Food Policy最新文献

Though improved forage varieties have the potential to supply high quality feed for livestock and optimize livestock nutrition and production, demand for them in developing countries is low. To inform interventions aiming to increase demand for the improved forages such as pricing, we assessed farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for different improved seeds and two types of dried feed in Meru County Kenya. We used a mix of sampling strategies to recruit 356 dairy farmers into the study. We used the Becker-De-Groote Marschak (BDM) mechanism to elicit WTP, and a mixed effects model in the analysis. We find that the WTP for the forage products (except one) was below the market prices, and that the WTP differed significantly between farmers in cooperatives and those that were not. For related varieties, none is significantly superior to other varieties in terms of WTP. We also find that farmers who had prior exposure to the forages, larger farm sizes, mainly practiced zero grazing, and owned the livestock were more likely to bid above the market prices. Our results underscore the need for strategies that can lower the prices of the improved forages such as reducing the costs associated with their production, certification, storage, and transportation. Training farmers especially on the benefits of the improved traits can potentially increase the likelihood of farmers paying premiums for the improved traits, an important ingredient for the commercialization of the improved forage products at scale.

In the past decades, the Government of Ethiopia implemented widespread interventions with the objective of modernizing the agricultural sector and stimulating transformative growth. This paper assesses the agricultural yields and food security impacts of those interventions. Combining project and remote-sensing data with a nationally representative household panel survey, we identify impacts by exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the roll-out of the interventions implemented by the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency from 2011 to 2016. Results show that large-scale agricultural interventions are associated with higher agricultural yields and better food security outcomes. These outcomes underscore the linkages that persist between agricultural development and food security for rural households living in mostly agrarian economies and the potential for systems-wide interventions to catalyze agricultural transformation.

The prevalence of organic farming and other sustainability standards is increasing around the globe. While effects of organic farming on productivity, income, and poverty alleviation have been analyzed in numerous empirical studies, its effects on food security are barely understood. Using data from smallholder cotton farmers in Benin, we aim to empirically investigate how adopting organic farming affects their food security. According to our results, organic farming is conditionally associated with a notably lower experienced food security and a slightly lower dietary diversity and consumption of vitamin A-rich foods. Evaluating pathways, we find that the negative conditional association between organic farming and food security is a result of a lower household income of organic farms due to lower income from cotton farming given a smaller land area cultivated with cotton, while a larger land area cultivated with food crops cannot fully compensate for the reduced income from cotton farming. This alarming result illustrates the need for evaluating and eventually improving programs for organic farming in developing countries to ensure that good intentions for more sustainable production practices do not jeopardize the livelihoods of vulnerable smallholder farmers.

Most Sub-Saharan countries implement input subsidy programs (ISPs) in an attempt to increase fertilizer use, crop yields and farmers’ income and to improve household food security. Senegal is no exception and has had an ISP in place for the last 15 years. This article assesses how access to subsidized fertilizer under the ISP is associated with changes in fertilizer and manure use and gross margin. Using household-level data from two agroecological zones, we employ an endogenous switching regression framework to control for the potential endogeneity of access to subsidized fertilizer. We find that access to subsidized fertilizer is associated with an increase in the total use of fertilizer of +39 % but also with a reduction in the use of commercial fertilizer of 18 %. Access to subsidized fertilizer is also associated with a reduction in the likelihood of using manure of 5 % and an increase in farmers’ total gross margin of 11 %. Results are heterogeneous across agroecological zones, with a strong crowding-out of commercial fertilizer where widely available to farmers. In this case, revising the design of the ISP could lead to improved efficiency.

The use of animal antibiotics is a double-edged sword. It can be used for disease treatment, health protection, and growth promoters. It also creates antibiotic residues and resistance, poses risks, and damages food safety, ecosystems, and public health. Under the pressure of disease risk and expected losses, farmers' overuse of animal antibiotics exacerbates this dual objective incompatibility. In this study, we employ the endogenous switching regression (ESR) model and the mediating effect method to empirically analyze the inhibitory effect and intervention mechanism of the food traceability system (FTS) on reducing farmers’ overuse of antibiotics by using the survey data of hog farmers from China. This paper measures the “dose” unit of antibiotics farmers use regarding cost and the active ingredients of antibiotics per kilogram of treated infected hogs. The study finds evidence that the FTS exerts a significant inhibitory effect on the overuse of antibiotics by farmers. The counterfactual hypothesis unveils that non-participation in the FTS by the involved farmers will increase the cost of antibiotics overuse by 0.080 yuan/kg, while if the farmers currently not participating are to engage with the FTS, the price will decrease by 0.126 yuan/kg. This effect persists across control variables controlled in turn and the unit doses of active ingredients of tetracycline, sulfonamides, $\beta$-lactam, chloramphenicol, and macrolide antibiotics. Moreover, our results reveal that the inhibitory effects of the FTS on over-the-counter and broad-spectrum antibiotics are more significant than on prescription and narrow-spectrum antibiotics. The results show that the inhibition effect of the FTS on the overuse of antibiotics by free-range, professional, and large-scale farmers exhibits an approximately inverse-U curvilinear relationship. Besides, the intervention mechanism of the FTS on the overuse of antibiotics by farmers mainly consists of social reputation maintenance, liability traceability for antibiotic residues, and biosafety enhancement, and the proportion of their mediating effects in the total impact are 24.22%, 21.84%, and 10.87%, respectively. Our empirical study has yielded several implications, such as strengthening the FTS construction, improving farmers’ antibiotic use skills, promoting standardized breeding levels, and increasing the market premium for food products that adhere to antibiotic residue standards. These outcomes not only contribute to the improvement of livestock production safety but also reduce the problem of antibiotic overuse.

The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) initiated 1,073 recalls of meat and poultry products that could cause severe illness or death over 2000–2019. These recalls led to substantial drops in demand that vary by the characteristics of the recall (Zhou and Liu, 2023) and incentivized firms to invest in food safety (Ollinger and Houser, 2020, Ollinger and Bovay, 2020). Following Zhou and Liu (2023) and Ollinger and Houser, 2020, Ollinger and Bovay, 2020, this paper examines differences in food safety process control for establishments with different recall characteristics and contrasts that performance with establishments without recalls. Results show that (1) Salmonella share relative to an establishment’s own mean Salmonella share outperforms Salmonella share alone in estimating the likelihood of a recall, (2) 27 percent rather than 12 percent of establishments would have failed to meet the Salmonella standard if a proposed but not yet mandated more stringent standard had been in effect, and (3) most establishments return to normal operating conditions after a recall, but establishments with multiple recalls struggle to regain control of food safety, suggesting they may benefit from an audit of their food safety systems by FSIS or an auditor.

There has been significant national attention to the issue of childhood obesity, leading policymakers to reform the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) to include stricter nutritional requirements. We use data on school lunch menus to document improvements in the nutritional quality of school meals between 1991 and 2010. We then evaluate how this change in nutritional content maps into obesity outcomes, using panel data on a nationally representative cohort of children, tracking them from kindergarten entry in fall 2010 through the end of fifth grade in spring 2016. We find little evidence that participation in the school lunch program leads to weight gain, as measured by changes in obesity, overweight, and BMI. These results suggest that improvements in the nutritional content of school lunches have been largely successful in reversing the previously negative relationship between school lunches and childhood obesity.

Over its 50-year history, CGIAR has with increasing frequency revisited the question of how best to organize its research to address growing complexity of agricultural, food, and ecological systems, a multiplying set of development goals, changes in global science, increasing diversity of funding, and evolving capacities of partner organizations. We review this evolution over four periods noting inevitable trade-offs and tensions in a system of autonomous centers and sovereign donors, in developing common research strategies, appropriate lines of management, and aligning resources around agreed priorities. As a result, organizational changes have not met expectations and funding has continued to fragment around short-term payoffs at the expense of producing global public goods over the long term. The paper concludes with suggestions for building on the lessons of organizational reform to improve the collective action performance of funders and centers to drive and sustain needed changes.

A higher diet quality has been associated with lower environmental impacts, but not consistently. Considering the cultural diversity of dietary habits and the heterogeneity of socioeconomic development in China, we aimed to evaluate the association between diet quality and environmental impacts across demographic subgroups and regions. This study used dietary consumption data from the China Health Nutrition Survey 2011. Diet quality was measured with the Chinese Healthy Eating Index 2016 (CHEI2016). Diet-related environmental impact (Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGE), Total Water Use (TWU), and Land Use (LU)) were estimated using the Chinese Food Life Cycle Assessment Database. Multilevel regression models were used to quantify the association of the CHEI2016 score and the diet-related environmental impacts across heterogeneous population subgroups. A one-standard deviation increase in CHEI2016 score was associated with an increase of 9.7% in GHGE, 9.1% in TWU, and 6.4% in LU. This occurs because increasing the consumption of under-consumed foods (dairy products and fruit), partially offsets the environmental benefits of reduced meat consumption. Demographic subgroups characterized by either higher educated or a higher income exhibited a larger proportion of animal-based foods within their diet, consequently leading to higher diet-related environmental impacts. When expressed per standard deviation increase in CHEI2016, the dietary environmental impacts rose fastest in the Metropolitan area and slowest in the Northeast. Diets with higher CHEI2016 scores are associated with higher diet-related environmental impacts among Chinese adults but this varies per region. The development of sustainable diet strategies needs to account for potential trade-off between the health and environmental goals, and dietary habits of consumers in different regions and subpopulations.

In the United States, the federal government subsidized universal free school meals (UFSM) nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. This policy ended in June 2022. In response, several state governments subsidized extensions of UFSM statewide into the 2022–2023 school year. I leverage variation in state extensions of UFSM to examine the policy’s impact on school meal participation and rates of food insufficiency. Using data from the Household Pulse Survey and a difference-in-differences approach, I find that children in states that did not extend UFSM were 12.6 percentage points less likely (38.3% reduction over the sample mean) to participate in school meal programs and 1.5 percentage points more likely (9.8% increase over the sample mean) to experience food insufficiency relative to those in states that did.