Over the past fifteen years, Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) has experienced significant changes in its agrifood system. Driven by rapid urbanization and growth in per capita incomes, changing food consumption patterns have been at the core of this broader agrifood system change. Responding to the region’s diet transformation, firms – including a limited presence of supermarkets – have arisen in food marketing and distribution, food processing, and food services. Food consumption patterns are changing in three ways: food is becoming more purchased, more perishable, and more processed. These changes drive a multitude of effects on the agrifood system. This dissertation provides new insight into the nature of the diet transformation that is unfolding in the region, and on some of its drivers and effects. The first essay, “Diversification “Beyond Staple Foods” in the Diets of Poor Rural and Urban Consumers in Developing Eastern and Southern Africa”, focuses on the effects of income and urbanization on the commodity makeup and source of foods in household diets. Transitioning food consumption patterns are not solely a middle-class story, as conventionally assumed – in fact, poor households are already consuming surprisingly high levels of purchased food and are consuming greater shares of non-grain foods as their incomes rise. Spatial considerations of increasing city size and reduced distance to cities also have significant positive effects on purchased share, affirming the expectation that households will purchase more food (compared to consuming own production) when they have increased access to markets. Essay two, “Consumption of Processed Food in the Diets of Poor Rural and Urban Consumers in Developing Eastern and Southern Africa”, further analyzes the same drivers of food consumption patterns on the consumption of processed food. Processed foods, specifically highly processed foods, have penetrated the diets of rural and urban households at all levels across the income distribution of ESA. The income-induced diet change towards processed food begins among the poor regardless of household distance from urban areas, albeit at greater shares among households within larger cities. The patterns of increased processed share with income growth and urbanicity signal a strong future demand for increased food market infrastructure.The final essay, “City size, supermarkets, and processed foods: Evidence from Zambia”, incorporates food retail modernization into the analysis of processed food consumption patterns. Utilizing a unique dataset that contains disaggregated household consumption data, including source and distance to source of each consumed food item, this analysis shows the following: First, conditional on the presence of a supermarket, households in smaller cities consume greater shares of food, by value, from supermarkets than households in larger cities. Second, although supermarket use positively affects the consumption of processed food, households that consume some food from supermarkets continue to purchase the majority of their processed food from non-supermarket retailers.Together, these three essays provide detail to how the macro trends of income growth, rapid urbanization and the beginning of food retail modernization significantly affect the consumption patterns of ESA, which in turn affect ESA’s entire agrifood system.
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