LCIRAH
Assessing and managing change in food systems
– what can economics contribute on zoonotic risks?
Jonathan Rushton, Barbara Häsler,
Nicoline de Haan and Ruth Rushton
jrushton@rvc.ac.uk
6 July 2011
Liverpool, 1UK
Acknowledgements
• Belen Otero (RVC), Olafur Oddergeirsson (FCC), Tessa
Crilly (independent human health economist), David
Dewar (FCC) – Salmonella team
• Liz Redmond – FSA, UK
• Wantanee Kalpravidh – FAO
• Alma Yjro-Koskinen, Theo Knight-Jones
• Katharina Stärk, Dirk Pfeiffer, Javier Guitian – RVC
• Alan Dangour, Karen Lock, Richard Smith (LSHTM),
Andrew Dorward, Deborah Johnston, Harry West
(SOAS), Michael Heinrich (SoP) - LCIRAH
LCIRAH
2
Introduction
• Rapidly changing societies generating bigger demands
for livestock products have historically created health
problems
• Our current rate of change has thrown up new
challenges in terms of emerging and re-emerging
diseases
• Addressing these with adequate investments in health
education, research and institutional development is a
major challenge
This is a societal resource allocation and socio-economic
challenge
LCIRAH
3
Introduction
• How do we achieve stable and safe supplies of food?
• It requires interdisciplinarity and intersectorial
approaches
• It requires a thorough understanding of:
• Context in which diseases circulate – the value chain
• Rules in which people in the value chain operate –
institutional environment
• Response of the people concerned – human
behaviour
LCIRAH
4
Getting to grips with the context
- Value Chains and Risk
LCIRAH
5
Basic livestock food system
Feed
Feed
Inputs
$, €, ¥
Animals
Production
System
$, €, ¥
Animals
Transport
$, €, ¥
Carcass
Abattoir
Meat
Processing
& marketing
$, €, ¥
$, €, ¥
Meat
Preparation
Consumer
$, €, ¥
• Provides food
• Moves money
• Generates employment
• People in the chains are GEOGRAPHICALLY DISPERSE –
great likelihood of moral hazard
LCIRAH
6
Livestock food systems and pathogens
Pathogen
Feed
Inputs
Production
System
Transport
Abattoir
Processing
& marketing
In livestock food systems pathogens can:
• be maintained
• spread in both directions
• be introduced from external sources
Preparation
Consumer
LCIRAH
7
Livestock food systems and information
Government working with the private sector
Feed
Inputs
Production
System
Transport
Abattoir
Processing
& marketing
Preparation
Consumer
Information in the livestock food systems:
• can be transferred between people
• can be hidden by people – MORAL HAZARD
• can be made available by regulators outside the
system – government, others??
LCIRAH
8
Livestock food systems and pathogens
- where to intervene
• Standard questions when examining an intervention:
• Is the intervention technically feasible?
• What is the intervention’s cost and effectiveness?
• Is the intervention socially acceptable?
LCIRAH
9
Livestock food systems and pathogens
- where to intervene
• Questions need to be added for complex food systems:
• Can implementation of the intervention be verified
within the food system by people affected?
• i.e. Can moral hazard be reduced?
• How will people’s decision making be affected by the
intervention?
• i.e. What do we understand of human
behaviour?
• What do we know of the rule breakers?
LCIRAH
10
Why should we study livestock value chains for animal
health measures?
• A value chain is no different to a biological organism
• It survives to support the livelihoods of the people who
work in it and to feed the people who are its consumers
• If a disease is put into a value chain the people within
will react and modify their behaviour
• In turn the people’s actions will affect how the chain
functions and operates
• Strong chains will manage and internalise disease risks
LCIRAH
Why should we study livestock value chains for animal
health measures?
• Understanding how the livestock value chains modify
and manage disease allows us to help see how our
interventions can help a chain to recover as fast as
possible
• The rapid healing of a chain is vital to ensure that people
who depend on the chain for income and food are
affected as little as possible
LCIRAH
Value chains and veterinarians
• When working with livestock value chains with disease
and those at risk of disease we need to think like
veterinarians treating a sick animal
• How can we make the chains disease free and
healthy?
• The outcome of such an approach benefits the people
who:
• work and generate an income in the chains
• eat and use the livestock commodities supplied by
the chains
LCIRAH
Risk management in a value chain
- the need for a people centred approach
• People are no longer just the people affected by a
disease
• Lost income
• Health
• Death
• People’s actions dictate how a disease:
• Enters a society
• How it spreads
• How it is controlled
LCIRAH
14
Environment
Pathogen
Pathogen
Pathogen
Host
Environment
Host
Environment
PEOPLE
Inert &
exogenous
People
People
Classic view of
animal diseases
Classic risk
assessment
Host
People centred risk
assessment
Risk management in a value chain
- the need for a people centred approach
• With a people centred approach it becomes critical to
understand people’s behaviour
• Some of this will be dictated by:
• Economic incentives
• Institutional environment
• Rules (official and informal) and their
enforcement
• Social, cultural and psychological factors
LCIRAH
16
How can economics contribute to the investigations of
the weak points in the food system?
LCIRAH
17
INDIVIDUAL FACTORS
SOCIAL/PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT
•Physical attributes
Age
Gender
Size, weight
Ethnicity
•Personal Characteristics
Personality Variables
Temperament
Self esteem
General health beliefs
General beliefs about risktaking/offending
•Resource base and livelihood options
•Family and social network
Rules and enforcement
•Cultural practices
Informal/cultural codes/rules of
behaviour
•Economic drivers (private)
Rules of transactions
Methods of enforcement
•Official rule structures
Methods and willingness to enfoce
•Political environment
•Availability and type of information
INDIVIDUAL ATTITUDES
BELIEFS MOTIVATING
FACTORS
GROUP HELD ATTITUDES
BELIEFS MOTIVATING
FACTORS
INDIVIDUAL/GROUP RISK BEHAVIOUR
FOR SPREAD OF DISEASES
Strong reward motivated – ‘conscious’
rule breaking e.g. monetary gain
Less ‘conscious’/ignorant rule breaking
e.g. culturally driven; lack of information
Data collection – Key issues
• Looked at a complex system NOT a simple cause and
effect pattern
• The system is held together by beliefs and needs of the
people and systems involved
• Part of the system has different degrees of illicit
behaviour
• The outcome of the data collection and analysis is to
simulate a DYNAMIC system in order to make
PREDICTIONS
LCIRAH
19
Data collection – the approach
• Investigative
• Relationship based
• Question type
• Attention to: Informal understanding and culture
• Integration of quantitative and qualitative data with the use
of:
• Individual narratives and stories
• Secondary and primary data sources that recognises
previous and ongoing work and resource constraints
• You cannot collect everything
• Overall structured as a “systems analysis”
LCIRAH
20
Lao PDR and China
- Example of culturally related trade
LCIRAH
21
Egg
Trays
Feedmills Parent
Flock
Feed
China
DOC
Layer Unit
Local Market
Eggs and
egg trays
Lao PDR
Thailand
Eggs and
egg trays
Vientiane
Market
22
400
1
267
533
799
1065
1331
1597
1863
2129
2395
2661
2927
3193
3459
3725
3991
4257
4523
4789
5055
5321
5587
5853
6119
6385
6651
6917
7183
7449
7715
7981
8247
8513
8779
9045
9311
9577
9843
10109
10375
10641
10907
11173
11439
11705
11971
12237
12503
12769
13035
13301
13567
13833
Altitude (metres)
Change in altitude (metres) from Vientiane to Luang
Namtha,
Lao
PDR (meters) travelling by road from Vientiane to Luang
Plot of Change
in Altitude
Namtha, Lao PDR
1600
1400
1200
1000
800
Luang
Namtha
600
Luang
Prabang
Vientiane
200
0
GPS Route Point
23
Bringing the systems framework to life
and the
BELIEFS?
LCIRAH
24
China
Layer Unit
Local Market
Rules of the
official authority?
Lao PDR
Bus
Drivers
Thailand
Vientiane
Market
25
Bringing the systems framework to life
and the
PEOPLE?
LCIRAH
26
Input supplier
Border
crossing
China
Layer
Unit
Data collectors
Local
Market
Local Market
Bus Drivers
Lao PDR
Thailand
Vientiane
Market
27
Importance of people and behaviour
• In complex food systems we need to understand what
people are doing and why
• Some of it will be economic
• But other aspects need a better understanding of the rules
they are working to – the institutional environment
• These rules can be
• Cultural norms
• Private standards
• Public regulation
• And let’s not forget enforcement
LCIRAH
28
Biosecurity
Can economics make it a useful concept?
LCIRAH
29
Biosecurity
• What does biosecurity mean?
• Bigger walls
• Better procedures for entry
• Cleaner animals
• Cooperate with neighbours and trading partners
• Let’s split bio-security into two components:
• Bio-exclusion
• Bio-containment
• Then we will assess these using a New Institutional
Economics framework
LCIRAH
30
Bio-exclusion on the Border
of Thailand with Lao PDR
Bio-exclusion
• Bio-exclusion focuses on avoiding a biological agent
entering a livestock population or contaminating a
livestock product
• It is not in the interest of the owners of the
• livestock to infect their animals
• livestock product to contaminate it
• There is a strong private interest to exclude biological
agents
• Government support could be limited to education,
research and possibly subsidies on critical infrastructure
32
Bio-containment
• Once a biological agent infects an animal or
contaminates livestock products attention needs to
switch to CONTAINMENT
• The presence of the biological agent can cause economic
losses
• Death of livestock
• Reduced growth and production
• Spoilage of livestock products
• Poor markets if the livestock are known to be
infected or a product is known to be contaminated
33
Bio-containment
• Risk of a disease agent if/when it gets in
• Surveillance – passive has to be the key
• Response
• reducing time from infection to detection and
control is critical
• the response measures need to be consistent,
thorough and effective
• Active participation of the farming community and
the traders
LCIRAH
Depopulation
Disinfection
Bio-containment
in
Thailand
Close down risky business
Bio-containment
• There are few private incentives for bio-containment
• There are public incentives for bio-containment
• The release of the biological agent could affect other
businesses in the food chain
• Food-borne pathogens and zoonotic diseases put
human health at risk
• Government investments to support bio-containment
are well justified
There is a strong role for the State in bio-containment
36
Some questions
37
Are food borne and zoonoses important?
• Are we chasing the sparks from the fire?
• Is the modern day epidemic not already with us?
38
How do zoonoses and food borne disease compare with
malnutrition?
• We know that around a billion are undernourished
• Some estimate the undernourished to be closer to 2
billion if we take into account a lack of quality in the diet
• The International Obesity Taskforce estimate that:
• There are 1 billion adults overweight
• 475 million obese
• In total human population of around 6.7 billion between
2.5 to 3.5 billion are malnourished
http://www.iaso.org/iotf/obesity/obesitytheglobalepidemic/
LCIRAH
39
What is driving malnutrition?
• Under nutrition is not due to a lack of food, it is due to
poverty and poor distribution – even in places with
hunger and starvation
• Over nutrition?
• Decades of policies looking for cheap foods?
• Transfer of production and processing from the
home to third parties?
• Is there a correlation between the % of processed
food and obesity?
40
What can we learn from zoonoses and food borne
diseases?
• The increases in food borne incidences (perhaps better
said mini-epidemics) is perhaps an indicator that
something is wrong with the food system – a sign of ill
health
• We over blow our fear from the new plague
• In part because our responses tend to be over
reactions costing millions and are largely ineffective
• In fact our reactions are generally good at
maintaining a pathogen
41
What can we learn from zoonoses and food borne
diseases?
• Most of all the entry, maintenance and spread of
pathogens is related to human behaviour
• Conscious and unconscious rule breakers
• Understanding the institutional environment that they
operate in will give us clues to effective entry points
• This needs the combination of natural and social
sciences skills
42
Key messages
• Understand the context – the food system
• Establish what is driving the institutional environment of
the food system
• Determine at which points in the food system the
institutional environment is weak
• Investigate the economics and social aspects of human
behaviour at the weak points
• Link this with biological investigations of pathogens
• Separate biosecurity into biocontainment and
bioexclusion in order to define public and private
roles
LCIRAH
43
Protecting livestock to protect people
Through a people centred approach with
strong technical leadership