Food Policy最新文献

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.

Farm to School (FTS) is a widely implemented public food procurement program in the U.S., and the number of state and Federal policies promoting it continue to grow. However, previous research has found inconclusive results associated with state-level policies. One reason may be that FTS adoption is associated with different stocks of community wealth (assets including human, social, and financial capital, net of liabilities). This research leverages the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2019 FTS Census, a new disaggregated database on state-level FTS policies, and a new comprehensive dataset of stocks of community wealth to assess this relationship. We find positive associations between cultural and social capital and FTS intensity (an index representing the extent of FTS participation), highlighting community assets that are often overlooked in community development programs. Further, we find that different types of state FTS policies are associated with FTS intensity; procurement policies have positive associations and education policies have negative associations. Results provide rationale for more nuanced consideration of local assets in prioritizing the types of FTS policy.

From a global perspective, the incidents of food fraud are still increasing in recent years, which shows that the food safety issue has not been well addressed. As a major world food exporter and importer, egregious incidents of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) for domestic food companies were discovered in China. Although the Chinese government has been strengthening the supervision on food companies, the governance effect is not obvious. This research focuses on the governance of the CSI behavior of food companies. As opposed to the existing literature based on Neoclassical economics, this article analyzes food companies' CSI by applying a behavioral economic framework. The system dynamics method is used to analyze the implementation effect of the corresponding governance strategy. Researchers discovered that the short-sighted cognitive bias of food companies is the primary reason for CSI, which results in the self-reinforcing effect and interactive contagion effect. Under the current imperfect institutional environment, these effects will be further amplified to present a crisis of collective irresponsibility. This study provides timely evidence and significant regulatory implications for the ongoing food safety crisis in China. In order to control the contagion of CSI in the food industry, the government should increase its sanctions on irresponsible food companies from the short-term perspective. The government should also establish a fair and standardized market competition order and improve the information disclosure mechanisms and third-party governance mechanisms in the long term. These actions will contribute to a more comprehensive research perspective on food safety governance and, additionally, and to develop more targeted strategic tools for the government to regulate the food market. Our insights can also provide a reference for other countries and industries facing similar challenges.

Food aid presents a core component of humanitarian support for people incapable of meeting basic human needs and aims to bolster food security. However, some studies suggest that food aid may cause violent conflicts in recipient countries, which has initiated a controversy regarding the impact of food aid on conflict in the political and scientific debate. We decompose the relationship between food aid and conflict into the channels through which food aid can affect conflict. We address questions of methodological choice and estimation techniques for empirical studies. Our review of the empirical evidence on the effect of food aid on conflict shows that none of the previous studies proposes a compelling identification strategy. While existing research shows promising approaches in terms of econometric methods, i.e., instrumental variables estimation, they have not succeeded in i) using instruments that pass the necessary tests of instrumental variable estimation and ii) identifying the channels through which food aid influences conflict. We argue that future work should contain a rigorous identification strategy with a stricter focus on the impact of food aid on conflict intensity, empirically examine the conceptual channels through which food aid affects conflict, and that there is the need for data at a more disaggregated level to achieve both objectives.

There is continuing interest in how rules created at the “institutional environment” level influence the performance of food safety policies. The influence of institutional rules on the behavior of farms and firms may vary widely depending on how strongly incentives reach potential users. This article assesses how the creation of a private meso-institution (i.e., Conseleite) affects the implementation of food safety guidelines in the Brazilian dairy industry. We use a dataset that has laboratory analyses of milk from 18 out of the 27 Brazilian states over a period that goes from 2006 to 2014. We show that the creation of Conseleite has led to an increased effectiveness of implementation of the Normative Instruction 51, which sets indicators and basic parameters of milk quality in Brazil. Specifically, the creation of Conseleite in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul led to a decrease in the low-quality index related to the bacterial contamination of milk. In turn, we find that Conseleite played a limited role in raising the values of the high-quality milk index. Our conclusions highlight the fundamental role of meso-institutions in bridging the gap between the “institutional environment” level and the “governance” level. This study sheds light on a potential policy implementation path for other developing and emerging countries in the dairy industry, which is marked by frequent food safety scandals.

This study examines the impact of food quality certification on farms’ eco-efficiency in China, recognizing that the certification acts as a catalyst for encouraging more sustainable practices. The data was collected from 1855 vegetable growers in Shandong and Hebei provinces. Following a two-step approach, stochastic frontier analysis is applied to estimate eco-efficiency scores of smallholder farms, and a multinomial endogenous switching regression model is used to estimate the implication of certification schemes on eco-efficiency, while accounting for selectivity bias due to both observed and unobserved factors acting as a confounder. The empirical results suggest that hazard-free certification increases the eco-efficiency score for vegetable farms by 2.7%, followed by green certification by 4.6% and organic certification by 16.3%, respectively. Meanwhile, we find that the farmer’s certification adoption decision is significantly associated with farm size, farming experience, off-farm income, extension service, and social capital, which should be taken into account as policy recommendations to sustain and improve the positive effects of certification in regard to both economic and environmental aspects.

Whether Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) - such as Fairtrade, GlobalGAP or Organic - may contribute to economic sustainability has been subject to vigorous debate over the past decades. To analyze the welfare effects of VSS for family farms, previous studies rely on single equation models which enable analyzing if (some) VSS affect welfare, but not how (some) VSS affect welfare – or not. Hence, little is known about the mechanisms and the relative importance of these different mechanisms by which VSS contribute to farmer welfare. In this paper, we analyze the channel of effects through which VSS affect net farm revenue, as a proxy of farmer welfare, of family farms in Peru. We use nationwide data from Peru’s National Agricultural Survey covering five years, multiple agricultural commodities, and multiple VSS. We apply a multiple mediation model which allows to disentangle the main revenue-determining mechanisms and to compare their relative importance. We find that prices (and not yields) are the main channel through which VSS affect net farm revenue. However, higher prices cannot offset higher production costs, resulting in zero net revenue gains. We do not find an effect through yields, but identify a large potential effect on net farm revenue. We find heterogeneity in the effects by standard and crop, with crops certified to standards that apply a system of quality-based price differentiation having the largest impact on net farm revenue through a price effect. From a policy perspective, we highlight potential improvements in VSS design to effectively improve economic sustainability.