The Linkages Between Social Protection Program and Environmental Impacts in Food Systems: A Conceptual Model

∗The world is facing greater challenges in eradicating hunger, food insecurity, and all forms of malnutrition. Political conflict, economic slowdown, climate changes, and a pandemic are apparently becoming threats to progress. As one of the externalities of a food system, public policy like social protection programs, encompassed a range of regulations and programs used for problem-solving and holds a determinant role in the long term application of food systems. However, the food system is a complex web of activities that involve all fundamental aspects of social, environmental, and economic to achieve the state of the equilibrium system. The negative outcomes towards the environment are unavoidable since 26% of global emissions is coming from food production, processing, and distribution. The impact assessment of social protection policies towards the environment remains limited. This paper investigates the environmental impacts of three social protection programs: cash transfer, food subsidy, and in-kind transfer; using a system dynamics approach. The conceptual model provides a deep-structural insight and understanding of the ideas on how social protection programs in the food and agricultural system strongly influence the outturn of the environmental impacts. The developed model has shown the interlinkages of household expenditure increment, which influences by income level and social protection access that caused more dynamics and uncertain behavior in food consumption level. This considered as more impactful for environment sustainability since it will cause more production and distribution activities which drawn more greenhouse gas and food loss. Three external factors are determined as the control variables: price settings policy, import policy, and the amount of regional supply.