Food PolicyPub Date : 2025-07-25DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102916
Rahman Md. Mostafizur , Khatun Mst. Asma , Moinul Islam , Tatsuyoshi Saijo , Koji Kotani
{"title":"Does future design induce people to make a persistent change to sustainable food consumption?","authors":"Rahman Md. Mostafizur , Khatun Mst. Asma , Moinul Islam , Tatsuyoshi Saijo , Koji Kotani","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102916","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102916","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Adopting sustainable food consumption (SFC) is essential for addressing climate change, improving health outcomes and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, little is known about what encourages people to make a lasting shift to SFC. This research considers a future design (FD) approach where people are asked to think about a problem and to act through taking a perspective of future generations, investigating the question “how does the FD approach impact food consumption?” and the hypothesis “FD induces a lasting shift to SFC.” We employ a social experiment with three treatments of “control group,” “deliberation” and “FD,” collecting data on organic and nonorganic vegetable consumption with 300 households in Bangladesh over three months. In the control group, households report the consumption. In deliberation, they additionally deliberate among their family members to think of a vision, a mission and a strategy for the consumption. In the FD treatment, participants additionally consider the perspectives of past, current and future generations before deliberating on the same issues. Results indicate that FD affects people to have a sustained increase (decrease) in organic (nonorganic) vegetable consumption as compared to any other treatment, and the effect under FD is approximately twice as much as that under deliberation in magnitude and in each round. Overall, FD demonstrates a great potential for inducing people to make a persistent change to SFC.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":"135 ","pages":"Article 102916"},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144702728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Food PolicyPub Date : 2025-07-25DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102918
Kirara Homma , Abu Hayat Md. Saiful Islam , Masanori Matsuura-Kannari , Bethelhem Legesse Debela
{"title":"Weather shocks and child nutritional status in rural Bangladesh: Does labor allocation have a role to play?","authors":"Kirara Homma , Abu Hayat Md. Saiful Islam , Masanori Matsuura-Kannari , Bethelhem Legesse Debela","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102918","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102918","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Despite efforts to improve food and nutrient intake in the last decades, child undernutrition remains a challenge, particularly in rural areas of developing countries. Although household labor reallocation after weather shocks is an important ex-post strategy to mitigate weather-shock impacts, a comprehensive understanding of how households adjust their labor and its implications in the context of child health is lacking. We investigate how different forms of labor activity is associated with the impacts of rainfall shock on child nutritional status, using nationally representative panel data from rural households in Bangladesh, in conjunction with monthly precipitation and temperature data for the last three decades. We find that less rainfall during the main cropping season in the previous year worsens nutritional status of children under the age of five years, while less rainfall in the current year increases child nutrition. We also find heterogeneous associations of different types of labor with the identified linkages between rainfall shock and child nutritional status. While maternal off-farm self-employment plays a potential role in mitigating the negative impact of rainfall shortage, maternal on-farm labor may worsen child nutrition under rainfall shocks. We do not find any significant associations for household-level total labor time and other household members’ labor time. Our results therefore underscore the importance of providing sufficient off-farm employment opportunities for mothers and addressing maternal time constraints through targeted policies to cope with extreme weather and improve child nutrition.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":"135 ","pages":"Article 102918"},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144702729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Food PolicyPub Date : 2025-07-23DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102917
Vivek Pandey , Elangbam Kyamba Khanganba
{"title":"School milk programs and child nutrition: leveraging local governments and markets","authors":"Vivek Pandey , Elangbam Kyamba Khanganba","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102917","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102917","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The literature extensively documents the nutritional impact of School Milk Programs (SMPs) on school-going children. Nonetheless, a gap exists regarding the identification of mechanisms influencing the placement and implementation of SMPs. This paper presents new insights regarding the mediated role of local governments, parent-teacher associations (PTAs), and dairy cooperatives in connection with SMP’s association with child nutrition. This study utilizes exogenous historical variations in the establishment of village-level dairy cooperative societies and randomly assigned political reservations for women in Indian local governments to examine the relationship between SMPs and nutritional outcomes for school-going children. The findings indicate a 14.6% drop in the probability of HAZ score falling below −2σ and a 14.3% reduction in the likelihood of being underweight among the school-going children. The mediated effects of women’s reservations in local governments and the presence of PTAs on the z-scores of height-for-age and weight-for-age are 0.27σ and 0.19σ, respectively.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":"135 ","pages":"Article 102917"},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144686741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Food PolicyPub Date : 2025-07-14DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102915
Zhen Guan , Yang He , Xinjie Shi , Chen Zhang
{"title":"The long-term impact of the nutrition improvement program on children’s education outcomes: Empirical evidence from rural China","authors":"Zhen Guan , Yang He , Xinjie Shi , Chen Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102915","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102915","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Existing research on nutritional assistance largely focuses on its short-term effects. Using data from the 2019 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), this research investigates the long-term effects, underlying mechanisms, and cost-effectiveness of the Nutrition Improvement Program (NIP), a widespread school meal program in rural China, on students’ educational attainment. Our findings indicate that the NIP significantly increases the likelihood of students attending high school and college and extends their years of education. These results are robust across various sensitivity tests. The NIP improves educational attainment by enhancing students’ health, cognitive abilities, non-cognitive skills, and parental educational expectations. Furthermore, the impact is more pronounced among students with lower parental education levels and those in western regions. A cost-benefit analysis shows that the economic returns of the NIP surpass its costs, highlighting its substantial economic efficiency. This research underscores the importance of school meal programs as a human capital investment and provides valuable insights for policymakers in China and other developing nations seeking to address educational inequality and improve population health and well-being.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":"135 ","pages":"Article 102915"},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144614655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Food PolicyPub Date : 2025-07-11DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102904
Mkupete Jaah Mkupete
{"title":"Is agricultural technology adoption effective in reducing multidimensional poverty? Panel data evidence from Tanzania","authors":"Mkupete Jaah Mkupete","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102904","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102904","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper assesses the impact of agricultural technology adoption on poverty beyond headcount in Tanzania. Specifically, the paper examines the effects of adopting yield-increasing technologies, such as organic fertilizers and improved seeds, as well as risk-reducing technologies, including intercropping, on multidimensional poverty using panel data and an instrumental variable econometric approach. We find that the adoption of climate-smart technologies reduces the risk of a household being deprived in multiple non-monetary welfare dimensions. The largest impact on multidimensional poverty is achieved when these technologies are adopted in combination. Furthermore, adopting the full package of technologies has a more significant impact than adopting either a single technology or a combination of the two. The results also indicate that improved agricultural productivity and increased income from agricultural sales are key mechanisms through which CSA technologies reduce poverty. These findings underscore the importance of promoting bundled CSA adoption strategies to maximize poverty reduction and resilience among smallholder farmers.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":"135 ","pages":"Article 102904"},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144597565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Food PolicyPub Date : 2025-07-09DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102914
Bhagyashree Katare , Krystal L. Hodge
{"title":"Creating awareness and informing policy: Implications of Buzby and Hyman’s food loss estimates in the United States","authors":"Bhagyashree Katare , Krystal L. Hodge","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102914","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102914","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":"137 ","pages":"Article 102914"},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144580046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Food PolicyPub Date : 2025-07-03DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102913
William A. Masters
{"title":"Tracking the affordability of least-cost healthy diets helps guide intervention for food security and improved nutrition","authors":"William A. Masters","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102913","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102913","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This Policy Comment describes how the <em>Food Policy</em> article entitled “Cost and affordability of nutritious diets at retail prices: Evidence from 177 countries” (first published October 2020) and “Retail consumer price data reveal gaps and opportunities to monitor food systems for nutrition” (first published September 2021) advanced the use of least-cost benchmark diets to monitor and improve food security. Those papers contributed to the worldwide use of least-cost diets as a new diagnostic indicator of food access, helping to distinguish among causes of poor diet quality related to high prices, low incomes, or displacement by other food options, thereby guiding intervention toward universal access to healthy diets.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":"137 ","pages":"Article 102913"},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144548454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Food PolicyPub Date : 2025-07-01DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102905
Jonas Schmitt , Frank Offermann , Robert Finger
{"title":"The use of crop diversification in agricultural yield insurance products","authors":"Jonas Schmitt , Frank Offermann , Robert Finger","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102905","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102905","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Crop production is exposed to many sources of biotic and abiotic risks, such as extreme weather, pests, and diseases. Crop diversification and crop insurance are both important risk management strategies for farmers. The two strategies are usually considered separately. Here, we propose to exploit potential synergies by including crop diversification in multiple crop yield insurance designs. We provide an ex-ante analysis to compare multiple-yield insurance, which covers the different crops together as a bundle, with single-yield insurances. To this end, we use historical farm-level yield observations for winter wheat, winter barley, winter rapeseed, sugar beet and grain maize in German agriculture (N = 113,463 historical farm-level yield observations during 1995–2019) and assess the implications for risk reduction, fair insurance premiums, and expected utility. In our analysis, we refer to the area-weighted and price-weighted revenues as the underlying for both insurance scenarios. We show that multiple-yield insurance is particularly attractive for highly risk-exposed farms because multiple-yield insurance has lower fair insurance premiums compared to insuring each crop separately. Moreover, the certainty equivalents in the multiple-yield insurance scenario are often higher than those in the single-yield insurances scenario, especially when the premium loadings are high. In addition, the fact that broader crop rotations and diversification are rewarded with lower premiums under multiple-yield insurance offers the potential to combine the overarching policy goals of agricultural risk management and diversification of agricultural landscapes.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":"134 ","pages":"Article 102905"},"PeriodicalIF":6.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144549555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}