The triennial International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE-2024), centred on the theme “Transformation Towards Sustainable Agri-Food Systems” is scheduled from August 2-7, 2024, in New Delhi, India. The conference offers a distinctive platform, providing a golden opportunity for agricultural academic institutions and researchers to convene in person, exchange knowledge, and actively contribute to the global agricultural research community. This International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE) flagship conference attracts about a thousand colleagues from around the world. The IAAE has a worldwide membership of agricultural economists and others concerned with agricultural economic problems, organised to foster the application of agricultural economics to improve rural economic and social conditions.
ICAE 2024 will address urgent questions on how to make agri-food food systems more sustainable, focusing on the important role of agricultural economists in facing these interdisciplinary challenges. The conference will feature invited and contributed papers and sessions on topics such as healthy and sustainable diets, technological and institutional innovations, agro-ecology, gender roles and social equity in agri-food systems, environmental and social externalities of value chains, the true cost of food, and bio-economy, among others.
Why is GAIN at ICAE-2024?
The conference provides a prime networking platform with policymakers, industry experts, and researchers, opening doors to potential strategic partnerships. A significant presence, underscored by all our team members’ active participation in speaking engagements and panel discussions, will significantly boost GAIN's thought leadership and visibility, enhancing our reputation in key economic areas closely linked to policy and decision-making and ensuring nutrition priorities and food systems thinking are well-integrated in purely economic discussions.
GAIN at ICAE-2024
Session #1: Food Environments and the Local and Traditional Food Sector in LMICs
Date: 6 August 2024
Time: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM IST/7:30-9:00 AM CET
Addressing the urgent need for transformation in agri-food systems, this symposium poses critical questions about sustainable structures, innovations, policies, and behavioural changes on both global and local scales. Central to this discourse is the role of food environments, which offer a vital entry point for transformative action by offering the opportunity to inclusively and sustainably reshape how and where people sell, buy, prepare, and consume food and how they manage food waste.
Particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where changing diets and the rising prevalence of the double burden of malnutrition—the coexistence of undernutrition with overweight, obesity, or diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs)— are prevalent, food environments are crucial in steering towards healthier, more sustainable, and equitable food systems. Described as the 'interfaces' of broader food systems, food environments encompass various external and personal domains. External domains involve factors such as food availability, prices, marketing, regulation, vendor/retailer characteristics, and product properties. Personal domains include food accessibility, affordability, convenience, and desirability, influencing people's food acquisition, consumption, and, consequently, their nutrition and health.
Session #2: Healthy, Sustainable, and Affordable Diets: New Methods and Tools for Evidence-Based Policymaking and Programming
Date: 6 August 2024
Time: 13:30-15:00 PM IST/10:00-11:30 AM CET
Achieving global nutrition and sustainability goals requires a transformation of food systems to deliver healthy, sustainable, and affordable diets. This imperative brings immense complexity in balancing priorities across nutrition, environment, economics, culture, and more. To enable evidence-based policies and programs, innovative research is developing tools and methods that capture these multidimensional diet priorities. This proposed symposium for the 32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists explores recent advances in this area. The symposium emphasises quantitative, data-driven approaches to evaluating the nutritional value, environmental impacts, costs, and acceptability of diverse diets. Presentations showcase new frameworks, models, and datasets being applied in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia to generate actionable evidence.
Specific topics include nutrient profiling models identifying foods with high nutritional value and low environmental footprints per unit of nutrition. Related research analyses the affordability of nutritious foods and healthy diets for vulnerable populations. Novel diet optimisation models balance nutrition, sustainability, cost, and acceptability constraints to create tailored diet recommendations. Complementing these methods, new tools improve access to fragmented food systems data, enabling more holistic analyses. Cross-cutting considerations examine methodological challenges in evaluating food systems interventions and articulating recommendations.
The session will consist of five 12-minute presentations followed by 30 minutes of discussion and Q&A.