Organic Agriculture and the Affordability of Healthy Diets: Evidence from Cross-Country Panel Analysis

The affordability of healthy diets has become an increasingly important global policy issue as governments seek to improve nutrition while promoting sustainable agricultural systems. This study examines whether the development of organic agriculture influences the affordability of healthy diets across countries, focusing on different types of organic land use within national food systems. The empirical analysis is based on cross-country panel data from FAOSTAT and the World Bank Open Data. It uses two-way fixed-effects panel regression models with Driscoll–Kraay robust standard errors to assess the relationships among organic agricultural land shares, GDP per capita, and the cost of a healthy diet (CoHD). The results indicate that the share of total organic agricultural land has a small but statistically significant positive association with the cost of a healthy diet, where a 1% increase in organic land share is associated with approximately a 0.006% increase in CoHD. The share of certified organic agricultural land does not show a statistically significant relationship with diet affordability. In contrast, the share of organic cropland demonstrates a weak negative association (−0.009) with the cost of a healthy diet, suggesting that greater organic crop production may slightly reduce diet costs. Across most model specifications, GDP per capita remains a significant determinant, with coefficients ranging from −0.14 to −0.25, indicating that higher levels of economic development are associated with lower relative costs of healthy diets.