Is a healthy diet more expensive?

What Francis is experiencing at home in Nigeria is also visible in the global figures.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which has been analyzing the affordability of nutritious foods across the world, says food prices have risen by around a quarter in recent years because of factors like the global pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and conflict in the Middle East.

I've been speaking to the FAO chief economist, Maximo Torero Cullen, about how many people this is affecting and what the UN's definition of a healthy diet is.

So the major core behind the definition of a healthy diet is diversity.

This includes vegetables, fruits, oils and fats, legumes and nuts, starchy staples, animal source foods.

So how affordable is a healthy diet?

So when we look at the affordability, what we found is that 32.7% of the population cannot afford a healthy diet.

They are entirely priced out of a healthy diet.

So that means that almost one in three people around the world can't afford a healthy diet?

Exactly.

That's 2.7 billion people.

The most hard-to-afford foods tend to be vegetables, fruits, and animal source foods.

In some low and middle-income nations, poor roads and a lack of cold storage can make fresh food more expensive still, particularly in remote areas.

But getting produce to market isn't necessarily the end of the problem.

In Lagos, Francis will sometimes hesitate to buy it even when she has the cash.

I can't even freeze or refrigerate things because there is no electricity for your fridge to run, and the fuel, petrol, is so expensive, so you can't even get that for your generator to run so that you can refrigerate your foods.

The challenges there is even when you bring out your money, the little you have to make do and buy something, it ends up that it's spoiled.

Yeah, for the past couple of years, it's been really hard feeding the family on good nutrition.

Francis is in Nigeria, but where is a healthy diet most expensive? Maximo's team has compared countries around the world, taking into account how much food money can buy in each one.

The surprise is that you have a region like Latin America and the Caribbean and South America, where we see that the cost of the healthy diet is the highest in the world, and the question that you ask yourself is, "Okay, why is this?" Because this region is a key exporter of food to the world, but internally, markets are not developed so that you can distribute it also locally in your market.

So the population have to pay the highest cost, so for the poor segments of population in each country, of course, they won't be able to afford it.

So a healthy diet costs most in Latin America, followed by Asia, but it's in Africa where the greatest proportion of people are priced out.

66.6% of Africa population could not afford a healthy diet in 2025.

That's two-thirds of people.

Exactly.