Agricultural policies
and food supplies
Mobilizing the Food Chain for
Health
Food Chain Network Meeting
October 25-26 2012
1
Health dimension of agriculture

Increased importance of health and nutrition
dimensions in food and agricultural policies.
– Increased incidence of nutrition related chronic diseases and
their health care costs

Demands on agricultural and food policies
– Malnutrition in low income populations : increases in
agricultural productivity and incomes
– Over nutrition in middle and high income populations: what
role for agricultural
2
Agricultural policies and food composition


Too much choice or too much similarity in food
Upwards of 40000 products in supermarkets of
OECD countries
– But the composition and raw commodity nutrient content
may be quite similar (Golan and Unnevehr, 2008)

Nutrient content of food could be linked to health
outcomes
3
Agricultural policies and food composition

Agricultural and food policies can alter relative prices
of inputs, but does it matter to health outcomes
– price support/R&D/investment can alter agricultural output
prices and thus input costs for food.which are costs in food
production
– Regulatory costs and information requirements can also
modify costs and thus final prices ( Golan and Unnevehr,
2008)
4
Agricultural policies and food composition




Milk price support : pricing of milk components: fat
content ( US and EU differences)
Sugar and corn relative prices: development of HFCS
a lower cost sweetner
R&D expenditure to increase productivity favored
basic commodities: wheat/corn/soybeans/dairy.
Have final product composition and their relative
prices for consumers?
5
Agricultural policies and healthy diets


Research finds no evidence that agricultural policies
are responsible for lowering relative prices of
‘unhealthy ‘foods.( Schmidhuber, 2006; Alston and
2008, 2011 and Beghin et al. 2008, Alston et al, 2012
Requillart et al. 2010)
Traditional agricultural policies—with focus on
producer subsidies increase prices of inputs, thus
increase relative price of unhealthy foods in many
cases, such as in EU-CAP.
6
Agricultural policies and healthy diets

Agricultural R&D aimed at nutrient content- nutrition
sensitive
– High income countries• modify final food nutrient/caloric content
– Low income countries
• enhance nutrient profiles of commonly consumed foods
• Enhance productivity of local foods
– Institutional support for local marketing structures
• High and low income countries for targeted
7