1 Agricultural policies and food supplies Mobilizing the Food Chain for Health Food Chain Network Meeting October

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 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