Food Policy最新文献

Transformative changes in the beef value chain are crucial for achieving various United Nations Sustainable Development Goals but face major challenges. Altruistic preferences exhibited by beef packers and retailers might play a positive role in transforming the beef value chain to improve its sustainability. Our paper examines whether altruistic preference can alter traditional market dynamics, resulting in improved environmental and economic outcomes within the beef industry. We employ a game-theoretical framework to investigate the strategic behaviors of the beef value chain participants. We apply the game theory model to the United States beef value chain. Our results show that altruistic preference from the beef packer and retailer alliance can improve the value chain’s efficiency and sustainability. As the alliance’s level of altruism rises, ranchers become more motivated to ramp up their emissions reduction efforts, resulting in higher profits for them. Reducing emissions reduction cost and increasing the price of carbon credits also provide positive incentives for ranchers to adopt sustainable technologies and farming practices to improve the sustainability of the value chain. These findings hold significant implications for beef value chain stakeholders on how altruistic preference from participants can be leveraged to improve value chain sustainability and efficiency.

Years after the initial settlement, food aid remains an essential component of humanitarian assistance for protracted refugees in managed camps. From data collected among refugee households in three camps in southern Chad and an exogenous variation of time between the latest food distribution and households’ interviews, we draw the time path of household’s consumption. Consistent with the literature on intertemporal choices in high-income countries, refugee households experience an average decline of 1.1 to 1.5 percent per day in their daily caloric intake between distributions. The short-term nutritional status of children under five also responds to the distance from food aid distribution and confirms the existence of food distribution cycles. Our results suggest that households don’t smooth consumption during the interval of time between two distributions, and face regular and frequent cycles of food shortage resulting in detrimental consequences on children’s health.

The introduction of a mandatory front-of-package nutrition label across the European Union is generating fierce controversy. Specifically, the Nutri-Score has been under debate, which has been reflected in the media. Drawing on signaling theory, this article aims to investigate how some consumers make sense of the Nutri-Score as a signal of nutritional quality in this noisy environment. First, a study analyzes how the media communicates about the Nutri-Score. Second, 15 semi-structured interviews examine how women with children interpret and use the Nutri-Score. Our findings show that media coverage of the Nutri-Score becomes ambiguous over time and that these women experience confusion due to cognitive dissonance and lack of knowledge. This article contributes to the literature on nutrition labeling and highlights the risks of confusion in interpreting this signal of nutritional quality. It suggests implications for policymakers and economic actors to promote the use of the Nutri-Score while reducing information asymmetry.

As the locus of political power, state is widely acknowledged to play an important role in achieving Sustainable Development Goals, particularly in food security. However, the means through which states can harness their power to enhance food security, particularly in developing countries, has yet to be thoroughly explored. This paper addresses this gap by examining the effects of enhanced accountability on food security, and investigating how it can operationalize food security goals into enforceable directives for lower-tier officials, with a focus on China. Utilizing the implementation of the “provincial governor responsibility system for farmland protection and grain production” as a natural experiment and employing a difference-in-difference strategy, we demonstrate that main grain-producing areas (MGPAs), whose governors’ promotion is more tightly linked to food producing, experience a more significant increase in grain sowing areas when compared to other provinces. The results are robust facing a series of robustness checks. Additionally, by considering the dispatch of central inspection team, political cycle, and governor’s tenure as the sources of variations in accountability, we confirm that the key mechanism at play is the accountability inherent in China’s nomenklatura system, rather than alternative economic incentives. The back-of-the-envelope calculation demonstrates the increased grain production caused by strengthened accountability could meet the basic food needs of at least 8.76 million people annually. Our findings highlight that crafting tailored policies based on different political systems to strengthen official accountability is of great significance for better governance of food security.

We examine empirically whether the level of data aggregation affects the assessment of misallocation in agriculture. Using data from Ugandan farmers, we document a substantial discrepancy between misallocation measures calculated at the plot and at the farm levels. Estimates of misallocation at the plot level are much higher than those obtained with the same data but aggregated at the farm level. Even after accounting for measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity, estimates of misallocation at the plot level are extremely high, with potential nationwide agricultural productivity gains of 562%. Furthermore, we find suggestive evidence that granular data may be more susceptible to measurement error in survey data and that data aggregation can attenuate the relative magnitude of measurement error in misallocation measures. Our findings suggest caution in generalizing insights on measurement error and misallocation from plot-level analysis to those at the farm level.

Women’s empowerment has been associated with improved nutritional outcomes in various settings. However, the gains from empowerment do not necessarily accrue to different members of the same household in the same manner. Furthermore, the relationship between empowerment and nutrition itself is likely to be shaped by the overall level of development in a given region. This paper investigates the heterogeneity in the association between women’s empowerment in nutrition index (WENI) and quality of intra-household diets between men and women when spatial variations in the levels of urbanization are accounted for, in India. We use intrahousehold dietary intake data for 60,000 men and women from the fourth round of India’s National Family Health Survey and conceptualize women’s empowerment using the women’s empowerment in nutrition index (WENI). We use geospatial data on nightlights as a proxy for the urban continuum. Nightlights intensity (NTL) captures the growth of smaller towns (between large urban cities and rural areas) that has characterized urbanization in India. A multilevel modeling approach indicates that a unit increase in WENI scores is associated with an improvement in women’s diet diversity scores by 0.19 units, with no significant association for men’s diet diversity. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that this finding holds at all NTL terciles. Alongside the role of WENI, we find that a doubling of NTL is associated with an increase in diet diversity scores by atleast 7–8% for both men and women, across wealth quintiles. These results emphasize the need for targeted approaches based on spatial heterogeneity in growth and development within a country when investing in the empowerment-nutrition pathway.

In many emerging countries, agri-food value chains are transforming rapidly. One emblematic trend is the proliferation of supermarkets and other modern retailers. Supermarkets affect the way supply chains are organized and may also influence the types of foods purchased and eaten by consumers. Research on what this means for people’s diets and nutrition is still relatively scant. Here, we analyze the effects of supermarkets on child diets and nutrition in China, using nationally representative panel data with information on households’ access to supermarkets and individual-level dietary and anthropometric indicators. Employing a variety of difference-in-difference approaches, we find that improved access to supermarkets leads to higher child dietary diversity and nutrient intakes, especially among children in rural areas and from low-income households. Supermarkets are also found to increase child height, but not weight. The positive nutritional effects are mediated through supermarkets contributing to more variety in local food supplies and lower average food prices. Our findings suggest that the spread of supermarkets has improved child dietary quality and nutrition in China.

In the agricultural household literature, empirical tests of separability between production and consumption decisions commonly exploit theoretical predictions of household labor allocation. Many of these studies rely on data that asks respondents to recall labor usage over the entire growing season. Two recent field experiments in Tanzania and Ghana show that such labor use data, collected at the end of the growing season, is a systematically unreliable measure of actual labor allocation. In this study, we examine how inaccurate measures of labor influence the reliability of market failure tests based on separability. In Ghana, we find no statistical evidence that recall bias influences the reliability of the separability test. In Tanzania, we find that recall bias increases the probability that such tests fail to reject separability. Thus, we find partial evidence that classic tests based on typical household survey labor data may erroneously conclude that markets are adequately functioning.

Carbon labeling facilitates the evaluation of carbon emissions throughout the entire food production process. Consumer interpretation of food labels is subject to context. We conduct an online discrete choice experiment in four Chinese cities to investigate the potential how social desirability bias (SDB) may affect consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for milk carbon labels. Our findings indicate that failing to account for SDB leads to skewed WTP estimates. We observe a significant presence of SDB in WTP for carbon labels, particularly among respondents under subject to injunctive social-norm treatment. Additionally, our research shows that SDB can manifest differently among consumers with varying levels of environmental commitment. This research provides crucial insights for both policymakers and marketers in food carbon labeling. It highlights the importance of considering SDB and emphasizes the necessity of developing tailored strategies across different consumer segments.