Food Prices and the Affordability of Healthy Diets: New Data and Methods to Inform Agriculture, Food Systems, Safety Nets and Nutrition Programs
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 7, 2022 3:45 PM - 5:45 PM (EST)
- Chair: William Masters, Tufts University
Impacts of COVID Severity and Climate Shocks on Food Prices around the World
Abstract
Monthly variation in food price data from national sources, market information systems and early warning systems can be combined across countries to identify spatial and temporal variation in the cost and affordability of healthy diets. This paper builds on previous work to describe how these data and methods reveal significant cost increases associated with COVID mortality, the stringency of lockdowns, and a variety of climate shocks. These changes in retail food prices are uncorrelated with international farm commodity prices, and are most plausibly caused by increased labor costs or disruption of storage and transport to retail outlets.Confidence Intervals and Long-Run Trends in Food Prices, the Cost of Basic Needs, and Global Poverty
Abstract
Measuring long-run changes and comparing living standards across very different countries can be facilitated by the establishment of absolute poverty lines based on the least-cost ways of attaining a minimum standard of health as well as housing and other requisites. This paper builds upon methods pioneered by Allen (2017) and extended by Moatsos (2020) as well as OECD (2021) to reveal that, in terms of affordability of basic foods, global poverty in the 19th century was lower than the estimates that use all prices in the economy as in the World Bank’s dollar-a-day global poverty line. At the same time in recent years, most countries have lower affordability of basic foods than poverty in terms of the dollar-a-day approach. Moreover, in terms of poverty lines that add non-food components on top of the EAT-Lancet reference diet, global poverty estimates are substantially higher than what standard extreme poverty measures provide, and for 2018 global poverty is estimated at about 31% or 2.4 billion people. When partially accounting for uncertainty -using a modeling approach- the level at which the global poverty statistics with a 95% confidence do not exclude individuals that may be poor, the global poverty rises to almost 35% or about 2.7 billion people in 2018.What the Potato Did for Us: A Dual Approach to the Changing Value of Nutrients over the Seasons
Abstract
Potatoes were introduced into Europe during the seventeenth century and became an important food by the eighteenth. It is widely believed that the potato made an important contribution to European nutrition, but how exactly? Was the potato a cheap source of calories or did its contribution lie elsewhere? This paper addresses those questions by collecting the prices of many foods for eighteenth England, including vegetable prices in different seasons. Linear programming is used to compute least cost diets satisfying nutritional requirements. These diets are representative of what many people actually ate. Winter and summer models are computed to capture the large seasonal swings in vegetable prices. The dual linear programs are calculated to determine the shadow prices of nutrients. Removing foods (like potatoes in the winter) and re-computing the model shows the contribution of the foods to the diets and maps out the changing value of nutrients. The consumption of potatoes did not lower the value of calories; rather, potatoes lowered the value of vitamin C in the winter (but not in the summer when fresh vegetables were cheap).JEL Classifications
- I1 - Health
- Q1 - Agriculture