Food Policy最新文献

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.

We assess the impact of crop commercialization on the resilience to shocks of smallholder farmers and examine which groups of smallholders are more resilient from crop commercialization. We use balanced panel of 1,370 smallholders from Thailand and 1,497 smallholders from Vietnam collected in three survey waves for the empirical analysis. We employ a generalized structural equation model to estimate the (latent) variable of smallholders’ resilience. Then, we apply fixed-effects estimations with an instrumental variable and a control function approach to address the endogeneity concerns of crop commercialization in assessing the impact of commercialization on the resilience of smallholders. The results show that crop commercialization has a positive effect on smallholders’ resilience capacity. To examine which groups of smallholders are more resilient from crop commercialization, we apply an unconditional quantile regression model. The results show that crop commercialization has the highest impact on smallholders in 10th and 25th quantile groups of resilience capacity. Thus, crop commercialization should be stimulated to improve smallholders’ resilience to shocks. Besides, improving infrastructure for transportation and information and communication technology at the village level and the effectiveness of public governance at the national level could lead to a better resilience of smallholders.

Food systems have changed drastically in the last 50 years, are continuously globalizing, and are constantly responding to environmental, social, economic and political challenges. While a primary goal of food systems is to provide food security, food insecurity rates have continued to rise in recent years. To deal with these systemic problems, food systems experts call for food systems literacy. However, there are no common frameworks outlining what people should know about food systems, making it challenging to relay information into education and to the general population. As such, the aim of this research was to identify competencies for food systems literacy for youth in Canada. We conducted a 2-round modified Delphi study to achieve consensus on a list of key competencies for food systems literacy. Delphi studies allow for broad consultation of expert judgements to achieve consensus on complex issues. This resulted in a list of 50 key competencies for food systems literacy (out of 131 tested) across themes for Indigenous food systems, food systems activities (i.e., production to waste as well as some overarching and technology themes), sustainability, food security and governance. This Framework of competencies is the first of its kind and will be useful for directing how food systems can be integrated into education as well as be a guide for food systems literacy evaluation tools.

Child malnutrition remains a widespread public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Providing access to nutritious foods for all is key, but it is not clear how this can be achieved in various local contexts. Here, we analyze the role of markets and food environments for child diets and nutrition in Malawi along a rural-urban continuum. We develop a new methodology to characterize food environments in terms of the variety of fresh and processed foods available in local market settings. Geocoded data of market food variety are combined with individual-level child diet and anthropometric data collected through a household survey. We find large differences in food environments, diets, and nutrition outcomes between urban, rural, and remote locations. The spatially-explicit analysis shows that market food variety is positively associated with dietary diversity and negatively associated with stunting, also after controlling for confounding factors. Strikingly, processed food variety has more favorable associations with child nutrition than fresh food variety, suggesting that lightly and moderately processed foods are important sources of nutrients in the local settings. Our findings stress the importance of improving the functioning of markets for nutritious foods, especially in rural areas. Conceptually, we add to the literature on measuring food environments.

In the context of rising food insecurity, food hubs such as food pantries, food banks, community agriculture supported schemes, social supermarkets, community kitchens and cafes, have proliferated both in number and in the roles they perform. Food hubs have a range of benefits in the communities that they serve as well as the wider food system. However, more empirical evidence is required to build a compelling case for policy support. Using the area of Leeds, UK as a case study, and taking a mixed methods approach (i.e. evidence synthesis, mapping, survey and interviews) we present the food hubs’ perspectives on the benefits that they offer to food security, sustainability, resilience and food justice. Food hubs reflect on how their activities enhance sustainability, strengthen local food systems, support local economies, and improve the health, wellbeing and agency of their communities. In doing so, food hubs contribute to regional, national and global priorities on food security, health, sustainability, justice and resilience. However, to scale up or out their positive impact, food hubs require support to transition away from emergency food provision to longer-term, holistic and financially viable models that focus on community wellbeing and empowerment, healthy diets, local economies and environmental sustainability.

Animal disease outbreaks have been extremely disruptive to global livestock industries in recent years. In light of the modern integration of international supply chains, to what extent have these disruptions been experienced by upstream stakeholders? This research investigates the upstream impacts of global animal disease outbreaks in the international soybean market. We employ a two-step procedure to deduce the impacts of animal disease on upstream soybean trade. We first use a standard, econometric gravity model to empirically estimate the relationship between observed trade and livestock production patterns (accounting for each country’s economic masses and trade frictions). We then conduct a counterfactual analysis with our estimated gravity relationships to assess the value of lost soybean trade using a global repository of disease-specific animal mortality data. Our results indicate that between 2005–2020, animal disease outbreaks have cost the international soybean market approximately $5 billion in lost trade. The average exporter loses as much as 2% of its export potential each year. These losses are primarily attributable to cattle disease outbreaks in East Asia and South America. Foot-and-mouth disease alone has cost the soybean trade market approximately $4 billion in lost trade over our sample period.