Oct. 16 is World Meals Day, a worldwide marketing campaign to rejoice the founding of the Meals and Agriculture Group 80 years in the past, and to work towards a wholesome, sustainable, food-secure future. Greater than 670 million individuals on this planet are dealing with starvation. Tens of millions of others are dealing with rising weight problems charges and wrestle to get wholesome meals for correct vitamin.
World Meals Day calls on not solely world governments, however enterprise, academia, the media, and even the youth to take motion to advertise resilient meals techniques and fight starvation. This 12 months, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Meals Methods Laboratory (J-WAFS) is spotlighting an MIT researcher who’s working towards this objective by finding out meals and water techniques within the World South.
J-WAFS seed grants present funding to early-stage analysis tasks which are distinctive to prior work. In an eleventh spherical of seed grant funding in 2025, 10 MIT school members acquired help to hold out their cutting-edge water and meals analysis. Ali Aouad PhD ’17, assistant professor of operations administration on the MIT Sloan College of Administration, was a kind of grantees. “I had searched earlier than becoming a member of MIT what sort of analysis facilities and initiatives have been obtainable that attempted to coalesce analysis on meals techniques,” Aouad says. “And so, I used to be very enthusiastic about J-WAFS.”
Aouad gathered extra details about J-WAFS on the new school orientation session in August 2024, the place he spoke to J-WAFS employees and discovered about this system’s grant alternatives for water and meals analysis. Later that fall semester, he attended just a few J-WAFS seminars on agricultural economics and water useful resource administration. That’s when Aouad knew that his challenge was completely aligned with the J-WAFS mission of securing humankind’s water and meals.
Aouad’s seed challenge focuses on meals subsidies. With a background in operations analysis and an curiosity in digital platforms, a lot of his work has centered on aligning supply-side operations with heterogeneous buyer preferences. Previous tasks embody ones on retail and matching techniques. “I began considering that these kind of demand-driven approaches could also be additionally very related to vital social challenges, significantly as they relate to meals safety,” Aouad says. Earlier than beginning his PhD at MIT, Aouad labored on tasks that checked out subsidies for smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income international locations. “I believe at the back of my thoughts, I’ve at all times been fascinated by making an attempt to resolve these points,” he famous.
His seed grant challenge, Optimum subsidy design: Software to meals help applications, goals to leverage information on preferences and buying habits from native grocery shops in India to tell meals help coverage and optimize the design of subsidies. Typical information assortment techniques, like point-of-sales, usually are not as available in India’s native groceries, making such a information laborious to come back by for low-income people. “Mother-and-pop shops are extraordinarily vital last-mile operators in terms of vitamin,” he explains.
For this challenge, the analysis staff gave native grocers point-of-sale scanners to trace buying habits. “We goal to develop an algorithm that converts these transactions into some form of ‘revelation’ of the people’ latent preferences,” says Aouad. “As such, we are able to mannequin and optimize the meals help applications — how a lot selection and adaptability is obtainable, making an allowance for the anticipated demand uptake.” He continues, “now, after all, our capacity to reply detailed design questions [across various products and prices] relies on the standard of our inference from the information, and so that is the place we want extra refined and sturdy algorithms.”
Following the information assortment and mannequin improvement, the final objective of this analysis is to tell coverage surrounding meals help applications by an “optimization strategy.” Aouad describes the complexities of utilizing optimization to information coverage. “Insurance policies are sometimes knowledgeable by area experience, legacy techniques, or political deliberation. Lots of researchers construct rigorous proof to tell meals coverage, nevertheless it’s honest to say that the type of strategy that I’m proposing on this analysis isn’t one thing that’s generally used. I see a chance for bringing a brand new strategy and methodological custom to an issue that has been central for coverage for a lot of many years.”
The general well being of customers is the explanation meals help applications exist, but measuring long-term dietary impacts and shifts in buy conduct is tough. In previous analysis, Aouad notes that the short-term results of meals help interventions may be important. Nevertheless, these results are sometimes short-lived. “It is a fascinating query that I don’t assume we will deal with throughout the area of interventions that we are going to be contemplating. Nevertheless, I believe it’s one thing I want to seize within the analysis, and possibly develop hypotheses for future work round how we are able to shift nutrition-related behaviors in the long term.”
Whereas his challenge develops a brand new methodology to calibrate meals help applications, large-scale functions usually are not promised. “Lots of what drives subsidy mechanisms and meals help applications can be, fairly frankly, how simple it’s and the way cost-effective it’s to implement these insurance policies within the first place,” feedback Aouad. Price and infrastructure obstacles are unavoidable to this type of coverage analysis, in addition to sustaining these applications. Aouad’s effort will present insights into buyer preferences and subsidy optimization in a pilot setup, however replicating this strategy on an actual scale could also be pricey. Aouad hopes to have the ability to collect proxy info from clients that may each feed into the mannequin and supply perception right into a more cost effective technique to acquire information for large-scale implementation.
There’s nonetheless a lot work to be completed to make sure meals safety for all, whether or not it’s advances in agriculture, food-assistance applications, or methods to spice up ample vitamin. Because the 2026 seed grant deadline approaches, J-WAFS will proceed its mission of supporting MIT school as they pursue progressive tasks which have sensible and actual impacts on water and meals system challenges.
