From fork to farm: Impacts of more sustainable diets in the EU-27 on the agricultural sector

The implications of dietary changes for the environment and for human health are well documented, but the impacts on the agricultural sector are less well researched. We fill this gap by specifying scenarios in which European consumers' diets approximate the EAT-Lancet dietary recommendations to varying degrees and estimate the effects on agricultural production, incomes and emissions using an agro-economic modelling framework. The combination of different models allows for a detailed assessment of consequences for the agricultural sector from the global through European NUTS2 level to the farm level at different time scales. Shifting European consumption towards the EAT-Lancet recommendations leads to decreasing production of animal-based products, while production of fruits and vegetables increases sharply. The results indicate that the agricultural sector could benefit from a dietary shift, though the results are mixed at country, regional and farm levels. In particular, countries and regions that are highly specialised in animal farming are likely to lose income—at least in the short run—while regions with higher shares of vegetable and fruit farms can expect income gains. In Germany, pig and poultry farms may experience losses of up to 34% of their income, whereas farms with a high share of vegetables could gain more than 30% in income. Our results have implications for the policies to assist these extensive structural adjustments in response to widespread dietary changes.     

The nutrition transition and agricultural transformation: a Preston curve approach

The nutrition transition in diets and health is closely tied to other aspects of economic development, including agricultural transformation and urbanization as well as demographic change and epidemiological transition from infectious to noncommunicable disease. Over time, dietary patterns typically shift from widespread inadequacy of many foods and nutrients, especially for children and mothers, into surplus energy intake and rising obesity with continued inadequacy of healthier foods. Diet‐related diseases remain the largest single cause of premature death and disability in all regions. This article combines food availability and dietary intake data from more than 100 countries over 30 years with a wide range of other evidence to characterize the nutrition transition and its association with changes in agricultural production and the food environment, asking how future dietary patterns might be steered toward healthier outcomes as national incomes grow.     

Incorporating nutrients into meat demand analysis using household budgets data

The objective of this article is to analyze the Spanish demand for meat, taking into account the consumer's concern about the relationship between food diet and health. This concern is forcing food demand analysts to assume that consumer utility is a function of nutrients instead of simply the food products themselves. Nevertheless, these utility function arguments are not produced in the marketplace but rather at home. As a consequence, in this article household production theory is followed in order to analyze Spanish demand for meat using the Quarterly National Expenditure Survey for 1999. Demands for several meat products (the input in the model) are derived from the translog cost function. Censored regression models are used in the estimation process, since many zero responses are reported. Five broad categories, eight nutrients, and the most relevant socioeconomic variables are considered. Finally, a set of elasticities is calculated with respect to all the variables included in the analysis.     

From Farm to Kitchen: How Gender Affects Production Diversity and the Dietary Intake of Farm Households in Ethiopia

Malnutrition in farm households remains a significant problem in many developing countries and is linked to a lack of diversity in diets. We explore how gender differences might affect household dietary diversity using the LSMS‐ISA Ethiopia panel dataset. Drawing on a farm household framework, nonlinear panel models are estimated allowing for unobserved heterogeneity and production endogeneity using a control function. We use decomposition techniques to identify the impact of different potential sources of gender difference in dietary diversity. Our results provide evidence of significant gender effects in production diversity and in dietary diversity using the food variety score (FVS). For other indicators of dietary diversity, the evidence of gender effects is weaker. The decomposition results suggest that, after controlling for differences in characteristics, female‐headed households are at a dietary diversity disadvantage. Gender differences in the relationship between production diversity, price and income and dietary diversity and the production diversity decisions appear to be the main drivers. The results also suggest that female preferences are more orientated towards ensuring greater dietary diversity in the household. Our evidence also suggests that a key driver of gender disadvantage in dietary diversity is related to whether food is sourced from the household’s own production or the market. This implies that part of the observed negative gender impact on dietary diversity may stem from differences in marketing and storage of own production through the year.     

Agricultural Commercialisation and Nutrition in Smallholder Farm Households

Commercialisation of smallholder agriculture is important for rural economic growth. While previous studies have analysed effects of commercialisation on productivity and income, implications for farm household nutrition have received much less attention. We evaluate the effects of commercialisation on household food security and dietary quality with a special focus on calorie and micronutrient consumption. We also examine transmission channels by looking at the role of income, gender, and possible substitution effects between the consumption of own-produced and purchased foods. The analysis uses survey data from farm households in Kenya and a control function approach. Generalised propensity scores are employed to estimate continuous treatment effects. Commercialisation significantly improves food security and dietary quality in terms of calorie, zinc and iron consumption. For vitamin A, effects are insignificant. Commercialisation contributes to higher incomes and increased nutrients from purchased foods, but it does not reduce the consumption of nutrients from own-produced foods. Enhancing market access is important not only for rural economic growth, but also for making smallholder agriculture more nutrition-sensitive.     

National Food Consumption Patterns: Converging Trends and the Implications for Health

Worldwide, obesity almost tripled between 1975 and 2016 and is now prevalent in both rich and poor countries. Using annual food availability data produced by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) covering half a century in 118 countries, this article explores the diets that are central to the problem of obesity, identifying groups of countries with similar consumption patterns. Applying algorithms from the fuzzy clustering literature, five distinct consumption patterns are revealed whose dietary composition broadly corresponds to diets that we label ‘Western’, ‘Traditional’, ‘Mediterranean’, ‘Tropical’ and ‘Vegetarian’. Despite differences in dietary characteristics, all five share two common themes: rising total calories and declining healthiness, both of which are linked to the substitution of plant-based foods with food derived from animals. That the evidence points to a convergence on the ‘Western’ diet, the most obesogenic and least healthy of all the diets we consider, is a cause for concern. The key message is that in a future where people are predicted to live longer – but not necessarily healthier – lives, recent efforts to address the challenge are prescient, and as the results in the article imply, need to be heeded globally.     

Reducing nutrient loads from dairy farms: a bioeconomic model with endogenous feeding and land use

Growth trends of animal farming pose a threat to water quality around the world. To find cost‐efficient means to reduce nutrient loads from agriculture, detailed information on the abatement measures need to be incorporated in bioeconomic models. This study presents a theoretical framework that covers both animal and crop operations on farms. It describes the farmer decision making problem and incorporates nonlinear functions to capture the economic and biological aspects of the problem. The model is applied to Finnish dairy farms. The abatement cost functions are derived for nitrogen and phosphorus. Results indicate that abatement measures on fields should precede dietary changes.     

军事训练中六大营养素的作用与意义探讨

当下,各级部队扎实开展军事训练,为有效履行使命任务提供能力支撑.军事训练不仅需要科学组训,也需要全面加强饮食保障.广大官兵只有通过合理膳食才能摄入足够的营养素以保证军事训练中机体的康健,才能更好地达成军事训练效果.基于此,本文探讨了军事训练中六大营养素的作用与意义.     

Calibration of agricultural risk programming models using positive mathematical programming

Mathematical programming models of farmers’ cropping decisions must first be calibrated before they can be used to examine agricultural producer responses to policy changes. In this paper, we compare three calibration approaches for disentangling the risk parameter from the parameters of the cost function: one assumes a logarithmic utility function, while the others employ an exponential utility function. Historical crop insurance data for southern Alberta, Canada, are used to assess the calibration performance of the three approaches, and sensitivity analysis is implemented to test whether the changes in the optimal land allocation caused by the changes in the values of the parameters are practically reasonable. Only one of the three models is of practical use for policy analysis because it can recover the true values of the parameters and the results of sensitivity analysis are reasonable.     

A Note on Evaluating Agricultural Policy in the Presence of Health Care Cost Externalities: Dairy Production Quotas and Coronary Heart Disease Costs

The purpose of this note is to illustrate that the health cost externalities related to food consumption are significant and can be large enough to have implications for the economic evaluation of agriculture and food policy. The individual dietary intake of fats can affect the probability of being afflicted with coronary eart disease (CHD). While fat consumption is primarily a private decision, much of the annual $7.4 billion cost of CHD in Canada is borne socially through publicly funded health care, disability and pension plans. This note calculates the per-unit disease cost externality from saturated fatty acid consumption in Canada to be $5.07 per kilogram of saturated fatty acid. To demonstrate the importance for policy analysis, the disease cost externality was incorporated in a conventional welfare analysis of dairy production quotas in Canada. The externality was large enough to make the restrictive production quotas no further from social optimum than the competitive equilibrium. The importance of the disease cost externality suggests much more research is needed to incorporate these and other health cost externalities into many types of agricultural policy analysis.     

Food consumption impacts of adherence to dietary norms in the United States: a quantitative assessment

Promotion of adherence to healthy-eating norms has become an important element of nutrition policy in the United States and other developed countries. We assess the potential consumption impacts of adherence to a set of recommended dietary norms in the United States using a mathematical programming approach. We find that adherence to recommended dietary norms would involve significant changes in diets, with large reductions in the consumption of fats and oils along with large increases in the consumption of fruits, vegetables, and cereals. Compliance with norms recommended by the World Health Organization for energy derived from sugar would involve sharp reductions in sugar intakes. We also analyze how dietary adjustments required vary across demographic groups. Most socio-demographic characteristics appear to have relatively little influence on the pattern of adjustment required to comply with norms. Income levels have little effect on required dietary adjustments. Education is the only characteristic to have a significant influence on the magnitude of adjustments required. The least educated rather than the poorest have to bear the highest burden of adjustment. Our analysis suggests that fiscal measures like nutrient-based taxes may not be as regressive as commonly believed. Dissemination of healthy-eating norms to the less educated will be a key challenge for nutrition policy.     

Investigating cost non-attendance as a driver of inflated welfare estimates in mixed-logit models

Choice models are used by applied economists for many purposes, such as non-market valuation or estimating willingness to pay for novel food and product attributes. Mixed-logit models allow researchers to account for preference heterogeneity and complex decision-making processes when modelling choices. In mixed-logit models, parameters of monetary attributes such as prices typically are assumed to follow a negative lognormal random distribution to ensure that the marginal utility of a price increase is strictly negative. However, this practice can cause means and standard deviations of welfare estimates to ‘explode’ to unfeasibly large levels, as the model assumes there are some marginal utilities of cost approaching zero. This paper examines whether cost non-attendance, which occurs when respondents ignore costs in stated-preference studies, could be a cause of inflated welfare estimates when a lognormal cost parameter is used. A two-class equality-constrained latent-class model is proposed, in which the cost parameter is fixed at zero for a cost non-attender class and is specified as a random lognormal parameter for cost attenders. This proposed model produces mean welfare estimates that are 17 times lower than a mixed-logit model with a lognormal cost parameter, and 10% lower than a model with a non-random cost parameter. These results suggest that cost non-attendance can result in inflated welfare estimates when employing a lognormal cost parameter, and that accounting for cost non-attendance could be a simple, parsimonious solution to this problem.     

Nutrition Transition and Changing Food Preferences in India

We present empirical evidence on how changes in food preferences have contributed to nutrition transition, where the dietary pattern of households shifts away from traditional staples. Using household-level time series cross-section survey data for India, we estimate time varying demand elasticities, revealing evidence of the declining importance of cereals in Indian household diets. The estimates show that Indian demand for cereals has become more income inelastic and price elastic. We also find that cereals are a substitute rather than a complement to animal products in household diets. Since changes in elasticities can only be attributed to variation in utility parameters, this indicates that cereals are losing favour with Indian households. These findings have implications for Indian food policy design and implementation.     

城乡人力资本溢出效应两区域模型在湖南的应用

农村人力资本的大量流失严重制约农村经济的发展,诸多研究表明城乡差距的扩大与城乡人力资本溢出效应是息息相关的。以卢卡斯模型与新古典增长模型为基础,创建了人力资本溢出效应两区域模型,并利用该模型分析了湖南人力资本溢出效应在城市只进行城市内部的内溢性,而在农村很大部分表现为从农村到城市的外溢性。     

The effect of violent conflict on calorie consumption and dietary quality in Iraq

By combining 2012 Living Standard Measurement Survey cross-sectional survey responses and georeferenced conflict data, this study quantifies the effect of violent conflict on food security and dietary quality in Iraq. Specifically, it estimates the effect of physical insecurity on different food security dimensions, including caloric consumption and household dietary diversity. Because disrespecting war-related foreign national cemeteries is a war crime that discourages nearby fighting, instrumenting conflict intensity by the exogenous variation in distance between these sites and household place of residence addresses potential sources of bias. The instrumental variable analysis confirms the positive (negative) effect of conflict—deriving from state, non-state and one-sided violence (e.g., attacks by the Islamic State)—on per capita caloric consumption (household dietary diversity), which although counterintuitive is unsurprising given Iraq's relatively high-income levels and changes in dietary pattern. Given that the primary driver of conflict's positive effect on calories is increased consumption of carbohydrates and, to a lesser extent, saturated fat, these results suggest that in countries transitioning to Western-style diets, violent conflict may drive the population toward an unhealthier diet, contributing heavily to a growing national prevalence of nutrition-related non-communicable diseases.     

Abstracts of Award-Winning Theses

This thesis determines the tradeoff between producer welfare and the provision of environmental benefits, through reduced soil erosion and fertilizer applications, on agricultural working land. A land-use allocation model of two Iowa counties is formulated as a mathematical programming problem, building upon the Takayama and Judge framework. Slope is used to reflect terrain heterogeneity, such that the spatial allocation of land-use practices impacts economic and environmental outcomes via a yield damage function and differentiated rates of soil erosion. The model differs from prior empirical models in that it includes both crop and livestock production, which gives the model the flexibility to choose whether the two activities are optimally nonseparable.
Price policy analysis indicates that the land use allocation is relatively insensitive to changes in commodity prices, i.e., altering commodity-based support payments is insufficient to attain environmental improvements. Several "green" policy instruments are simulated to estimate the cost to producers of reducing environmental damages. Limiting soil erosion with either a regulatory standard or a per unit tax reduces the average return to land by 10%. Shifting current income support payments into a system of payments for conservation land management practices, similar in essence to the Conservation Security Program, cannot attain the same soil erosion reduction with less cost to producers. Overall, the inelastic response of land use practices to commodity prices indicates that targeting the use of productive inputs, as opposed to commodity outputs, may be a more efficient means of attaining environmental improvements.     

Modelling recreation demand with respondent-reported driving cost and stated cost of travel time: A Finnish case

As the price of recreational visits is unobservable and commonly represented by researcher-assigned travel cost estimates, welfare change estimates generated by the travel cost method are ordinally measurable (Randall, 1994). For a potential solution to the resulting calibration problem we use respondent-reported driving costs and the stated cost of travel time, measured by willingness to pay to reduce travel time, to represent the individual trip price. On-site data from a hiking area in Finland are used. After considering visitors’ perceptions of driving cost and travel time, models with individual driving costs and stated cost of travel time are compared to standard specifications based on a uniform rate of driving cost and wage-based time cost. The use of respondent-reported driving costs appears to be a working approach for calibrating the benefit measures. The stated cost of time was logically related to visitor and trip characteristics and had plausible effects on benefit estimates.     

On the Use of Price Ratio in Aggregate Supply Response: Some Evidence from the Poultry Industry

The specification of supply/demand relationships has received considerable attention in agricultural economics (Heien 1977). Economic theory has helped provide a basis for the specification of such relationships, one of its contributions being the proposition that prices should be interpreted only in relative terms. This has had a profound influence on model building in agricultural economics, leading a number of researchers to avoid the use of absolute prices in economic analysis. For this reason, numerous market models of the agricultural economy use price ratios as explanatory variables (e.g., Chen; Chen et al.; Heien, 1976; Gerra; Kulshreshtha and Wilson; Rahn; Talpaz; Morzuck et al.; Houck and Gallagher; Wilson et al.); these examples suggest that the use of such ratios is fairly widespread in econometric modeling of the crop and livestock sectors. One of the best examples of price ratios is the "feed cost to price" ratio commonly used in the analysis of livestock supply response. Indeed, since feed cost constitutes a major part of the total production cost in livestock activities, the "feed cost to price" ratio is often considered a proxy for profitability. For this reason, data on such ratios are regularly published for various livestock activities (e.g., USD A). Also, "feed cost to price" ratios are often employed in the specification of models of livestock supply response, (e.g., Chen; Chen et al.; Heien 1976; Gerra; Kulshreshtha and Wilson; Rahn; Talpaz). However, not all models of aggregate supply response follow this approach. For example, Freebairn and Rausser, and Arzac and Wilkinson, use prices as separate variables rather than in ratio forms in their models. In particular, they do not employ price ratios in their livestock and crop supply equations. The existence of these different approaches raises questions about the appropriateness of the use of price ratios in the modeling of aggregate supply.     

Impacts of FFW on nutrition in rural Kenya

Assessing the impacts of Food-for-Work (FFW) on human capital formation depends on understanding the specific nutritional contributions of FFW to the overall diet of FFW participant households. However, empirical studies in this area are very scant. This paper is an attempt to fill such gap. The primary objectives are to measure the magnitude of the FFW contribution to participants' nutritional status. Primary data collected from a random sample of 300 farm-households in the Rift Valley Province of Kenya are used. A linear programming model is used to estimate the shadow prices of nutrients. These prices are then entered into an econometric model of consumer demand for nutrients in order to estimate own and cross-price elasticities for each nutrient component. The results indicate that FFW significantly improves the nutritional status of FFW participant households. More specifically, participants experienced an implicit income gain, which resulted in a significant nutritional improvement. The poorest FFW participant households exhibited even higher nutritional gains (32.46%) than those participants from relatively higher income groups. FFW participant households showed a 90% higher propensity to spend on nutrients than the non-FFW participants. The findings of this study are expected to assist in the design of future ‘targeted’ food aid projects.     

Risk Sharing and Compensation Guides for Managers and Members of Vertical Beef Alliances

Vertical alliances in beef are growing in importance. Alliances struggle with decisions on how to compensate members. Both conceptual development and empirical analysis are needed. A conceptual framework building on transaction cost and principal agent literature is developed and strategies for sharing feeding and packing margins are analyzed. Premiums for high-quality cattle increase revenues to the alliance. Margin and premium sharing interactions are investigated and guidelines are presented. Compensations that provide incentives for improving cattle quality help ensure the success of alliances as vertical coordination and quality control mechanisms.