Linking Subsidies for Agriculture and Food to Dietary Styles: Estimates for Switzerland

Abstract

Agriculture contributes substantially to global greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. Current agricultural policies tolerate these impacts and sometimes even aggravate them through subsidies for unsustainable production systems and products. Against this background, we explore the resulting transfers to agriculture and food associated with different dietary styles. Using data from Switzerland, we consider both direct transfers through government subsidies and indirect transfers through toleration of environmental impacts and costs. Gross transfers were quantified based on existing studies that (i) define eight dietary styles in terms of the quantity of the different product groups, (ii) allocate subsidies for agriculture to product groups, (iii) allocate environmental impacts to product groups using life cycle assessment (LCA) methods, and (iv) estimate external costs of agriculture using politically endorsed expenditures for damage avoidance. To quantify net transfers associated with the dietary styles, we subtracted individual tax contributions from the subsidies received and average external costs individually suffered from external costs caused. We found that the gross transfers from government to agriculture range from about CHF 500 to about CHF 2000 annually per taxpayer/consumer depending on dietary styles. Net transfers per taxpayer/consumer range from about CHF −1000 to about CHF 1000 depending on dietary style and income. The estimates highlight that current policies strongly privilege and thereby also endorse environmentally problematic dietary styles over more environmentally friendly ones, contradicting official strategies and targets in the domains of environment and public health.