rather than to predict one most likely future,” Kim explained. Morris added that the approach has attracted interest precisely because of its breadth of applications. “It’s a different approach to scenarios than we typically see,” she said. The research was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Stanford University, and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Subject of Research: Projected disparities in food, water, and energy access across income groups and regions by 2050

Article Title: Study predicts large disparities in access to food, water, and energy in 2050

Article References: Study predicts large disparities in access to food, water, and energy in 2050. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

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Keywords: food security, water security, energy security, resource inequality, 2050 projections, GCAM model, sub-Saharan Africa, scenario ensemble, income disparity, MIT, climate change, sustainable development