Food System Pathways and Dietary Outcomes: Approaches for Improved Nutrition and Sustainable Diets in Resource-Dependent Economies

Food policy and food-system economics play a central role in shaping both diet quality and environmental sustainability, especially in resource-dependent settings where agriculture, fisheries, and forestry are tightly linked to livelihoods, ecosystems, and public health. Evidence increasingly shows that value chain dynamics, including pricing, standards, labelling, subsidies, and public procurement, shape food environments and influence what foods are produced, marketed, and consumed. These mechanisms can either reinforce or reduce persistent gaps in nutrient adequacy, diet diversity, and healthy dietary patterns, particularly in low- and middle-income countries experiencing rapid dietary transitions and changing retail landscapes. At the same time, these transitions often carry environmental consequences through land use change, biodiversity loss, emissions, water use, and waste, raising urgent questions about how to steer food systems toward diets that are both nutritious and sustainable.A growing body of work suggests that targeted subsidies and taxes, nutrition-sensitive standards, fortification and reformulation policies, labelling, and sustainable public procurement can shift supply and demand toward healthier options. Yet critical questions remain about where in the value chain interventions have the strongest leverage, how policy packages interact with private-sector responses, and how benefits and burdens are distributed across populations, particularly when equity, climate resilience, biodiversity, and circular economy strategies are also considered. There is a clear need for multidisciplinary research that connects nutrition science, food environments and dietary assessment, and economic and policy analysis, while explicitly accounting for environmental impacts and trade-offs.This Research Topic will advance understanding of how economic levers and value chain policies can be designed and implemented to improve diet quality alongside environmental sustainability in resource-dependent economies. It will explore which nodes in food value chains, from production and processing to distribution and retail, most influence nutritional outcomes; how policy instruments (e.g., taxes, subsidies, labelling, standards, procurement) can promote healthier and more sustainable diets; and which combinations of interventions deliver durable benefits for population health while supporting goals such as reduced emissions, lower resource use, biodiversity protection, and reduced food loss and waste. The Research Topic also welcomes work assessing cost-effectiveness, affordability, and equity implications, including impacts on food insecurity, undernutrition, and diet-related chronic disease risks, with attention to vulnerable groups and uneven access to healthy, sustainable foods.To generate actionable insights for policymakers and food-system actors, submissions are encouraged that analyse the interactions between public policy, market incentives, private-sector governance, and measurable nutrition and environmental outcomes in rapidly evolving food systems.Themes include (but are not limited to):o Relationships between market forces, pricing, and value chain dynamics and diet quality, nutrient adequacy, and sustainable dietary patternso Effects of standards, labelling, reformulation, and regulatory interventions on food composition (nutrients, bioactives, contaminants), consumer behaviour, and environmental footprintso Cost-effectiveness, affordability, and equity of taxes, subsidies, and public procurement approaches for improving diet quality and sustainability outcomeso Linkages between climate, energy, and land-use policy and dietary shifts, nutrition-sensitive transitions, and resilience of food systemso Approaches addressing hunger, food insecurity, and undernutrition as natural resource and environmental issues, including rural–urban and low-income interfaceso Gender, equity, and inclusion in food system economics and nutrition policy, including distributional effects across groups and geographieso Circular economy and waste-reduction innovations (loss and waste, by-product valorisation) that enhance nutrient delivery and sustainabilityo Private-sector governance, investment, and digital tools that support healthy, sustainable food environments o Methods and metrics to appraise interventions, including indicators integrating nutrition and environmental sustainability, and analyses of trade-offs and unintended consequences Topic editors: Wegayehu Fitawek, Kadirbyek Dagys Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/77028/food-system-pathways-and-dietary-outcomes-approaches-for-improved-nutrition-and-sustainable-diets-in-resource-dependent-economies