Food Policy最新文献

As many countries are considering the restriction of marketing to children for unhealthy foods and beverages to improve population health, systematic monitoring of this marketing to inform and evaluate policies is critical. The objective of this research was to develop and describe the Food and Beverage Marketing Monitoring Framework for Canada, a framework commissioned by Health Canada to help guide their monitoring efforts. Following a literature review and expert consultation, the questions to be answered by the framework, the frequency and scope of monitoring activities, the short-/long- term outcome indicators and the methodologies to be employed were determined. The resulting Framework aims to assess the frequency and power of food marketing in various media and settings and monitor children and adolescents’ exposure to food marketing, food company practices, and changes in children’s attitudes, behaviours, and health. It proposes that monitoring occur annually in six regions across Canada. Considering probable budget constraints and research capacity, television, digital media, schools, convenience stores, packaging and children’s sport/event sponsorship were identified as priority media/settings. Short- and long-term outcomes include: food marketing (e.g., advertising rate, marketing technique use), company-level (e.g., ad expenditures, product reformulation) and behavioral/health indicators (e.g., children’s marketing awareness and recall, food requests and consumption). While significant efforts have been made in monitoring food marketing in Canada via the implementation of the Framework into the Health Canada M2K Monitoring Strategy, gaps remain (e.g., within diverse sociodemographic groups). The Framework can be leveraged to inform policy in Canada and the development process and content of the Framework could be adapted and implemented for global use.

Wheat is a vital cereal crop for smallholders in Ethiopia. Despite over fifty years of research on wheat varietal development, consideration of gendered trait preferences in developing target product profiles for wheat breeding is limited. To address this gap, our study used sex-disaggregated survey data and historical rainfall trends from the major wheat-growing regions in Ethiopia. The findings indicated heterogeneity in trait preferences based on gender and rainfall endowment. Men respondents tended to prefer wheat traits with high straw yield and disease-resistance potential, while women showed a greater appreciation for wheat traits related to good taste and cooking quality. Farmers in high rainfall areas seemed to prioritize high straw yield and disease resistance traits, while those in low rainfall areas valued good adaptation traits more highly. Most of the correlation coefficients among the preferred traits were positive, indicating that farmers seek wheat varieties with traits that serve multiple purposes. Understanding men’s and women’s preferences and incorporating them in breeding and seed systems could contribute to the development of more targeted and effective wheat varieties that meet the diverse needs of men and women farmers in Ethiopia.

Despite the well-studied nutritional benefits of dairy for child linear growth, dairy is less consumed in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where the prevalence of child stunting is high. Previous studies have suggested the cost of dairy as a potential barrier to increased dairy consumption in these countries. Surprisingly, little research on the association between dairy consumption and child stunting in LMICs focuses on the role of trade policies, particularly the liberalization of dairy trade. To explore this, we use representative cross-country individual data on child stunting from 2006 to 2020 and link it with country-level dairy trade data. We find that a 10% decline in dairy tariff rates reduces the risk of stunting by 7.78%. Our results are robust to a subsample analysis excluding countries which joined the WTO after 2000 and to an alternative clustering method. As a falsification test, our results show child stunting is not linked with tariffs for coffee and tea. Heterogeneity analysis indicates the associations are more pronounced for boys, children aged 3–5, and children from households with lower socioeconomic status. Although we did not find significant rural–urban differences, the associations are indeed stronger for households without cattle and for countries in Western Africa, South East Asia and Europe and Central Asia. Mechanism analysis suggests that dairy tariffs are positively correlated with milk prices, while they are negatively associated with dairy import values. Lower dairy tariffs are also found to be linked with higher probability of child dairy consumption. Our findings highlight the importance of removing tariff barriers in reducing the cost of dairy and promoting dairy consumption in LMICs. This study has implications for repurposing dairy trade policies in creating nutrition-sensitive agriculture.

This paper examines the role of past remittances in mitigating the adverse effects of COVID-19 employment shocks on food security in Nigeria. We formally define the mitigating effects parameter as the difference in the shock impact between households that received remittances and those that did not. Leveraging pre- and post-COVID-19 surveys, we employ a triple-difference strategy to estimate the mitigating effects parameter. Our results suggest that past remittances can alleviate the negative consequences of COVID-19 employment shocks, particularly in the short term. Indeed, the mitigation effect is limited to the early stages of the pandemic, as the negative effects of the shock persist over time. Additionally, we find that the impact of remittances on mitigating the shock varies based on the origin of remittances, recipients’ area of residence, and poverty status. Furthermore, our study highlights the importance of the capital channel in explaining the mitigating role of past remittances. Our findings demonstrate that formal financial inclusion, capital ownership such as livestock, and rental earnings amplify the impact of remittances in mitigating the negative consequences of COVID-19 employment shocks on food security.

Dairy foods are an important source of essential macro- and micronutrients in household diets, and their consumption is associated with reduced malnutrition, especially among young children. Low dairy consumption in many developing countries is a justification for programs that promote dairy livestock ownership, help develop dairy value chains, or stimulate dairy demand. While several studies confirm the beneficial effects of such dairy-specific interventions on nutritional outcomes, the purpose in this study is to consider more broadly the contribution of dairy to overall diet quality. Our assessment of consumer preferences for dairy, coupled with simulations of consumption responses to dairy price and household income changes, provide quantitative evidence that can inform policymakers about the possible effects of public policies on dairy consumption and diet quality. While our analysis is based on data from Kenya and Uganda, both countries with established dairy sectors, our findings are relevant for other East African countries with similar dietary patterns and emergent dairy sectors.

Modern inputs and mechanization are promoted across Africa to raise smallholder labor productivity and broker the structural transformation. Yet, adoption has remained low and the implications for returns to labor and labor allocation remain poorly understood. This paper explores the effects of different intensification packages on farm performance, market orientation, and food security using data from lowland rice farmers in Côte d'Ivoire. Employing a multinomial treatment effect model, the findings reveal that intensification increases land and labor productivity, especially when agro-chemicals and mechanized land preparation are combined. Returns to labor more than triple, inducing greater market orientation as well as greater food security. This opens opportunities to productively release agricultural labor for other activities (on and off the farm). Labor in rice production becomes more waged and slightly more male, but child labor input does not decrease. The findings call for greater attention to labor productivity and confirm that agricultural intensification can pay and enhance rural transformation.

Some evidence suggests that sodium intake in the United States has been declining, but little is known about the driving forces behind this trend. We construct detailed, barcode-level information on the near-universe of packaged food products to isolate and quantify the role that product reformulation, vis-à-vis consumer purchasing behavior, has played in this decline. We find that product reformulation has been a driving force in the decline. Consumers, on the contrary, have gravitated towards saltier products. We provide analyses across socioeconomic and demographic groups and find that disparities in diet quality have exacerbated over time. We discuss the implications of our findings for effective diet improvement policies.

Animal food products are featured prominently in current debates on dietary transitions. Food demand projections and policy evaluations often draw on expenditure and price elasticity estimates; thus, it is crucial that these elasticities are robust at an adequate product disaggregation, well-founded, and comparable both across products and countries. To the extent of our knowledge, there is no analysis providing meta-elasticities for all world regions, all food groups, and disaggregated animal foods. In this study, we cover this gap and collect a database with more than 50,000 demand elasticities from 444 studies and 87 countries. As 50% of our sample involves animal food products, we are able to provide food demand meta-elasticities for 14 food groups, of which ten are animal food. We present a set of estimated expenditure, own-price, and cross-price; unconditional and conditional; and uncompensated and compensated elasticities; and discuss their policy implications.

Good nutrition in early life is vital for healthy development, and sets the stage for good health throughout the life-course. Most children aged 0–4 years old in the UK spend at least some time each week in an early years’ setting (EYS), such as a nursery or childminder. Unlike schools which serve older children, there are no statutory standards for the food and drinks served to the youngest children in EYS, despite the potential for greater public health gains due to early intervention. Two comprehensive, age-appropriate voluntary guidelines were developed, one called the Example Menus for Early Years Settings in England by the government and another, called Eat Better, Start Better by a charity. Both are seen as standard across the sector. To assess nurseries’ awareness and use of voluntary guidelines, including how they are used and how they can be improved upon, and examine how these vary by socioeconomic deprivation and setting types (private nurseries and voluntary, community and charity nurseries), we conducted the first nationally representative cross-sectional survey of nurseries in England via an online survey. Using frequency distributions and binomial multivariate logistic regression models, considerable discrepancies between awareness (82.6 %) and use (48.8 %) of available EYS dietary guidelines were found. A key reason for not using guidelines was ‘I know what is healthy without them.’ The question about whether following food and drink guidelines should be voluntary or statutory generated mixed findings. More research is required to understand the factors influencing nurseries’ views on whether guidelines should be voluntary or statutory.

Applications of new crop science often spread widely to reach farm fields, but sometimes they do not. The Green Revolution seeds first released in the 1960s and 1970s were taken up widely and quickly, but the transgenic GMO seeds first released in the 1990s, which also performed well, have remained highly restricted. After more than two decades, 84 percent of all GMO crop acres around the world are still in just four Western Hemisphere countries, and 97.2 percent of total acres are still planted to just four crops. The presence or absence of six “success factors” can explain these divergent uptake trajectories. The success factors are 1) a broad social agreement on the urgent need to boost food production, 2) an immediate and obvious benefit for farmers when they plant the new seeds 3) social trust in the institutions producing and delivering the new technology, 4) an absence of new consumer food safety concerns, 5) an absence of organized opposition from environmental advocacy groups, and 6) the absence of a simple means to detect the altered genetics of the new seeds. The Green Revolution seeds enjoyed all six of these success factors, while GMO seeds enjoyed only one of the six. This same approach can be used to predict the future uptake of genome-edited crops, which show three of the six success factors, predicting a rate of uptake slower than for the Green Revolution but wider and faster than for GMOs. A preliminary scan of national regulatory decisions being made toward genome-edited seeds strengthens this prediction.