Oct. 16 is World Meals Day, a world marketing campaign to have fun 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 people on this planet are dealing with starvation. Thousands and thousands of others are dealing with rising weight problems charges and battle 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 programs and fight starvation. This yr, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Meals Programs Laboratory (J-WAFS) is spotlighting an MIT researcher who’s working towards this purpose by learning meals and water programs within the International South.
J-WAFS seed grants present funding to early-stage analysis tasks which might be distinctive to prior work. In an eleventh spherical of seed grant funding in 2025, 10 MIT college members obtained help to hold out their cutting-edge water and meals analysis. Ali Aouad PhD ’17, assistant professor of operations administration on the MIT Sloan Faculty of Administration, was a kind of grantees. “I had searched earlier than becoming a member of MIT what sort of analysis facilities and initiatives had been obtainable that attempted to coalesce analysis on meals programs,” Aouad says. “And so, I used to be very enthusiastic about J-WAFS.”
Aouad gathered extra details about J-WAFS on the new college 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 a couple of J-WAFS seminars on agricultural economics and water useful resource administration. That’s when Aouad knew that his venture was completely aligned with the J-WAFS mission of securing humankind’s water and meals.
Aouad’s seed venture 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 programs. “I began considering that a lot of these 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 nations. “I feel behind my thoughts, I’ve at all times been fascinated by attempting to unravel these points,” he famous.
His seed grant venture, Optimal subsidy design: Application to food assistance programs, 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 programs, like point-of-sales, are usually not as available in India’s native groceries, making any such information arduous to come back by for low-income people. “Mother-and-pop shops are extraordinarily vital last-mile operators relating to vitamin,” he explains.
For this venture, the analysis staff gave native grocers point-of-sale scanners to trace buying habits. “We intention to develop an algorithm that converts these transactions into some form of ‘revelation’ of the people’ latent preferences,” says Aouad. “As such, we will mannequin and optimize the meals help applications — how a lot selection and adaptability is obtainable, considering the anticipated demand uptake.” He continues, “now, in fact, our capacity to reply detailed design questions [across various products and prices] is dependent upon the standard of our inference from the information, and so that is the place we want extra subtle and strong algorithms.”
Following the information assortment and mannequin growth, the final purpose of this analysis is to tell coverage surrounding meals help applications via an “optimization method.” Aouad describes the complexities of utilizing optimization to information coverage. “Insurance policies are sometimes knowledgeable by area experience, legacy programs, or political deliberation. A variety of researchers construct rigorous proof to tell meals coverage, but it surely’s truthful to say that the sort of method that I’m proposing on this analysis is just not one thing that’s generally used. I see a chance for bringing a brand new method 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 habits is troublesome. In previous analysis, Aouad notes that the short-term results of meals help interventions will be important. Nevertheless, these results are sometimes short-lived. “This can be a fascinating query that I don’t suppose we will deal with throughout the area of interventions that we’ll be contemplating. Nevertheless, I feel it’s one thing I want to seize within the analysis, and perhaps develop hypotheses for future work round how we will shift nutrition-related behaviors in the long term.”
Whereas his venture develops a brand new methodology to calibrate meals help applications, large-scale functions are usually not promised. “A variety of what drives subsidy mechanisms and meals help applications can be, fairly frankly, how straightforward it’s and the way cost-effective it’s to implement these insurance policies within the first place,” feedback Aouad. Price and infrastructure limitations 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 method 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 less expensive method to acquire information for large-scale implementation.
There’s nonetheless a lot work to be accomplished to make sure meals safety for all, whether or not it’s advances in agriculture, food-assistance applications, or methods to spice up satisfactory vitamin. Because the 2026 seed grant deadline approaches, J-WAFS will proceed its mission of supporting MIT college as they pursue revolutionary tasks which have sensible and actual impacts on water and meals system challenges.
