Diet, Economic Development and Climate Change

We develop a quantitative, multi-country general equilibrium framework to studythe impact of economic growth, dietary restrictions, and food trade policies on globalgreenhouse emissions (GHG) from agriculture. Motivated by new cross-country rela-tionships between economic development, diet patterns, agricultural technologies, andGHG emissions, our framework features different income elasticities of demand acrossfood products, and multiple agricultural technologies for production across grid-cellscovering the surface of the Earth, with food products and technologies being heteroge-neous in their GHG emissions per calorie. Using our model’s open economy structure,we propose a simple procedure to estimate the income elasticities without price data.We find that GHG emissions following economic growth are strongly influenced bythe general equilibrium effects related to dietary changes, agricultural modernization,and food supply readjustments. Moreover, compared to food trade policies, dietaryrestrictions are both substantially more effective in reducing GHG emissions, and morefavorable when considering the welfare losses in developing countries