Food Policy最新文献

The European Union is committed via legally binding targets to reduce per capita food waste at the retail and consumption stage. This requires realising profound behavioural change in diverse political and cultural contexts. Work of food waste experts systematically analysing implemented reduction interventions revealed important insights and gaps that need to be jointly addressed by scientists, policymakers and practitioners.

Governments are urged to make significant changes to food policies to reorient food production and consumption to support healthy and sustainable food systems and diets. New Zealand, like many countries, is under pressure to address the deleterious effects of its food system on food security, nutrition, and environmental health to meet global sustainable development goals. We completed a systematic policy review to assess how food policies in New Zealand support the transition to sustainable diets by aligning with sustainable diet principles and whether this is enabled through multisectoral collaboration and policy coherence. We analysed New Zealand’s food policies against a sustainable diet framework, examining if policies are aligned with all dimensions: health and nutrition, environmental, sociocultural, and economic. We found that while sustainability is a priority, the economic, environmental, and sociocultural outcomes dominate policies concerned with food production and trade, with little attention given to nutritional health. We also found that the health impacts are often left out of multisectoral collaboration efforts and that there is a lack of coherence between health, food production, and trade sector policies concerning nutrition. These findings suggest that current policies will likely undermine nutrition-related health goals and hinder New Zealand’s ability to shift to sustainable diets and food systems. Further research is required to understand how food policies influence food producer and consumer behaviours and determine how a more coherent and comprehensive sustainability-oriented policy environment shifts behaviours towards more sustainable diets and food systems.

Futures markets promise improved price transparency and risk mitigation for staple commodities important to many developing countries, but they can fail even in developed economies with modern financial institutions. We investigate rice futures trading in Japan at the Osaka Dojima Exchange to identify the reasons underlying its failure in 2021. Our analysis reviews the multiple necessary conditions for a successful commodity futures market. We find the Japanese rice market did not meet many of these conditions. The spot market was fragmented with heterogeneous goods and a single dominant firm. Futures trading was unable to facilitate price discovery or effective hedging activity. To the extent it was traded, the Dojima rice futures contract was instead used as a forward contract for making and taking physical delivery. In addition, there was political opposition and regulatory uncertainty around futures trading. Using detailed data on trader positions in the futures market, we show how these factors contributed to diminished interest in futures trading from firms who handle physical commodities. The lessons from the Japanese case are useful for traders, exchanges, and policy makers, especially those in countries where futures markets may face similarly unfavorable economic and political conditions.

The objective of this paper is to analyse the changes in the occurrence of the Differences in Composition of Seemingly Identical, branded food Products (DC-SIP) – also known as “dual food quality” – in the EU and the role of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) in affecting the food industry’s packaging and recipe formulation choices of branded food products. The occurrence of DC-SIP has decreased from 31 % in 2018/2019 to 24 % in 2021. Our regression results show that companies are more likely to alter the front packaging rather than the composition of the products to address DC-SIP issues. The likelihood that changes in recipe reformulations and front packaging are introduced simultaneously is statistically significant but not all recipe reformulations are introduced jointly with changes in front packaging. Our results provide evidence that the UCPD regulation plays a role in companies reformulating recipes or/and changing the product packaging, but it is not a main driver. Companies often justify the composition differences in DC-SIP by differences in market conditions across Member States. The DC-SIP provisions in the UCPD give companies several options for addressing DC-SIP. For this reason, it is not a significant factor in impacting the companies' choices to reformulate or change the packaging of products.

The price volatility observed in agricultural value chains presents a significant socio-economic challenge, particularly for smallholder farmers. The issue of price volatility in agricultural value chains is complex due to the dynamic and interconnected nature of these value chains. The objective of this study is to integrate system dynamics with value chain analysis in order to address price volatility in the Indonesian chilli value chain. In order to ensure stakeholder engagement and enhance the robustness of the proposed solutions, a participatory approach will be employed. The utilisation of system dynamics enables the quantitative simulation of the inherent dynamics of the chilli value chain, thereby facilitating both ex-ante and ex-post assessment of policy interventions. A collaborative process with stakeholders was employed to develop, test, and validate a system dynamics model that operates at both provincial and national levels. The findings demonstrate that the model accurately replicates the price volatility observed in the Indonesian chilli market. The key factors contributing to this volatility are seasonal production, disorganised market governance and high postharvest losses. The analysis of policy options indicates that while the importation of chillies can stabilise prices in the short term, it has a negative impact on the income of those involved in the value chain. More sustainable solutions to mitigate price volatility include the implementation of year-round planting and the enhancement of market governance. These strategies present potential avenues for achieving a more stable and equitable chilli market, offering valuable insights for broader agricultural value chain stability.

Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) are an important platform for reaching poor women in India. Despite SHGs' women-focused programming, evidence of the impact of SHG-based interventions on nutrition outcomes is limited, and most evaluations of nutrition interventions have not examined intermediate outcomes along the impact pathways or outcomes for women themselves. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of an integrated agriculture-nutrition intervention delivered through women’s SHGs in five states in central and eastern India. The interventions involved the delivery of nutrition behavior change communication to groups through participatory approaches, community engagement around key issues, and the strengthening of collective organizations. Our analysis is based on three rounds of rich panel data on close to 2700 rural women and their households from eight districts in these five states and qualitative work from an accompanying process evaluation. Using difference-in-difference models with nearest neighbor matching methods, we present results on women’s anthropometry and diet-related outcomes.

We do not observe any improvements in women’s BMI or overall dietary diversity. Although more women in the nutrition intensification arm consumed animal source foods, nuts and seeds, and fruits, this was not enough to increase overall dietary diversity scores or the proportion of women achieving minimum dietary diversity. We measure intermediate outcomes along the program’s impact pathways and find improvements in household incomes, cultivation of home gardens, and utilization of government schemes but not in women’s empowerment. The lack of improvement in anthropometry and diets despite changes in some intermediate outcomes can be attributed to several factors such as low implementation intensity, poor facilitator capacity and incentives, the lack of relevance of the BCC topics to the average SHG member, and resource and agency constraints to adoption of recommended practices. Although we do not have data to test the parallel trends assumption and so do not interpret our results as causal, these findings do suggest that optimism about using group-based platforms needs to be tempered in resource-poor contexts.

Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) is one of the key global concerns yet in the face of HIV/AIDS, it is compromised. The significance of nutrition education targeted at women in promoting food and nutrition security cannot be overstated, considering their role in ensuring food and nutrition security for their household members. However, empirical evidence on the causal impact of nutrition education on food and nutrition status is limited to the individual level and very scanty for vulnerable groups such as HIV/AIDS-positive women. This study used a large dataset from a randomized control experiment with 3,200 women to investigate the effects of nutrition education on household behaviour and food nutrition outcomes. Results indicate that the intervention results in increasing the individual woman’s labour supply on-farm and diversifying crops grown by the household. Positive influences of nutrition education on dietary diversity are observed but were only significant at the household level. Individual women’s nutrition outcomes were strongly influenced by engagement in an income-generating activity or household’s market participation. As such, blending nutrition education interventions with initiatives that facilitate access to the needed nutritious foods such as on-farm diversification and activities that generate revenues from off the farm was recommended.