Agricultural policies and food supplies

1. Agricultural policies and food supplies Mobilizing the Food Chain for Health Food Chain Network Meeting October 25-26 2012

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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)

5. 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?

6. 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.

7. 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