Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe shift in the population from majority food‐producer to majority food‐consumer has played a role in public calls to reform federal policy to focus more on the consumer implications of the food supply chain. This article critically evaluates the food and farm policy proposals recently offered by prominent members of the so‐called food movement. I demonstrate that the authors offer no consistent, underlying philosophical basis for when the federal government should (and should not) intervene and offer no framework for making tradeoffs when proposed "guarantees" come into conflict. Moreover, the authors misjudge the trajectory and impacts of changes in food and agriculture and thus overstate the urgency and scope for intervention. The authors' numerous specific policy proposals tend to represent a hodge‐podge of ideas that have already been tried, are already being undertaken by the USDA, or fail to hold up under close scrutiny, although there is some common ground on a few proposals.

AbstractThis article investigates the distributional effects of the subsidized crop insurance program in the United States. An equilibrium displacement model is constructed, linking the supply of disaggregate farm commodities with final consumer food demands. Using state‐specific data on farm commodity production, crop insurance payments, food expenditures, and federal tax payments, the welfare effects of the removal of the premium subsidies for crop insurance are calculated for each state in the United States. Results indicate that the removal of the premium subsidy for crop insurance would have resulted in aggregate net economic benefits of $622, $932, and $522 million in 2012, 2013, and 2014, respectively. The deadweight loss amounts to about 9.6%, 14.4%, and 8.0% of the total crop insurance subsides paid to agricultural producers in 2012, 2013, and 2014, respectively. In aggregate, removal of the premium subsidy for crop insurance reduces farm producer surplus and consumer surplus, with taxpayers being the only aggregate beneficiary. The findings reveal that the costs of such farm policies are often hidden from food consumers in the form of a higher tax burden. On a disaggregate level, there is significant variation in effects of removal of the premium subsidy for crop insurance across states. Agricultural producers in several Western states, such as California, Oregon, and Washington, are projected to benefit from the removal of the premium subsides for crop insurance, whereas producers in the Plains States, such as North Dakota, South Dakota, and Kansas, are projected to be the biggest losers.

AbstractAlthough food waste is increasingly recognized as an environmental and food security problem, there remains uncertainty over its primary contributors. Some food waste analyses seem to treat household food waste as a "mistake" or careless decision; however, consumer decisions to waste also likely reflect trade‐offs and economic incentives. These issues were explored in large surveys of U.S. food consumers using both within‐ and between‐subject designs, where we study consumers' decisions to discard food in different scenarios that vary safety, price, and opportunity costs. We find that food waste is a function of consumers' demographic characteristics, and that decisions to discard food vary with contextual factors.

AbstractThe food consumer plays an increasingly prominent role in shaping the food and farming system. A better understanding of how public policies affect consumer choice and how those choices impact health, environment, and food security outcomes is needed. This paper addresses several key challenges we see for the future, including issues related to dietary‐related diseases and the efficacy of policies designed to improve dietary choices, trust in the food system, acceptance of new food and farm technologies, environmental impacts of food consumption, preferences for increased food quality, and issues related to food safety. We also identify some research challenges and barriers that exist when studying these issues, including data quality and availability, uncertainty in the underlying biological and physical sciences, and the challenges to welfare economics that are presented by behavioral economics. We also identify the unique role that economists can play in helping address these key societal challenges.

AbstractThis paper integrates several areas of the literature by more fully developing the linkage between demand estimates and the welfare effects of food labels and bans for three common survey/experimental approaches used to elicit consumer preferences. We present empirical applications related to beef cloning and methylmercury in fish where, for the same data sets, we compare each value elicitation approach in terms of the consumer surplus changes that result from two regulations. Welfare measures vary significantly across the three methodologies, but the sign of the welfare change is invariant across method.

AbstractMillenials are the generation everyone is talking about and the generation who loves to talk about themselves. More than just a media buzzword, researchers, marketers, and retailers are interested in how the soon‐to‐be‐largest segment of the population is making food purchasing decisions. This paper uses the difference‐in‐difference method to determine the causal "millennial effect" on the share of income spent on various food expenditure categories. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey was used to identify how young people's food expenditures compare to older people's in 2015 and in 1980. Results indicate significant "millennial effects" that might have policy implications for future health care spending. Millennials have higher demand for cereal, beef, pork, poultry, eggs, and fresh fruit and lower demand for "other" food, and for food away from home relative to what would have been expected from the eating patterns of the young and old 35 years prior.

AbstractAfter much debate, the United States recently adopted a law that will require mandatory labeling of genetically modified (GM) food. We elicit willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) for manufactured and fresh foods that communicate the presence or absence of GM material. We find that a text disclosing the presence of GM material lowers WTP relative to a QR code disclosure that must be scanned. Furthermore, participants perceive Non‐GMO Project verified and organic as substitutes; WTP premiums for a product with both Non‐GMO Project verified and organic labels is about the same as the WTP premium when either label is present in isolation.