P. Canning, Sarah Rehkamp, A. Waters, Hamideh Etemadnia
{"title":"The Role of Fossil Fuels in the U.S. Food System and the American Diet","authors":"P. Canning, Sarah Rehkamp, A. Waters, Hamideh Etemadnia","doi":"10.22004/AG.ECON.262187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22004/AG.ECON.262187","url":null,"abstract":"The food system accounts for a large share of fossil fuel consumption in the United States, and energy accounts for a substantial and highly variable share of food costs. This intersection between food and energy markets suggests that public and private decisions affecting one market will have spillover effects in the other. For example, would increasing the share of population having diets that align with Federal dietary guidance reduce fossil fuel use in the U.S. food system? Would a carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) tax improve diet quality? To address these issues, we use the most recent data available to integrate the material-flows accounting framework adopted by the United Nations Statistical Commission into the existing food-system accounting structure of the ERS Food Dollar accounts. Then, we use mathematical optimization to model healthy diets. Our research indicates that U.S. agri-food industries are more sensitive to energy price changes than nonfood industries. We find that in 2007, fossil fuels linked to U.S. food consumption produced 13.6 percent of all fossil fuel CO 2 emissions economywide. Our study of alternative diets shows there are many ways to meet the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. If Americans made a minimal dietary shift to eat healthy, we find food-system energy use would decrease by 3 percent. By making greater changes from current consumption, we find food- system energy use could be reduced by as much as 74 percent. A tax on CO 2 emissions from fossil fuels would increase the cost of a typical meal by an average of 1.7 percent, with estimates ranging between 0.2 and 5.4 percent. ----- Errata: On March 8, 2017, ERS corrected a few errors made in the calculation of data reported in Figure 14 (p. 32) and in the calories columns in Table 5 (p. 34). References to these data were updated in the text on pages 31- 33 and p. 42. Also, a superscript on q on p. 89 was changed from a 1 to 0.","PeriodicalId":348588,"journal":{"name":"Economic Research Report","volume":"106 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116941953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"THE IMPACT OF BIG-BOX STORES ON RETAIL FOOD PRICES AND THE CONSUMER PRICE INDEX","authors":"Ephraim S. Leibtag","doi":"10.22004/AG.ECON.7238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22004/AG.ECON.7238","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past 10 years, the growth of nontraditional retail food outlets has transformed the food market landscape, increasing the variety of shopping and food options available to consumers, as well as price variation in retail food markets. This report focuses on these dynamics and how they affect food price variation across store format types. The differences in prices across store formats are especially noteworthy when compared with standard measures of food price inflation over time. Over the past 20 years, annual food price changes, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), have averaged just 3 percent per year, while food prices for similar products can vary by more than 10 percent across store formats at any one point in time. Since the current CPI for food does not fully take into account the lower price option of nontraditional retailers, a gap exists between price change as measured using scanner data versus the CPI estimate, even for the relatively low food inflation period of 1998-2003.","PeriodicalId":348588,"journal":{"name":"Economic Research Report","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129878693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A. Cattaneo, R. Claassen, R. Johansson, M. Weinberg
{"title":"Flexible Conservation Measures on Working Land: What Challenges Lie Ahead?","authors":"A. Cattaneo, R. Claassen, R. Johansson, M. Weinberg","doi":"10.22004/AG.ECON.7248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22004/AG.ECON.7248","url":null,"abstract":"From 1985 to 2002, most Federal conservation dollars going to farm operators have been to retire land from crop production. Yet most U.S. farmland (850 million acres) remains in active production. The Farm Security and Rural Investment (FSRI) Act of 2002 sharply increased conservation funding and earmarked most of the increase for working-land payment programs (WLPPs). The design and implementation of WLPPs will largely determine the extent to which environmental goals are achieved and whether they are cost effective. We simulate potential environmental gains as well as adjustments in agricultural production, price, and income associated with various WLPP features to illustrate tradeoffs arising from WLPP design and implementation. Competitive bidding with the use of environmental indices to rank producers for enrollment is most cost effective. Payments based on past conservation will help support farm incomes, but limit the amount of additional environmental benefit that can be generated under a fixed budget.","PeriodicalId":348588,"journal":{"name":"Economic Research Report","volume":"113 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132004056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}