Download or read book Effectiveness of food subsidies in raising healthy food consumption written by Chakrabarti, Suman and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is an increasing demand to add pulses to the basket of subsidized goods in the Public Distribution System (PDS) of India—the world’s largest food-based social safety-net program. Would subsidizing pulses through PDS lead to a significant increase in its consumption? We study the case of subsidy on pulses in select Indian states and its impact on consumption and ultimately nutrition (in terms of protein intake) by exploiting an exogenous variation in prices to answer this question. Between 2004/2005 and 2009/2010, four Indian states introduced subsidized pulses through the country’s PDS, while other states did not. We exploit exogenous price variations to examine whether the price subsidy on pulses achieves its goal of increasing pulse consumption, and by extension protein intake, among India’s poor. Using several rounds of consumption expenditure survey data and difference-in-difference estimation, we find that the change in consumption of pulses due to the PDS subsidy, though statistically significant, is of a small order, and not large enough to meet the goal of enhancing the nutrition of beneficiaries.

Download or read book Effectiveness of Food Subsidies in Raising Healthy Food Consumption written by Suman Chakrabarti and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper provides evidence on the effectiveness of one of the most common policies to improve nutrition among the poor, that is, a food subsidy. We study the case of subsidies on pulses in select Indian states and their impact on consumption and ultimately nutrition (protein intake). As a natural experiment, we use the introduction of pulses into India's Public Distribution System (PDS) where the variations in prices were brought about by the inclusion of pulses in the PDS in some states and not in others. Our difference in difference (DID) estimates show that change in the consumption of pulses because of their inclusion in the PDS, though statistically significant, was of a small order. The impact was not large enough to bring about any sizable difference in consumption of pulses or the total protein intake. The results withstand several robustness checks including randomized inference and triple differencing based on location and other consumer characteristics.

Download or read book Comparative Analyses of Nutritional Effectiveness of Food Subsidies and Other Food related Interventions written by Eileen T. Kennedy and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 1987 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction; Food subsidy measures and their nutritional impact: a conceptual overview; Typology of nutrition interventions; Targeting; Cost and administrative concerns of food transfer programs; Other issues related to food subsidies; Comparative analysis of selected nutrition interventions; Conclusions.

Download or read book Food Subsidies in Developing Countries written by Per Pinstrup-Andersen and published by International Food Policy Research Insitute. This book was released on 1988 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Key nutrition and hydration insights for public health and policy written by Sumantra Ray and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-07-27 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Pilot Food Price Subsidy Scheme in the Philippines written by Marito Garcia and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pilot food price subsidy scheme; The study areas; Assessment of implementation; Analytical methodology; Descriptive analysis of income, consumption, and nutritional patterns; A comparative analysis of the effects of the food price subsidy Scheme; A multivariate analysis of the effects of the food subsidy Scheme; Cost-effectiveness analysis.

Download or read book Obesity written by Meera Shekar and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obesity is a global ticking time bomb with huge potential negative economic and health impacts, especially for the poor. As of 2016, an estimated 44 percent of adults (more than two billion) worldwide are overweight or obese, and over 70 percent of them live in low- or middle-income countries, dispelling the myth that obesity is a problem only in high-income countries. The global obesity epidemic presents a formidable challenge to human capital acquisition, national wealth accumulation, and the goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Given the renewed global focus on human capital, its links to the obesity epidemic, and the growing evidence base for double- and triple-duty actions, there is both an urgent need for action and a great opportunity for engagement that will require both a whole-of-government and a whole-ofdevelopment-partner approach. Countries and global partners need to act urgently to address this ensuing epidemic, with emphasis on interventions that require corrective public action rather than one of individual responsibility.

Download or read book Can contract farming increase farmers income and enhance adoption of food safety practices written by Kumar, Anjani and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-04-20 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing inequality has become an important concern in many countries. One of the ways that inequality is perpetuated is through differential market access across regions. This research deals with one of the primary determinants of regional inequality manifested in terms of market access. Nepal is one country where hierarchical geography leads to regional inequality. Differential market access can cause as well as accentuate inequality among farmers. Coordination arrangements such as contract farming can improve outcomes for the farmers and integrators on the one hand, but on the other hand it can accentuate inequality if only some regions benefit from it. With this background, in this paper we study the case of contract farming for exports with farmers in remote hilly areas of Nepal. The prospect for contract farming in such areas with accessibility issues owing to underdeveloped markets and lack of amenities is ambiguous. On the one hand, contractors in these areas find it difficult to build links, particularly when final consumers have quality and safety requirements. On the other hand, remoteness can make the contracts more sustainable if the agroecology offers product-specific quality advantages and, more important, if there is a lack of side-selling opportunities. At the same time, concerns remain about buyers’ monopsonistic powers when remotely located small farmers do not have outside options. This study hence quantifies the benefits of contract farming on remotely located farmers’ income and compliance with food safety measures. Results show that contract farming is significantly more profitable (offering a 58 percent greater net income) than independent production, the main pathway being higher price realization, along with training on practices and provision of quality seeds.

Download or read book Long term drivers of food and nutrition security written by Laborde Debucquet, David and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-05-18 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2015 Global Hunger Index suggests that despite progress in reducing hunger worldwide, hunger levels in 52 of 117 countries in the 2015 Global Hunger Index remain “serious” or “alarming.” Since achieving and maintaining food and nutrition security (FNS) remains a goal for all countries, it is important to understand the individual, national, and global factors that affect FNS. This paper proposes an analytical framework to identify and analyze the respective roles of key long-term drivers of FNS. We start by identifying what the key variables affecting FNS are at the household and country level, and then we continue by defining what the main exogenous or endogenous drivers affecting these variables are. We discuss the key drivers of both aggregated food supply and demand and therefore their impact on prices. Specifically, for aggregated food demand, we discuss demographic factors, income growth, changes in dietary preferences, aggregated domestic distortions, and overall quality of the food system. With respect to the drivers of aggregated food supply, we discuss land available for food products and the drivers behind land availability, the share of waste/losses generated by the food system, and the normalized average yield. We define yield as the amount of nutrients produced by unit of land. It depends both on the physical yield of the crop or the livestock and on the quality of the food produced. It also can be affected by the changes in production patterns linked to the different dietary patterns of the consumers and by climate change. We emphasize the fact that in many cases, key drivers may have ambiguous effects on the FNS situation of different agents. For instance, more liberal trade policies will affect real income, terms of trade, demand and supply, returns of factors, foreign direct investments, and food prices and thus may lead to the improvement of the global-level FNS, that is, the FNS of the majority of the population. At the same time, more liberal trade policies may bring food insecurity to some households. Therefore, careful quantitative assessment is needed for each policy option. Finally, we propose a typology of variables that will help modelers adapt their models to study the different drivers through both direct and indirect effects.

Download or read book Agricultural Input Subsidies written by Ephraim Chirwa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes forward our understanding of agricultural input subsidies in low income countries.

Download or read book Making pulses affordable again written by Joshi, Pramod Kumar and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rising prices and declining consumption of pulses cause concern in terms of both nutrition and food inflation in India. This paper outlines policy strategies to increase the availability of pulses at affordable prices in India and also points out limitations of some of the most common recommendations for achieving these objectives. There seems to be no option but to increase domestic production of pulses in India. The global supply of pulses is limited compared with India’s needs, and sizable imports by India are bound to increase world prices. Domestic production of pulses in India is most likely piecewise inelastic, meaning that small price increases do not translate into a significant supply response. Because farmers face both production and marketing risks, they increase pulse area and intensify production only when there is a large increase in expected prices that covers the risk premium. Droughts, too, are a major risk for pulses. Access to one or two protective irrigations during the growing season can possibly lead to sizable increases in pulse production and reduce the production risk. The har khet ko paani (assured irrigation) initiative under the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY) program should give priority to pulse-producing areas. The minimum support price (MSP) for pulses, without direct government procurement, helps traders more than farmers because it acts as a focal point for tacit collusion among traders. Farmers will benefit from the MSP only if it is raised substantially from its current levels. The increase in farmgate prices due to a higher MSP will not necessarily lead to an increase in the retail price of pulses because much of the wedge between farmgate prices and consumer prices is traders’ margin. Including subsidized pulses in public distribution systems can save households some money, but it has only a small effect on total consumption of pulses and almost no effect on total protein intake. We suggest, as more potent solutions, investing in research and extension for pulses, aggregating pulse growers into farmer producer organizations, and paying pulse growers or pulse-growing areas for the ecosystem services offered by pulses.

Download or read book A model of reporting and controlling outbreaks by public health agencies written by Saak, Alexander E. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When an outbreak of an infectious disease is suspected, a local health agency may notify a state or federal agency and request additional resources to investigate and, if necessary, contain it. However, due to capacity constraints, state and federal health agencies may not be able to grant all such requests, which may give an incentive to local agencies to request help strategically. We study a model of detection and control of an infectious disease by local health agencies in the presence of imperfect information about the likelihood of an outbreak and limited diagnostic capacity. When diagnostic capacity is rationed based on reports of symptoms, the decision to report symptoms or not creates a trade-off. On the one hand, rigorous testing allows one to make an informed disease control decision. On the other hand, it also increases the probability that the disease will spread from an untested area where fewer precautionary measures are taken. Symptoms are overreported (respectively, reported truthfully, or underreported) when the cost of disease control is sufficiently small (respectively, in some intermediate range, or sufficiently large). If the disease incidence decreases or infectiousness increases, symptoms are reported less frequently. If the precision of private signals increases, the extent of overreporting of symptoms may increase. For different values of the parameters it can be socially optimal to subsidize or tax requests for additional investigations and confirmatory testing.

Download or read book Understanding the demand for protective foods in East Africa An economic analysis with policy recommendations written by Headey, Derek D. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suboptimal diets are a major risk factor for avoidable death and disease in low- and middle-income countries. Evidence shows that some foods or food components (e.g., processed red meat, saturated fat, salt, sugar) significantly elevate the risk of noncommunicable diseases and mortality, while others protect health (e.g., vegetables, fruits, pulses, nuts/seeds, fish, whole grains—referred to in this document as “protective foods”). We used household surveys to compare dietary patterns in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet and to quantify and explain consumption gaps for nutritious foods. Compared to the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet, consumption gaps for pulses and nuts/seeds, vegetables, and fruits are large for both poor and rich consumers in rural and urban areas in the four countries studied, while consumption gaps for meat, fish, and eggs and dairy foods are much larger for lower income groups. Food expenditures of most households in these four countries are far too low to allow consumption of the healthy reference diet; animal-source foods and vegetables are the largest cost components of food expenditures, although quantities consumed of both food groups are much lower than the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet. Income elasticities of demand for pulses and nuts/seeds and vegetables are often low or moderate, suggesting weak consumer preference for these foods, while income elasticities for fruits and animal-source foods are relatively high. Income growth alone will not solve dietary problems in East Africa; in addition to supply-side interventions to improve affordability, special interventions are required to increase consumer demand for underappreciated protective (nutritious) foods such as pulses and nuts/seeds and vegetables.

Download or read book India s pulse policy landscape and its implications for trade written by Roy, Devesh and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2022-04-06 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The paper attempts to fill a knowledge gap by examining India’s pulse complex, consisting of production, consumption, and trade policies. India’s pulse policies are anchored in a cereal-centric farming system and prioritize national self-sufficiency as well as the mitigation of relative price increases in food. On the farmer side, government policy includes price support (a minimum support price [MSP]) for different pulses initially without procurement, but later backed by public procurement. The MSP plus procurement elicited a comparatively high supply response. Without procurement, the MSP worked only to anchor prices and benefit traders at the farmers’ expense. By not accounting for the needed risk premium (for a supply response) the MSP kept domestic production low. Even as the world’s largest importer of pulses, the scale of pulse imports in India have generally not been large enough to cool its markets and bring down domestic prices. Instantaneous supply adjustments by exporters in response to trade policy changes are difficult.

Download or read book Rent Dispersion in the US Agricultural Insurance Industry written by Smith, Vincent H. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A central, but inadequately explored issue with respect to subsidized crop insurance programs concerns the costs of delivering insurance coverage to farmers. This study examines that issue in the context of the heavily subsidized US crop insurance program which has often been put forward as a model for agricultural insurance programs in other countries. US Government programs often rely on private firms to deliver income transfers or services, which then establish their own rent-seeking lobbies, which are shared with input suppliers. This rent dispersion process is examined in the context of the U.S. agricultural insurance industry, which receives as much as one third of the annual subsidies that support the federal crop insurance program. We find that as total payments to insurance companies increased between 2001 and 2009, an increasingly large share of the agricultural insurance industry’s rents accrued to insurance agents, although in markets where insurance companies possessed some oligopsony power, agent payments are smaller. The findings also suggest that the insurance industry (companies and independent agents) would almost surely provide the same service for substantially less than the gross revenues from the subsidies and underwriting gains they received.

Download or read book Understanding compliance in programs promoting conservation agriculture written by Ward, Patrick S. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Land degradation and soil erosion have emerged as serious challenges to smallholder farmers throughout southern Africa. To combat these challenges, conservation agriculture (CA) is widely promoted as a sustainable package of agricultural practices. Despite the many potential benefits of CA, however, adoption remains low. Yet relatively little is known about the decision-making process in choosing to adopt CA. This article attempts to fill this important knowledge gap by studying CA adoption in southern Malawi. Unlike what is implicitly assumed when these packages of practices are introduced, farmers view adoption as a series of independent decisions rather than a single decision. Yet the adoption decisions are not wholly independent. We find strong evidence of interrelated decisions, particularly among mulching crop residues and practicing zero tillage, suggesting that mulching residues and intercropping or rotating with legumes introduces a multiplier effect on the adoption of zero tillage.

Download or read book Contracting by small farmers in commodities with export potential written by Kumar, Anjani and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is undertaken to quantify the benefits of contract farming (CF) on farmers’ income in a case where new market opportunities are emerging for smallholder farmers in Nepal. CF is emerging as an important form of vertical coordination in the agrifood supply chain. The prospect for CF in a country like Nepal with accessibility issues, underdeveloped markets, and a lack of amenities remains ambiguous. Contractors find it difficult to build links in these cases, particularly when final consumers have quality and safety requirements. However, a lack of other market opportunities makes the contracts more sustainable. The latter happens if there are product-specific quality advantages because of agroecology and, more important, lack of side-selling opportunities. Concerns remain about monoposonistic powers of the buyers when small farmers do not have outside options. Results of this study show that CF is significantly more profitable (81 percent greater net income) than independent production, the main pathway being higher yield and price realization. The positive impact of CF on farmers’ profits can help Nepal in harnessing the growing demand for pulses, especially in neighboring international markets, like India.