Food Policy最新文献

About 10% of Americans are food insecure, lacking consistent access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle. One way that the federal government seeks to reduce food insecurity is by investing in charitable food providers, such as food banks and pantries. This paper highlights a limitation on the potential effects of these investments on food insecurity: some communities have more charitable food providers than others. We support this claim with an analysis of the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, a U.S. COVID-19 program which distributed about 175 million boxes of food worth $9 billion to food pantries from May 2020 to May 2021. Consistent with our expectations, we find that food was targeted primarily to food insecure counties, but that counties with high rates of food insecurity that lack many food pantries received significantly less food than counties with equally high rates of food insecurity but more food pantries. Moving forward, policymakers should focus on providing direct aid to those in need, and on building a charitable food system rather than only investing more resources in the existing system.

Food labelling policies are usually conceptualised as a way to inform consumers about nutritional content of food. Although often unstated, a secondary aim is to encourage industry to reformulate recipes or introduce healthier alternatives. Parallel bodies of research examine how consumers and industry respond to food labelling policies. In this study we explored the interaction between provider and consumer responses by recording purchases under different assumptions about the impact of a label on product ranges. We simulated different online food markets and tested the effects of a food label, Nutri-Score, on incentivised consumer decisions. Consumers who were exposed to Nutri-Scores applied to snack products made healthier purchases, on average, than consumers who were not. Consumers who shopped in a market adapted to provide more healthy options made healthier purchases than those who shopped in the current market. These effects were additive: consumers who were exposed to Nutri-Scores on products when shopping in the adapted market made the healthiest choices. In a subsequent choice task, a market that simulated reformulation had a stronger effect on choices than one that merely added healthier options. The findings hence offer insight into the benefits of labelling and may be useful for informing both policy and the dialogue between policymakers and industry.

We analyse the theoretical tenets underpinning geographical indications (GIs) and seek to determine whether the number of producers engaged in them matters. To do so, we develop a qualitative methodology to focus on two small-scale cheese productions located in mountain areas endowed with a GI: Cebreiro (Galicia, NW Spain) and Tolminc (Slovenia). In both instances, just two dairies actively produce the GI-certified cheeses; yet, the two case studies differ greatly. In Cebreiro, the GI is seen as an opportunity for development, but the scant number of producers compromises its sustainability. In Tolminc, the GI is monopolised by one company and offers few benefits for the many disengaged producers throughout the region. We conclude that the number of producers engaged in a GI scheme is not a critical factor in their success; rather, public institutional support and the presence/absence of a GI producers’ management structure are pivotal.

Farmers react to ozone injury by abandoning crops when the expected revenues cannot compensate for the harvesting costs. This study provides the first empirical evidence of ozone pollution’s impact on the decision to abandon crops. Using a causal inference framework, we find evidence that a one-standard-deviation rise in ozone concentration decreases the harvested ratios of corn and soybeans by 0.133 and 0.151 standard deviations, respectively. Our bootstrap simulation results show that the agricultural production benefits from ozone control would be considerably underestimated for both corn and soybeans without accounting for the saved acreage that should have been abandoned. The re-estimated benefits of agricultural production from ozone control inform policy design regarding air pollution management and highlight the importance of research and development in ozone-tolerance traits. We also discuss the effects of insurance and price regimes on agricultural production by providing evidence that insurance enrollment rates and crop prices are imperative for adaptation to ozone stress, which facilitates insurance design to mitigate the adaptation disincentive.

Farm-to-school projects have been widely supported by policy makers with funding provided at state and federal levels. Still, many of the outcomes of this inflow of policy and funding remain unclear, often due to insufficient data to examine them. In 2018, New York State (USA) announced the 30% NY Initiative that substantially increases school lunch reimbursements if school districts purchase at least 30% of their ingredients as New York food products. With detailed food purchasing data from the second largest school district in the state and the largest to qualify for enhanced reimbursement, we estimate the gross and net economic impacts of the policy through a customized input–output model. We observe clear shifts in food spending categories that suggest changes in what and where foods were purchased. Results demonstrate net positive value added impacts of the policy even when a negative impact is applied to account for the cost of the policy to taxpayers. For every dollar in gross domestic product lost in the state to support the program, $1.06 of gross domestic product is expected to be added. However, the results are only true to the extent that the increase in local food spending is commensurate with an expansion of the related farm and food product industries to meet that demand. Specifically, at least 67% of the growth in local food spending must contribute to new aggregate demand for the related food product industries, rather than reallocation from other local marketing channels.

There is growing evidence on the impacts of site-specific nutrient management (SSNM) from Asia. The evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where SSNM developments are more recent and where conditions concerning soil fertility and fertilizer use differ importantly from those in Asia, is extremely scarce. We evaluate a SSNM advisory tool that allows extension agents to generate fertilizer recommendations tailored to the specific situation of an individual farmer’s field, using a three-year randomized controlled trial with 792 smallholder farmers in the maize belt of northern Nigeria. Two treatment arms were implemented: T1 and T2 both provide SSNM information on nutrient use and management, but T2 provides additional information on maize price distributions and the associated variability of expected returns to fertilizer use. We estimate average and heterogenous intent-to-treat effects on agronomic, economic and environmental plot-level outcomes. We find that T1 and T2 lead to substantial increases (up to 116%) in the adoption of good fertilizer management practices and T2 leads to incremental increases (up to 18%) in nutrient application rates, yields and revenues. Both treatments improve low levels of nutrient use efficiency and reduce high levels of greenhouse gas emission intensity, after two years of treatment. Our findings underscore the possibility of a more gradual and sustainable intensification of smallholder agriculture in SSA, as compared with the Asian Green Revolution, through increased fertilizer use accompanied by improved fertilizer management.

A shift in dietary habits will be required to meet global climate targets. However, from a social dilemma perspective, major voluntary shifts in diet patterns are unlikely. Hence, government interventions are called for. This may be a perilous political endeavor, since food habits and choices are assumed to be personal and contentious matters and any food regulation policy risks stepping over the line for what people accept, risking policy legitimacy. In order to construct feasible policy measures, it is therefore important to gain knowledge of the prerequisites for support of climate food regulations and to understand why people accept or oppose regulations. The aim of this paper is to do so by analyzing the public debate concerning meat-free days in school canteens and a tax on meat in two public online social forums in Sweden. We seek to 1) map the arguments supporting (non)acceptability of the two food consumption regulation issues and 2) analyze what policy-specific and factual beliefs are reflected in the arguments and then detangle their meaning and content as revealed in the arguments. We find that policy-specific beliefs around freedom, fairness, and effectiveness are commonly used in support of or objection to these policies, but to different degrees, and often linked to factual beliefs about consequences for health or disadvantaged social groups. We conclude that the general reluctance of policy makers to interfere with what people eat is not necessarily well founded, and that better policy design, framing, and communication have the potential to increase policy support.

Agriculture-nutrition interventions (ANI) have recently received attention as a promising delivery mechanism for achieving desirable nutritional outcomes. However, more evidence is needed on the effectiveness of such interventions. In this study, we analyze direct and spillover effects of ANIs for biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) in Malawi on sustained household outcomes: OFSP adoption, area planted, harvest, and sales. In Malawi, we selected three large-scale OFSP interventions and use a rich dataset of 2,492 smallholder farmers selected from every district of Malawi. Methodologically, we employ bivariate probit, instrumental variables, and propensity score matching techniques. We find positive and sustained participation effects for all outcomes. Second, we find that OFSP interventions spilled over and benefited non-participants who lived in treatment villages. Vine multipliers and vine conservation techniques were key diffusion mechanisms for initial and sustained adoption of OFSP varieties. Interventions promoted higher OFSP root sales which suggests that generating income is an important motivator of adoption, in addition to own-consumption. Also, root sales is an often overlooked diffusion mechanism to reach additional farmers beyond the direct participants. Relevant for policy-makers is that OFSP interventions have sustained positive adoption and diffusion effects, and thus feature well as a relatively cost-effective food-based approach among other strategies to eradicate hidden hunger. Designing ANIs with strong supply-push (e.g., (de)centralized vine multipliers, vine conservation techniques) and demand-pull components (e.g., participatory varietal selection and agronomic training) are key and will need to be accompanied by strategies that create a stronger economic case for OFSP, for instance, by investments to strengthen a processing industry for OFSP roots.

The expansion of organic agricultural production methods has been tendered as a critical factor in the development of a sustainable global food system. The European Union has led efforts to expand organic farming, with a current target share of 25% organic farmland area by 2030 through the Farm-to-Fork strategy. Many member states have set organic area targets through the initiation of organic action plans, but systematic, quantitative, empirical research into the effectiveness of such organic policies is lacking. This study analyses the effect of four different national organic action plans - the 1^st French Organic Action Plan (2008 to 2012), the 2^nd Swedish Organic Action Plan (2006 to 2010), the 2^nd Czech Organic Action Plan (2011 to 2015) and the 5^th Austria Organic Action Plan (2011 to 2013) - on organic farmland area extent. This was achieved using a balanced country-level panel dataset consisting of 26 OECD states between 2001 and 2019 (N = 494). The synthetic control method was applied systematically to predict the counterfactual organic area growth paths, enabling the quantification of the treatment effects for the selected action plans. The model specifications were vigorously tested with leave-out-one robustness tests and in-space placebo tests. The results indicated robust, large, positive and significant effects for the French and Swedish organic action plans on organic farmland area. However, the Czech and Austrian plans were found to be ineffectual. Whilst organic action plans appear useful agenda-setting tools, caution is advised in relying on them to produce consistent results, particularly if numerous plans have been previously implemented and the organic area share is already high. This finding is also likely indicative of decreasing marginal returns to action plans. A deeper understanding of the effectiveness of previously implemented plans is critical for the optimisation of future interventions.

We assess whether ownership of dairy cows is associated with a greater likelihood of consuming dairy products and with child anthropometric status in rural Bangladesh. Consistent with the assumption of imperfectly functioning markets for dairy products, ownership of dairy cows increases the likelihood that a child 6–59 months consumes milk by 7.7 percentage points with no difference in this association between boys and girls. This association nearly doubles in magnitude when we consider households that own a dairy cow that produced milk in the last year. This result is robust to the controls we use and the way in which we measure dairy cow ownership. Even when we saturate our model with child, maternal, household, wealth, as well as village fixed effects, we retain an association between dairy cow ownership and height-for-age z scores (HAZ) that is meaningful in magnitude – 0.13 standard deviations – and statistically significant at the one percent level. For children in the 12–23.9 month age group, ownership of a dairy cow is associated with a 0.37 SD increase in HAZ and a reduction of 11.3 percentage points in stunting. There is no statistically significant association with weight-for-height or wasting. These associations do not differ between boys and girls.