Food Policy最新文献

With its influence on the world stage, the EU’s Farm to Fork initiative seeks to extend sustainable and fair food production practises globally, in part, by encouraging convergence with EU food standards (i.e., sanitary and phytosanitary measures-SPS). Harmonisation clauses have been found empirically to encourage trade, but no quantifiable estimates exist on the trade effects of SPS regulatory convergence. This paper examines this issue for the dairy industry, a highly regulated sector with significant sustainability concerns attached. Furthermore, the cost-saving effects arising from closer regulations and ‘experience’ (i.e., accumulated years of foreign trade track-record), are compared. Employing a 3-year interval panel starting in 2010, a structural gravity equation that includes domestic trade is estimated with a flexible empirical approach that evinces asymmetric trade impacts for specific bilateral trade routes. Results indicate a trade depressing effect for SPS measures, estimated as a global average 10.4% Ad-valorem Equivalent (AVE). Moreover, at the global level, converging regulatory frameworks generate larger trade gains than experience, where a 1% rise in regulatory convergence is equivalent to 5 years of positive trade and a 14% reduction of the AVE. The reduction of trade frictions prompted by harmonisation and experience does not, however, outweigh SPS trade costs. Exporters to the EU face a higher SPS AVE than that faced by the EU (10.1% vs 9.3%). On average, exporters to the EU also benefit from a 9% saving due to experience, although cost savings from regulatory convergence are only reported for larger exporters to the EU, whose consolidated position in EU markets also grants them even greater than average benefits from years of accumulated experience.

West Africa produces almost half of the world's cashew nuts. With the domestic cashew processing industry still in its infancy, however, most of it is exported as raw material and processed in India and Vietnam. In Ghana, this is provoking discussions about market interventions to support domestic processing. Since different price policies have diverging implications for farmers and processors, the choice of the policy instrument leads to conflicts of interest between the two groups. In this study, we analyse the short- and long-term economic impacts of enhancing cashew processing through (i.) a temporary export tax on raw cashew nuts, (ii.) a temporary subsidy to cashew processors, and (iii.) a temporary export tax on raw cashew nuts, with government revenues passed on to cashew growers. For this purpose, we develop a partial equilibrium model for the Ghanaian cashew market including the processing from raw cashew nuts to kernels. We find that in the short run, all price policies lead to a substantial increase in processing at the expense of net welfare. We argue, however, that the sector may experience productivity gains through learning by doing and thus, after price policies are phased out, stick to its increased level of output such that short-term welfare losses could be recouped. Therefore, temporarily introduced price policies could help the infant cashew processing industry to grow up, promote the development of the domestic cashew sector, and be welfare-enhancing in the long run. A subsidy to processors is the most appropriate option to achieve this.

Premium subsidies are a common policy tool to promote crop insurance participation in many countries. However, the relationship between subsidies and demand is not entirely obvious given the variation in the use of subsidies and crop insurance participation within the international crop insurance landscape. Focusing on the U.S. Federal Crop Insurance Program (FCIP) demand is modeled as a system of equations representing decisions at the intensive [coverage level] and extensive [net insured acres] margins. The model makes use of an identification strategy that leverages exogenous variation in government-set pricing policy to address potential sources of endogeneity. Applying the model to over one million insurance pool level FCIP observations spanning two decades (2001–2022) suggest an inelastic response at both extensive and intensive margins to changes in producer-paid premium rates with the response to premium rates becoming increasingly more elastic as subsidies decrease. These estimated elasticities are on the low end compared to previous literature, however, significant heterogeneity across commodity, production practices, policy type, and location are observed suggesting subsets of producers are likely to respond to changes in the cost of insurance in different ways.

This paper exploits daily customs transaction data on the universe of Swiss agri-food importing firms to assess the response of firms to a global shock. Estimating a linear model that regresses product-level import margins on daily COVID19 shocks and a host of fixed effects, we find that the pandemic had a substantial trade-reducing effect on imports. The trade effects were driven mainly by a reduction in the number of importing firms (i.e., 63% of the total effect), and much less by the number of products imported and the average import value per product per firm. We explore several sources of heterogeneity and show, among others, that larger and incumbent firms were affected more by the trade adjustments. Our results also reveal that the relative contribution of each import margin to the decline in aggregate imports depends on the level of data aggregation (i.e., daily, weekly or monthly). Finally, we validate and confirm our main findings by testing two mechanisms: (i) third-country supply-side effects using insights from structural gravity models and (ii) changes to consumer demand using consumer mobility, and retailer and consumer scanner data.

Research on why consumers consider the origin of food products important, how and why it influences consumer choices, and whether they understand and trust it, is fragmented and contradictory. This systematic review of recent, peer-reviewed research finds strong evidence that origin information has a substantial influence on consumers’ food choices. Consumers generally prefer domestic food products to imported and local or regional to other domestic, irrespective of the country or product. The origin becomes less important when trade-offs have to be made and in the presence of other quality cues on the product, such as organic, eco-, or quality assurance labels. Origin information primarily serves two purposes for consumers. First, many believe that food products from some origins are of better quality, safer, more environmentally friendly and in other ways superior to food products from other origins. Second, many consumers feel that it is their duty to support their local or domestic farmers and food industry. A strong ethnocentric bias emerges from the literature review, not only regarding the products consumers buy, but even more regarding their beliefs about products from different origins. In addition, consumers’ understanding and interpretation of information on the origin of food are impeded by a knowledge deficit. However, there is a need for studies digging deeper into deficiencies in consumers knowledge and understanding of origin information. There is also a need for research that disentangles the role of consumer ethnocentrism from other reasons why consumers are interested in origin information.

Despite the similarities in the drop and recovery patterns of US and EU meat production during the Covid19 pandemic, the literature in the two continents assessed their respective meat processing industries’ resilience differently - resilient in the EU and non-resilient in the US but offered no resilience metrics in support of their assessments. We cast the differing transatlantic views in the context of the economic resilience literature and operationalize several metrics for cattle, pig, and chicken slaughter. We find the US less resilient than the EU in cattle and pig slaughter. Resilience in chicken slaughter depends on which metric is used. We discuss possible drivers of resilience and highlight how our metrics can be used for further research to inform resilience policy on both continents.

Reducing factor misallocation is crucial for enhancing agricultural aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) and narrowing the income gap between urban and rural areas in China. This paper presents a theoretical framework illustrating how farmland leasing affects aggregated TFP via the reduction of misallocation. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset of cost and benefit survey for Jiangsu rice farmers, monthly surface climatological data, and soil characteristic information from FAO, this study finds that efficient factor reallocation could theoretically result in a 23.6% increase in aggregate TFP. In practice, a 1% increase in farmland leasing leads to a 1.087% gain in aggregate TFP and a 0.267% reduction in misallocation using IV regression. These effects become larger after the Three Rights Separation (TRS) reform compared to prior conditions. The mediation effects of farmland leasing on TFP through misallocation reduction are only observed in Southern Jiangsu, possibly due to farmland concentration.

Since the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) also the number of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) has risen strongly, from less than 50 in 1995 to more than 350 in 2022. Increasingly overlapping RTAs imply challenges and can raise trade costs associated with the management of multiple trade rules and regulatory standards. At the same time, countries that are connected through several RTAs could be strongly integrated and their regulatory approaches well-aligned, thus reducing trade costs among them. This paper looks at the parallels in the evolution of agricultural trade and RTAs and asks how the layering of RTAs is associated with agricultural trade among their signatories and with countries outside the RTAs. Based on network measures and correlations we identify common patterns in the evolution of RTAs globally and agricultural trade of a balanced panel of 190 countries in the years 1995, 2007, 2013 and 2019. We also provide first indication on the interaction of overlapping RTAs and agricultural trade. On global average, our findings hint at a positive association between RTA and agricultural trade connectivity and suggest that this relationship could be more pronounced at the extensive margin of trade and for countries that share several RTAs, possibly indicating a stronger political integration among these countries.

This paper quantifies the impact of the COVID-19 disruption on U.S. meatpacking production. We employ a confidential plant-level meatpacking plant data set from USDA that gives daily livestock (cattle, swine, broilers) slaughter by individual firms and their individual plants. We found a larger underutilization rate of processing capacity for larger-sized beef and pork plants during the peak of plant slowdowns in April-May 2020, while no such relationship was found for broiler plants. In our panel analysis of beef packing plants, we found that higher COVID-19 infection rates in a county were associated with greater plant disruptions, but that plants appear to have been able to adjust relatively quickly to these disruptions. Our empirical analysis suggests a beef plant distribution with fewer large plants could have meant smaller shocks to production during the initial surge of COVID-19 disruptions. However, beef plant size was significantly less important to maximizing utilization of processing capacity after the initial surge.

Achieving a coherent set of food-related policies is a challenge for policymakers worldwide, as food matters are addressed at more than one level of governance and across several policy domains. Policies in different domains can sustain each other by sharing the same objectives and actions or they can hinder each other, resulting in different levels of coherence. Focusing on the case study of the region Emilia-Romagna (Italy), the present research aims to answer the following research questions: to what extent is food mentioned in regional policies? Are the food-related objectives of Emilia-Romagna policies coherent with each other? Mixed methods were used in three subsequent research steps. Step 1 consisted of collating an inventory of regional policies where food is present. In Step 2, identified policies were analysed with quantitative content analysis, to examine their objectives, degree of targeting, which food supply chain step they focus on, and which policy instrument type they plan to use. Step 3 aimed to assess the coherence of the identified food-related policies’ objectives among each other through expert interviews, analysed with thematic coding. Overall, regional policies reached a good degree of coherence around the common intention of making Emilia-Romagna thrive economically. However, some level of incoherence is present, as a systematic process that lowers incoherence in policymaking is not in place yet. Therefore, implementing the use of a Policy Coherence Matrix as a standardised practice for policy approval is recommended to coordinate food-related policies.