Food Security最新文献

This paper estimates consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for meat certified to be safe for human consumption in Peru. Citizens in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are increasingly concerned about the safety of food they consume. Across LMICs, urban markets remain the most important source of fresh and nutritious produce and therefore policymakers need to ensure food safety in urban markets. Much focus has been put on providing producers and supply chain actors with economic incentives to improve food safety. However, such effort has had limited effect without addressing the overall market and food safety governance. In this paper, based on an innovative policy experience from Peru, we explore if and how much consumers are willing to pay for meat sold at market stalls that are certified to provide safe meat. Peru has employed a series of economic packages to incentivise market vendors to improve their practices, and in turn increase their revenue. Our analysis based on a consumer survey across three cities in Peru reveal that consumers are willing to pay 7.1%, 5.8% and 5.3% of the average retail prices of chicken, pork and beef, respectively. This amounts to an average of about 216USD/month of extra revenue for vendors.

Millets are known for their nutritive value: they are high in protein, dietary fibre, micronutrients and antioxidants. Millets are also drought-resistant crops that can withstand extreme temperatures and be grown in semi-arid regions with poor soils. In India, the area sown to millets has declined for decades and production of millets is less than 20 million tonnes as compared to over 200 million tonnes of cereals. From the late 1990s, the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), based in south India, began a set of interventions in the Kolli hills block, Namakkal district, Tamil Nadu, to conserve millet biodiversity and expand the production and consumption of millets. This paper begins by describing the basic interventions and the impact pathways from these interventions to outputs, outcomes and impact. It then attempts to provide evidence for each of the impact pathways drawing on different types of evidence gathered over the last 25 years of grassroots activities. The paper argues that reversing the decline in millet cultivation is feasible.

Irrigation is often celebrated as a means of intensifying agricultural production and improving food and nutrition security. In the context of semi-subsistence smallholder agriculture irrigation can have a positive impact on dietary diversity through various pathways. However, studies on the linkages between irrigation and rural household nutrition show mixed results. This study argues that irrigation is not a simple agricultural input factor but is embedded in socio-technical conditions. It compares two different irrigation arrangements to understand how irrigation can contribute to transforming local food systems through different pathways. The impact of irrigation on dietary diversity and the potential impact pathways (agricultural income, production diversity and women’s empowerment) are analyzed using a propensity score matching (PSM) approach. The analysis is repeated for subsets of farmer-led and public irrigation to explore how different irrigation arrangements lead to different outcomes. The results show that both farmer-led and public irrigation have a positive impact on agricultural income and dietary diversity. The positive effect on dietary diversity was stronger in farmer-led irrigation while the income effect was stronger in public irrigation arrangement. However, the positive impact on dietary diversity appears to be dampened by a reduction in production diversity, particularly in the case of public irrigation. This study highlights that irrigation development may lead to a more diverse diet, strengthen the income pathway but weaken the production diversity pathway with the extent of this effect depending on the irrigation arrangement. Therefore, policy makers should be aware of this trade-off and seek to support irrigation that allows increased production for urban markets without compromising the dietary intake of rural households.

In the context of accelerating climate change (CC), this study empirically examines climatic variations’ impact on household dietary diversity (DD) in India. The analysis period spans 2014–2020 and includes approximately 1.04 million observations from 198,238 households. We use linear and quadratic regressions under multiple model specifications (pooled, fixed effect, and fractional) to obtain robust results. Our results indicate that temperature anomalies positively impact DD up to a threshold, after which the relationship turns negative. However, the effect of precipitation variation is inconclusive. Furthermore, rising humidity undermines DD. This paper contributes to the literature on climatic variations and food insecurity by exploring whether Indian households are adapting to climatic variations. Anomalies show heterogeneous impacts on DD depending on the baseline climate and households’ socioeconomic characteristics. Climatic variation is expected to exacerbate existing vulnerabilities in food systems; thus, our findings underscore the urgency for climate-adaptive strategies to safeguard food security, particularly in developing nations vulnerable to CC impacts.

Requirements to obtain groceries from a food pantry (e.g., forms of identification) can create potential “documentation barriers” to participation. A more holistic understanding of potential barriers are obtaining assistance from food pantries, specifically in the United States of America (USA), is warranted due to inflation in food prices, reduction of enhanced COVID-related SNAP benefits, and the increased demand for food pantry participation. In May of 2022, a survey was administered to low-income households across the USA that received groceries from a food pantry the previous month. Food pantry participants were asked which pieces of information were required to obtain groceries during their food pantry visit, including requirements to provide a home address, place of employment, Social Security Card, driver’s license, household size, blood test, and an “other” option in case they were asked to provide something beyond the previous requirements listed. On average, respondents were asked to provide 2.4 pieces of information (out of seven) when visiting a food pantry. Results indicated that 56% of African Americans had to provide their Social Security Card, which was significantly higher than the 21% of White food pantry participants, and requiring a Social Security Card is one of the most significant known barriers to obtaining food assistance. Further, probit model results indicated that the groups most susceptible to being food insecure (e.g., minorities, females, and SNAP-using individuals) were between 11 and 28% more likely to experience more documentation barriers to accessing groceries from a food pantry.

Food insecurity is often highly differentiated within village contexts of the Global South. This paper argues that an everyday political economy approach provides a useful framework to account for such differentiation. We apply this approach in a rural village in Myanmar’s Central Dry Zone, utilizing a mixed-methods approach that incorporates (1) food security and dietary diversity indexes, (2) household interviews and (3) qualitative wealth rankings. Our analysis shows that patterns of food insecurity and diet emerge out of the conjuncture of everyday livelihood activities and political-economic relations between individuals and between social groups. Those who control the land of the village continue to enjoy better food security and diet quality above landless or smaller landowning households. However, the centrality of land ownership as an indicator of household food and nutrition security status is becoming blurred because of the increasing availability of non-farm livelihood activities. Differentiated opportunities for households to grasp non-farm livelihoods can sometimes challenge but more often reproduce unequal patterns of wealth and hunger. The everyday political economy approach brings into focus the lived experiences behind these processes of change, making visible the complexities of village life that are not able to be revealed in analyses dependent on socio-economic variables alone.

China's rapid economic growth has led to a significant increase in the number of people who are eating away from home. However, some studies show that increased meat consumption poses a health burden while others show dietary diversity promoted by away from home enhances health. As a result, the effects of away from home on dietary nutritional quality remain inconclusive. Moreover, estimates of total food consumption are underestimated without considering away from home. Herein, we constructed away from home models (R² = 0.59) to assess its impacts on the quantity and quality of food consumption. By 2020, away from home accounted for 18% (233.37 g) of total consumption in urban areas and 8% (81.80 g) in rural areas. Although, at the national scale, away from home consumption of meat, poultry, and aquatic products led to decreased dietary nutritional quality in urban areas from 2000 to 2020 and in rural areas since 2015, by 2020, three urban provinces and 12 rural provinces still showed improvements in dietary nutritional quality from such consumption. Additionally, overall dietary nutritional quality of away from home impact in urban areas improved from 2000 to 2015 but decreased in 2020, whereas rural areas saw consistent improvement across all years, suggesting the divergent impacts on diet nutrition quality across urban and rural China. Our findings underscore the urgency and necessity of extensively strengthening national nutritional education and developing specific nutrition-health policies tailored to economic conditions. This study also provides critical data for accurate food consumption and life cycle evaluations, promoting sustainability in the food system.

Graphical abstract

Animal-source foods provide essential nutrients for humans, however, the use of nutrient-dense (i.e., high in nutrients but low in calories) and digestible resources for animal feeds is controversial as it may reduce the net contribution of farmed animals to global food supply, and hence to food security. Redirecting resources edible by humans to direct consumption as food can increase resource use efficiency and food supply, however, what can be considered as edible by humans is context dependent. The objective of the present study is to assess the net contribution of ten contrasting tilapia production systems from eight different countries to the supply of nutrients of importance for human health. To do so we calculated the human-edible nutrient conversion ratio (HeNCR), which is the human-edible nutrients in the inputs (feed) divided by the human-edible nutrients in the outputs (animal products) of the systems. We showed that tilapia systems can be net producers of proteins, but that in general, much more human edible micronutrients (5 to 175 times) and EPA + DHA (about 7 times) were in the feed used than in the fish produced. Four scenarios combining different definitions for feed and fish edibility were tested to explore the effect of different dietary changes on the performances of the tilapia systems. Scenario analysis revealed that the direct use of edible ingredients as food generates more nutrients than the consumption of fish. Consumers’ preferences, and therefore our definition of what is edible, may have to evolve in order to maximize food resource use.

Livestock production is critical to food security and rural livelihoods across Southern Africa. Despite progress in livestock science research in recent years, the seasonal availability and quality of feed remains one of the key challenges to livestock productivity in Southern Africa. In particular, dry weather conditions, the lack of rain and lower temperatures in the dry season cause herbaceous plants to die back and browse species to defoliate, limiting the abundance, quality, and variety of feed available. This creates a ‘Nutritional Feed Gap’, defined here as the combined effect of the sharp reduction in both forage quantity and quality from the wet to the dry season and the risk that it poses to ruminant production systems and the food security of the people and communities reliant on them. Understanding the nature and extent of how seasonality impacts ruminant production potential can thus contribute towards mitigating negative impacts of extreme weather and climate change on food systems. In this review, we characterise this nutritional feed gap in terms of forage abundance and nutrition as well as discussing how climate change may shape the future nutritional landscape. Whilst some forage nutrient concentrations varied little by season, crude protein and phosphorus were consistently found to decrease from the wet season to the dry season. We also identify a shortfall in primary research that assess both forage quality and quantity simultaneously, which forms part of a broader knowledge gap of our limited understanding of the impact of limiting factors to ruminant production on short and long-term food security across Southern Africa.

Formation of aspirations and ensuring food security are pivotal developmental concerns, capturing the attention of development practitioners, researchers, and scholars. Although aspirations play a role in reinforcing external factors to reshape welfare outcomes, the influence of on-farm agronomic demonstrations on aspiration formation and food security remains understudied. This research leverages primary data from 1,099 farm households to explore the nexus between on-farm demonstrations (OFDs), aspiration formation, and food security. Utilizing instrumental variable (IV) estimates, our analysis highlights a positive association between OFDs and income aspiration formation, as well as food and nutrition security. Participation in on-farm demonstrations (OFDs) has a heterogeneous association with income aspiration and food and nutrition security. Farm households with higher income aspirations and those experiencing greater food insecurity derive more significant benefits from OFDs. The robustness of findings across alternative methods addressing endogeneity underscores their reliability. The study implies that increased public investment in OFDs, coupled with efforts to overcome participation barriers, can propel aspirations and enhance welfare outcomes.