Food Prices And Policy

This book provides fresh insights into concepts, methods and new research findings on the causes of excessive food price volatility. It also discusses the implications for food security and policy responses to mitigate excessive volatility. The approaches applied by the contributors range from on-the-ground surveys, to panel econometrics and innovative high-frequency time series analysis as well as computational economics methods. It offers policy analysts and decision-makers guidance on dealing with extreme volatility.

"The conference was organized by the three editors of this book and took place on August 15-16, 2012 in Seattle."--Preface.

Since 2006, global food prices have fluctuated greatly around an increasing trend and price spikes were observed for key food commodities such as rice, wheat, and maize.

The Economics of Sustainable Food details the true cost of food for people and the planet. It illustrates how to transform our broken system, alleviating its severe financial and human burden. The key is smart macroeconomic policy that moves us toward methods that protect the environment like regenerative land and sea farming, low-impact urban farming, and alternative protein farming, and toward healthy diets. The book's multidisciplinary team of authors lay out detailed fiscal and trade policies, as well as structural reforms, to achieve those goals. Chapters discuss strategies to make food production sustainable, nutritious, and fair, ranging from taxes and spending to education, labor market, health care, and pension reforms, alongside regulation in cases where market incentives are unlikely to work or to work fast enough. The authors carefully consider the different needs of more and less advanced economies, balancing economic development and sustainability goals. Case studies showcase successful strategies from around the world, such as taxing foods with a high carbon footprint, financing ecosystems mapping and conservation to meet scientific targets for healthy biomes permanency, subsidizing sustainable land and sea farming, reforming health systems to move away from sick care to preventive, nutrition-based care, and providing schools with matching funds to purchase local organic produce.--Amazon.

The starting point of Paul Streeten's book is the dilemma, faced by policy makers in many developing countries: should the price of food be high, in order to stimulate production, or low, in order to prevent poor food buyers from starving? The author goes on to discuss the role of prices in the light of these and other objectives. 'It is the work of one of our wisest scholars on what I consider to be the key policy issue for economic development in the 1980s...this provocative essay will be required reading for anyone working on agricultural price policy.' C.Peter Timmer 'It provides solid and practical guidance to scholars and decision-makers. It is lucid, balanced and, above all, useful.' Robert Klitgaard 'Paul Streeten is well known for his gift of explaining the pros and cons of difficult policy issues in a clear, simple and realistic way, appealing to policy-makers, students and the wider development community, as well as to academic colleagues. This gift is fully displayed in his new book, and readers are bound to emerge with a better awareness of the conflicts and policy reforms which are involved.' H.W.Singer

Several changes in the United States over the past two decades have implications for diet, nutrition, and food safety, including patterns of food consumption that have produced an increase in overweight and obese Americans and threats to food safety from pathogens and bioterrorism. The changes raise a number of critical policy and research questions: How do differences in food prices and availability or in households' time resources for shopping and food preparation affect what people consume and where they eat? How do factors outside of the household, such as the availability of stores and restaurants, food preparation technology, and food marketing and labeling policies, affect what people are consuming? What effects have food assistance programs had on the nutritional quality of diets and the health of those served by the programs? Where do people buy and consume food and how does food preparation affect food safety? To address these and related questions, the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) asked the Committee on National Statistics to convene a panel of experts to provide advice for improving the data infrastructure on food consumption and nutrition. The panel was charged to review data needs to support research and decision making for food and nutrition policies and programs in USDA and to assess the adequacy of the current data infrastructure and recommend enhancements to improve it. The primary basis for the panel's deliberations, given limited resources, was a workshop on Enhancing the Data Infrastructure in Support of Food and Nutrition Programs, Research, and Decision Making, which the panel convened on May 27-28, 2004. This report is based on the discussions at the workshop and the deliberations of the panel. The report outlines key data that are needed to better address questions related to food consumption, diet, and health; discusses the available data and some limitations of those data; and offers recommendations for improvements in those data. The panel was charged to consider USDA data needs for policy making and the focus of the report is on those needs.

This book offers a broad introduction to food policies in the United States. Real-world controversies and debates motivate the book's attention to economic principles, policy analysis, nutrition science and contemporary data sources. It assumes that the reader's concern is not just the economic interests of farmers, but also includes nutrition, sustainable agriculture, the environment and food security. The book's goal is to make US food policy more comprehensible to those inside and outside the agri-food sector whose interests and aspirations have been ignored. The chapters cover US agriculture, food production and the environment, international agricultural trade, food and beverage manufacturing, food retail and restaurants, food safety, dietary guidance, food labeling, advertising and federal food assistance programs for the poor. The author is an agricultural economist with many years of experience in the non-profit advocacy sector, the US Department of Agriculture and as a professor at Tufts University. The author's well-known blog on US food policy provides a forum for discussion and debate of the issues set out in the book.

Ethiopia has experienced impressive agricultural growth and poverty reduction, stemming in part from substantial public investments in agriculture. Yet, the agriculture sector now faces increasing land and water constraints along with other challenges to growth. Ethiopia’s Agrifood System: Past Trends, Present Challenges, and Future Scenarios presents a forward-looking analysis of Ethiopia’s agrifood system in the context of a rapidly changing economy. Growth in the agriculture sector remains essential to continued poverty reduction in Ethiopia and will depend on sustained investment in the agrifood system, especially private sector investment. Many of the policies for a successful agricultural and rural development strategy for Ethiopia are relevant for other African countries, as well. Ethiopia’s Agrifood System should be a valuable resource for policymakers, development specialists, and others concerned with economic development in Africa south of the Sahara.

First reference on food consumption and policy.

Given the high prevalence of undernutrition among children in low income countries and the associated high human and eco-nomic costs (Hoddinott et al. 2013), improving nutritional out-comes must be an urgent priority. Improving nutrition is high on the policy agenda of the government of Ethiopia, as stated in the Growth and Transformation Plan II, which aims to reduce young child stunting levels from 40 percent in 2014/15 to 26 percent in 2019/2020. Lack of access to diverse diets is one of the underlying factors contributing to chronic undernutrition (Arimond and Ruel 2004, UNICEF 1998). Despite recent improvements, child stunting in Ethiopia remains widespread (CSA and ICF International 2017). Moreover, Ethiopian children consume one of the least diverse diets in sub-Saharan Africa (Hirvonen 2016). At the household level, food consumption baskets are dominated by cereals and pulses, while the consumption of animal-source foods and fruits and Vitamin A-rich vegetables is rare, especially in rural areas.1 Such monotonous diets are regarded as a major contributor to non-communicable diseases in Ethiopia (Melaku et al. 2016). Recent research suggests that the poor dietary diversity in ru-ral areas can be explained, at least partly, both by limited knowledge about the health benefits of diverse diets and by poor access to food markets. Households in areas in which food crop production is not very diverse but which have good access to mar-kets are found to have more diverse diets than do households in such areas but which have poor access to markets and, so, de-pend primarily on own-production for the food they consume.2 Yet, even with sufficient access to markets and knowledge on the benefits of diverse diets, poor households may simply be un-able to afford nutritionally rich foods (Warren and Frongillo 2017). Indeed, prices and affordability of nutritious foods remains a neglected area of research in efforts to understand poor dietary diversity in Ethiopia and elsewhere.3 In the analysis described here, we explore how prices and, consequently, the affordability of nutritious food have changed over the last decade in Ethiopia.