Food policy sausage

Where does Indian agricultural policy come from? IFPRI has a new report out on how the subsidy sausage gets made, and in particular what is keeping them from making better policy.

This study throws new light on the factors that have so far prevented a move toward more pro-poor and environmentally sustainable agricultural input policies in India. The authors show that electoral politics, institutional factors, and policy paradigms or belief systems all play an important role in blocking reform.

Where did the idea of people consuming 2000 calories a day come from? M. Nestle answers from her forthcoming book: a survey + marketing. Reality is complex, with surveyed responses varying over 1400 calories per day just in what Americans admitted to eating, let alone what was actually consumed. 2000 is easy to remember, easy to divide, and less than they were recommending for most real people so as not to give an appearance of over-encouraging saturated fat and salt. But as to how many calories you personally should actually consume to be healthy and satisfied, even she gives little real help: if you're gaining weight, you're eating too much.


How is it that farmers' market food safety regulation comes out so differently from that for corporations? Tucker discovers there are (at least) two kinds of farmers' markets and points out the idiosyncracies and food safety problems in our governance of them. Attending the university-sponsored one on a whim, he found the upscale farmers market with prices to match. In another town, the market was "kept alive by the workers and peasants. The price were 1/3 to 1/2 as much as the local grocery. They have locally grown produce, and a fantastic cart full of virtually free produce that is about to spoil." He notes that neither one was easily a pure exercise in local food. At the second, he bought Vietnamese fish. At the first:

For example, the man with super-cool rabbit meat, lamb and goat sausage, and the like, had come 3.5 hours, and he does this every week, even though he doesn’t have a refrigerated truck. Every corporate giant faces a labyrinth of inspections and mandates comparable to the Soviet Gosplan, just to get meat to the market. And yet here is a guy with some animals on his land who slaughters, grinds, packs, and sells, and no one seems to be bothering him. No inspectors, no special tests, no mandates. Puzzling. Thrilling but puzzling.

Aid effectiveness on a bad day

But all three books make the case that the ineffectiveness of much philanthropy is actually the fault of the philanthropist. They applaud the motives for giving, but all make the point that people too often let their philanthropy be guided by their hearts alone. “Deciding what you will do to make change happen is a choice that requires both your head and your heart”, write Messrs Fleishman and Tierney in the best chapter in “Give Smart”, entitled “What Am I Accountable For?” The biggest problem for philanthropists, they argue, may be that “they are essentially accountable to no one but themselves.”

Some of the problems:

1 - There’s the overall lack of evaluations being done, and even when we do them we can’t simply aggregate the results and call it done, as Blattman points out:

We’re selective in which programs we evaluate, and ten[d] towards the decentralized, uncoordinated, and less sensitive programs. I call it the “non-random impact of random impacts”

2 - Then there's the question of who receives the aid. Do we give to "bad governments"? On the one side, giving aid supports a corrupt regime. On the other, removing aid is likely to harm the poorest instead of the targets. Admittedly, there is a lot of disagreement about the model here: aid is hurting when it goes in and when it goes out. One of the ethical underpinnings, though may just be "strongly determined by how much you discount future suffering versus suffering today," writes Aid Thoughts.

Note: in the case being discussed at Aid Thoughts (Malawi and the British) I do not intend to imply that the Malawi government is “bad” on the basis of their insulting an ambassador. A little more care should be given, in my view, to differentiating between “behavior we don’t like” and actual villainy. If someone wants to argue that the government is villainous, then the debate should be about whether aid should be cut for that reason, rather than because a diplomat was expelled. Although, from an economist's perspective, I guess it reveals the true British preferences.

3 - And then Tales from the Hood tells us it may be time for aid -- all international aid -- to leave Haiti. His argument is that Haiti has been constantly interfered with without ever being given the chance to govern itself.

Tucker argues that this may not be the best thing, that the root cause of Haitian poverty is lack of capital, and the root cause of lack of capital is incredibly bad governance. He concludes unusually, however:

Now, to be sure, there are plenty of Americans who are firmly convinced that we would all be better off if we grew our own food, bought only locally, kept firms small, eschewed modern conveniences like home appliances, went back to using only natural products, expropriated wealthy savers, harassed the capitalistic class until it felt itself unwelcome and vanished. This paradise has a name, and it is Haiti.

Where Tucker gets the idea that Haiti only eats the food it produces is a little beyond me. Starvation is high, but so are food imports. The standard story (which Erica Philips and I debate in a forthcoming case study) is that massive US rice imports have harmed local agriculture significantly.

The Lighter Side: Local Food, Food Safety, and Artificial Ingredients

Big Bag of Food Politics and research

The Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria is asking the government to freeze rice imports as more than 75% of production had remained unsold as of two weeks ago. A Dutch NGO, a Kenyan NGO, and the Kenyan Ministry of Livestock are working together to teach pastoralists about storing hay so they can keep their animals alive longer during the expected upcoming drought. The local food movement in Senegal.

Florida tomato workers' representatives won them a 1 penny per pound raise. "The raise will bring most workers annual salary from 10,000 to 17,000 dollars." NPR's report is pretty shocking, including successfully prosecuted episodes of slavery. In FLORIDA. The growers' association is putting pressure on growers to not provide workers the pay raise.

Cornell researchers Wansink, Just, and McKendry on kids' food choices and school lunch lines. "Children and teenagers resist heavy-handed nutritional policies — and the food that is associated with the heavy hand. No food is nutritious, after all, until it is actually eaten. ... When cafeteria workers asked each child, 'Do you want a salad?' salad sales increased by a third." Other behavioral nudges included placing of healthy foods, making kids pay cash for cookies, and adjusting the size of food containers.

On the bad combination of alcohol and caffeine. "As for caffeine, its effects when combined with alcohol are considered serious enough to merit creation of a new journal, the Journal of Caffeine Research: The International Multidisciplinary Journal of Caffeine Science. The journal will be devoting much attention to the role of caffeine in alcohol energy drinks." Michigan has banned the drinks.

Change.org takes issue (surprise surprise) with a new factory farm livestock operations in Oswego (a 72k cow farm) claiming they are environmentally sustainable. The companies are touting their recycling, production of biofuels from waste, and "closed-loop, integrated technology platform." Velez worries this will lead to increased cattle infections both on the farm and on others, the increased grain consumption, and resident anger. I'm a little confused from his writing whether the company is applying for permits or for subsidies.

Powell on optimal systems:

There’s good farmers and bad farmers, whatever system they’re using, and I’m more interested in making sure people don’t barf, whatever kind of food they choose. There are endless scientific reports about which system is better, but they don’t say much. A new report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry found that organically grown onions, carrots, and potatoes generally do not have higher levels of healthful antioxidants and related substances than vegetables grown with traditional fertilizers and pesticides.

BIG Bag o Foodie Links

Water

Libya's Great Man-Made River nears completion at $20 billion and 2,333 miles long to connect the 5% of the country with rain to the rest.

What makes water projects work? Social capital, says IFPRI. Water and sanitation committees (cleverly known as WATSANs) in Ghana are not only more likely where communities have other social groups and less likely where communities are ethnically divided, they seem to improve payment for water services and improve water safety. Female leaders seem particularly important.

Food Safety
Powell gives NY Times reporter Bittman's new book two thumbs down for terrible food safety advice: "This is food safety idiocracy. Any food safety advice in Bittman’s book should be disregarded as fantasy."

Powell also found something worse than e. coli and salmonella:a metal staple in his pretzel-filled M&M. "I would rather take my chances with Salmonella or E. coli that I know I can cook to death rather than bleeding internally to death."  Update: Contrition from Mars goes a long way.

Foodie Faddies
Ben and Jerry's has surrendered. They're taking the "All Natural" label off their ice cream because a number of the ingredients are heavily processed (high fructo... I mean, corn sugar, highly processed? you don't say...)

And speaking of corporations, Wilde lets us know that corporate heads are either deluded or lying when they claim that "Personally, I would like to serve a healthier product.  But, if these efforts threaten profitability, I risk getting sued by stakeholders.  Corporations are obliged to pursue maximum profits and no other goal." A recent study of actual court cases says this is not the case.

If one can argue with a straight face that selling healthier food enhances the reputation and long-term prospects of the company, I think that would count as a reasonable business judgment.

Wilde's best line: "Markets are a great game, but a dreadful religion."

Powell urges us to buy local while avoiding "locavore nonsense" by quoting Doering:

buying local makes a good deal of sense when the natural conditions support the seasonal production of good, fresh local food. Who wouldn’t buy our local asparagus in June and fresh sweet corn and tomatoes in August? ...  What is new is the pretentious elevation of this simple idea by the chattering culinary class to the status of a comprehensive creed, which, they assert, can make a major contribution to a more sustainable food system.

I was in a very chic restaurant in Tucson, Ariz. where the smug chef righteously proclaimed that all his ingredients were locally grown. He was quite offended when I asked him about the environmental and other costs of importing all that fresh water to grow that food in the Arizona desert. And how is it more sustainable to deny developing countries the opportunity to export their tropical fruits and vegetables?

And five programs to improve school lunches:

• Salad bars
• Healthy vending machines (Cornell nutrition and agricultural economics students occasionally foment for that when gradual changes move the vending machines back to less healthy choices.)
• Chefs joining the staff or advising kids on healthy eating and food prep
  
• School gardens (not without controversy)
• Buying food from local farmers

Potpourri
Breakfast in Iraq: "At first this weekend I was jealous of my friends in DC enjoying DC brunches.  Then we went to a local hole-in-the-wall and I saw breakfast. ...  After that, I was basically jealous of myself, because the food was so good." 

Tyson is facing a suit for gender discrimination which could jeopardize millions in government contracts if a) it is proved true and b) they don't give 750 female workers backpay and roughly 100 more female applicants jobs. That could cause a significant market power shift. Change.org naturally assumes guilty before proven innocent.

And the FAO is touting small-holder dairy farms. There are presently over 750 million people engaged in it, with an average of two cows. The most interesting and unexpected problem they bring up is environmental: "Low-yield dairy systems in Africa and South Asia are estimated to have higher carbon footprints per 100 kilogram of milk produced than high-yield systems in the United States and Western Europe."

Omnivore's Delusion

Reaching into my stack of unread papers, I pull out Blake Hurst, a Missouri farmer who has a different opinion about the current state of Western agricultural practices than many armchair food policy "analysts," who, he says

does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory that makes his products to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver his products instead of trucks and trains. But he expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainable, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. ... He is an expert about me on the strength of one book....

So he presents a very different view of what organic and industrial farming looks like to dispel common myths and stereotypes.

The results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. ... molds, fungus, and bugs increase.... Some of the largest farms in the country are organic -- and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store.

The most delicious irony is this: the parts of farming that are the most "industrial" are the most likely to be owned by ... family farmers.... Most livestock is produced by family farms, and even the poultry industry, with its contracts and vertical integration, relies on family farms to contract for the production of the birds....

He makes a number of points about attempts to make livestock raising more "humane." Turkeys that are "range fed" are prone to weasel attacks and they don't come in when it rains, just stare up at the rain with their beaks open until they drown. Chickens are kept in separate cages to prevent their pecking at, wounding, even killing each other to establish the pecking order. Pigs are penned in tight cages (outside of CA which has outlawed them) because the larger wooden crates lead to certain problems, like pigs laying down on their offspring killing them:

Farmers do not cage their hogs because of sadism, but because ... being crushed by your mother really is an awful way to go. As is being eaten by your mother, which I've seen sows do to newborn pigs as well. ...

Norman Borlaug, founder of the green revolution, estimates that the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so. He further remarks that we would need another 5 billion cows to produce enough manure to fertilize our present crops with "natural" fertilizer.

He addresses the practical difficulties he has experienced of clover and legume production, including freezing rain, increased bug growth, and using twice as much water and land to grow the same amount of corn. Pollan proposed a program of mandatory urban composting that could be trucked to the farms to provide green manure. Hurst's calculations show that would amount to 5 million truckloads to fertilizer just the US corn crop. "Now, that would be a carbon footprint!"

He closes with a plea to listen to farmers and try to understand why they make their choices.

Bag of Links

Klein on the effects of tax changes: (HT:MR)

In "Do the Rich Save More?", economists Karen Dynan, Jonathan Skinner and Stephen Zeldes found a strong relationship between personal savings and income. However, other research suggests the opposite conclusion. Julia Lynn Coronado, Joseph Lupton and Louise Sheiner of the Federal Reserve studied (PDF) the effects of the 2003 tax cuts' child credit and found that the rich were actually more likely to spend most of the credit. Most of this is due to the fact that high earners were less likely to have to pay off debt:

Britain debates raising the retirement age faster than previously envisaged (The Economist)

Disney teaching Chinese children English with plans to double the number of students every year (The Economist)

Each lesson is assisted by virtual mermaids, ducks, mice and other Disney icons. Touch the answer to a question (a fried egg, for example) on one screen, and it plops out of the sky on the other.

Move over "Eat at Joe's."  "Read Ayn Rand" writ very, very large (HT: MR)

Boudreaux on the local food movement: Why only food?

Does he promote community by wearing only clothes made from locally grown fibers and woven at local mills?  When he is ill, does he stick to his principle of not swallowing the cold logic of global economics by refusing also to swallow any pharmaceuticals not made locally?  Does he drive a locally manufactured automobile?  Is the furniture in his home and office made only of materials found in or near Harlemville?  And are the novels he reads, the musical composition he listens to, and the movies he watches only those that are produced locally?

Zombie ants (HT:MR):

The oldest evidence of a fungus that turns ants into zombies and makes them stagger to their death has been uncovered by scientists.

Talking past each other: Locavore

Budiansky does an admirable job informing the debate on local food by criticizing the math of "food miles." Transportation from distant grower to distant market adds very little to the environmental cost of growing food. Home storage and food prep take the lion's share. It is often far more expensive in environmental terms to grow foods out of season in greenhouses than to grow them in season and ship them half way round the world (I can recommend Pretty et al, 2005, and Saunders, Barber, and Taylor, 2006, in this regard. This post compares transportation to heating and cooling).

The Ethicurean does not address any of the substantive points, instead taking issue with the characterization of the local food movement as being dogma-driven instead of acknowledging its important values. The value Eleanor would like us to consider is having a choice. Local food, she claims, is free from massive agroindustrial concentration and so if you want to have any kind of choice about how your food is grown, you have to go local. She thus equates the local food movement with democracy. She argues that also makes food safer (salmonella discussion here and here), though that depends on the education of your local farmer, which may or may not be greater than the corporations' systems and staff.

You don't have to have a local-only system to preserve choice. There are many options: 1 - international competition. Support your highly non-local organic farmer too! 2 - more stringent competition regulation to reduce concentration or apply anti-competitive regs to regions instead of nationally. 3 - mergers among organic (or any other choice you care to favor) producers to produce a large corporation doing something different from the others.

If you care about organic, tell people to buy organic rather than local. If you care about no growth hormones, tell people to find sellers who don't use growth hormones. They may be local. They may not. If you care about supporting smallholder agriculture, support distant smallholders too. At the moment, it probably means buying local, but if organic is important, you save the environment more by buying organic in season from far away than you do buying organic out of season locally. The internet is a wonderful resource for making such connections. That preserves choice without the simplistic "buy local" message that can undermine what some people care about.

Locavore's Blasphemy

I ate some locally grown food a while back. I knew it was local because it said so right there on the label, on the top in a nice, big, shiny, red script.

Well, okay, so it was locally grown in California and locally processed in California.

It was bought in Puerto Rico.

And carried into New York State by a student (I don't know who) who gave it as a gift to someone who let me have a taste of dried, locally grown persimmons.

It was hermetically sealed in a plastic container with the number 1, which if I recall correctly is, um, not in the best environmental tradition.

In the local food religion, I think this counts as blasphemy.

Five Second... Park Wilde

Good news! Parke Wilde's outstanding blog on US Food Policy is back in circulation. Here are short synopses of the last week's heavy activity:

1 - Marion Nestle came to Cornell last week and responded to a student that she held that high-fructose corn syrup was metabolically equivalent to sucrose. There is now a little more evidence that that may not be the case: rats consuming the human-equivalent of 3000 calories/day in HFCS gained more weight than those consuming 3000 calories in sucrose. Most of the authors' discussion is about how fructose is different.

2 - Obama is proposing an increase in school lunch spending of about $0.20 per child. Not enough for an apple. The Senate's Agricultural committee chair wants a smaller increase: less than a dime. The Senate version's extra money has to come from cuts to other programs. "Naturally, she has chosen to target conservation, hunger, and even other school-lunch programs -- leaving commodity payments, beloved of her state's large-scale cotton farmers, intact."

3 - A few words on small-scale meatpacking. (Cue Dumbledore) More consumers and farmers are going through small-scale packers for a variety of reasons, mostly to support local food and a belief that the food is safer for consumers and resulting higher price premiums for farmers. The comments point out the observational fallacy on food safety:

Given a low attack rate and all other things being equal, a problem is more likely to be detected from a large batch than a small batch. Over the long run, that would leads to the collective public consciousness that smaller producers are safer than the big ones. We see this already in the public perception that food prepared and eaten in the household is safer than food prepared and eaten in commercial establishments. My recollection (haven't looked at these papers for awhile) is that the reverse is true.

4 - Wilde's comments on the local, organic, etc. food movements are provoking. He finds that he often disagrees or is unconvinced by the specific argument they make about why the promoted eating pattern is good, but his nutritive Spidey-sense (read: lifetime of research experience) shows that the advice may be good for other reasons.

5 - Lastly (or firstly depending on how you count), he links to an article that quotes him extensively on tweaks to "SNAP," formerly the Food Stamp Program, to reduce obesity.

People never receiving food stamps had lower rates of obesity than those who had been on them at some point in their lives, even after accounting for differences in socioeconomic status.

The full monthly SNAP allocation, now averaging $124 per person nationwide, is provided at the beginning of each month. [T]he bulk of participants also do their grocery shopping once monthly, shortly after the benefit is credited. (Wal-Mart reports a spike in sales at 12:01 A.M., as soon as federal assistance funds hit SNAP accounts.)

Another study from 2004 found a corresponding decrease of 10 to 15 percent in food consumption over the course of the month, suggesting some recipients may eat well for the first couple weeks after they've shopped and then run low on food near month's end. This kind of "binge–starvation" cycle has been linked to changes in metabolism, insulin resistance and, ultimately, increases in BMI.

Without the obesity part, this corresponds strikingly to what The Lovely and Gracious experienced during her childhood and is always the first subject we talk about when I attend a seminar on the food stamp program.

"Now that funds are delivered electronically rather than as paper "food stamps," however, the additional cost to distribute SNAP money every other week would be minimal." So let's start the trial programs and find out how much of a difference it can make! Please!

The article is also bullish about the prospective benefits of subsidizing healthy foods. As I mentioned earlier, I have some concerns. A change that would have a similar effect to subsidizing fruits and vegetables without the income-substitution problems would be to expand WIC to allow fruit and vegetable purchases as well as the milk and dairy it now exclusively targets. The political economy arguments for why the dairy industry and their representatives in Congress would oppose that are obvious, and I'm not certain that the 'fruit and vegetable lobby,' which for some reason sounds a lot less sinister than Big Moo, is as well organized. But I think we could get enough locavores, organovores, nutritionists, and others to support their efforts to make such a change feasible. Any takers?

Lit in Review: Food Demand

Roberts and Schlenker (2009), "World Supply and Demand of Food Commodity Calories,"  American Journal of Agricultural Economics November, 1235-42, ungated January version.
They use 2SLS to provide what they term "a useful reality check for whether microcomplexities add up to patterns that are observable in the aggregate data." They gather data on corn, wheat, rice, and soybean production in any country that produces more than 1% of the total (plus one "country" to take care of the remainder) to calculate individual country trends and weather shocks. These are then converted in calories so that there is a single aggregated term.

They assume that demand for calories is unrelated to current weather shocks that affect supply, so current weather shocks trace out the demand curve. There is nothing revolutionary in this, as they point out. The unique idea is that past weather shocks shift the demand for calorie storage but not supply. They is sadly undefended, but if farmers know that demand will be higher the year following a bad one to replenish stocks, there ought to be a supply response too. If their assumption holds, though, they can trace out supply curves too. They estimate a supply elasticity of 0.1 and a demand elasticity of -.04 that may or may not be significantly different from 0. These lead them to conclude that US biofuel policies increased each commodity price by 35%

Toler, Briggeman, Lusk, and Adams (2009), "Fairness, Farmers Markets, and Local Production," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, November, 1272-78.
They perform an experiment at farmers markets and local grocery stores in Oklahoma. Participants write down offers to purchase four tickets, one of which is randomly selected as binding. The tickets pay off:
A) $4 to themselves and $7 to a local farmer
B) $4 to themselves and $7 to an out-of-state farmer
C) $4 to themselves and $1 to a local farmer
D) $4 to themselves and $1 to an out-of-state farmer

The folks at farmers markets were willing to pay a little more for every ticket, but otherwise there was no difference between the groups, nor was there a difference based on how often one went to a farmers market. The average willingness to pay for ticket A was between $3-4; for B and C were $2.50-3, with 54% willing to pay more than $3 for ticket C [giving more to the farmer than themselves in essence]; and $2 for D. They fail to reject the notion that the shoppers at each venue have different concern for inequity or for local farmers. But there was a significant willingness to benefit local farmers over out-of-state farmers, and a significant preference for letting others have the better end of the deal.

Zheng and Henneberry (2009), "An Analysis of Food Demand in China: A Case Study of Urban Households in Jiangsu Province," Review of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 31, No. 4, 873-93.
Uses the update to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics household surveys to examine basic food consumption elasticities for ten food products. Prices are household specific (amount paid divided by amount consumed according to diary entries). Most of the data is based on 900 households in 2004, and only in-home consumption. Highlighted series of results:

• 1990-2004: Rural households (60% of China) decreased annual grain consumption (262 kg to 219kg) and increased animal consumption (28 kg to 42kg).
• 1990-2004: Urban households decreased grains by more (131kg to 78kg) and increased animals by more (41kg to 73kg).
• Demographics: Average per capita income is $1,286, households usually of 3, it is more likely the third person is a senior than a child, 7% college educated.
• The most price-sensitive foods are grains, oils and fats, dairy, and "other" (tubers, alcohol, cakes, etc.)
• The least price-sensitive foods are aquatic
• As incomes increase, dairy, aquatic, other, poultry, and meats will increase their share of expenditures while fruits, eggs, vegetables, grains, and oils and fats lose share.
• "Pork accounts for more than 70% of ... total meat expenditures."
• Overall, diets are converging to those of Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
• Poultry consumption was rising steadily, but food safety concerns slowed this process recently.
• Dairy consumption is pretty low, and lower than other estimates have shown, but has increased by 400% percent.
• Half of the cross-price elasticities are significant: meats are substitutes for grains and eggs, but a complement to fish and dairy; vegetables are substitutes for poultry and dairy but complement eggs and fish. If you compensate demand, most everything is a substitute.
• Large portions of meat consumption (over half of poultry) are done outside the home.
• Demand for feed grain will outstrip demand for food grain as incomes increase, requiring an increase in imports from the US. China's land devoted to corn and soy have increased significantly (16% and 25%) with small decreases for rich and wheat (7% and 9%).