The Effects of Farm Commodity and Retail Food Policies on Obesity and Economic Welfare in the United States

Abstract

gave us substantial assistance with some calculations, and two anonymous reviewers and participants at several workshops and conferences provided helpful comments and suggestions. We gratefully acknowledge these helpful contributions to this work. The views expressed here are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Can nutrition be promoted through agriculture-led food price policies? A systematic review

“…Of these three studies, two were ex ante modelling studies, one from the Netherlands,11 one from the USA,12 13 and one was an ex post evaluation using econometric and regression analysis of a policy in Egypt 14. These three studies evaluated different policy scenarios in diverse settings with a range of health outcomes (table 2 Panel B).…”

“…The potential impacts of the removal of established farm subsidies (ie, output price policies) were modelled in two studies, one in the Netherlands11 and one in the USA,12 13 and the impact of a long-running public distribution system policy in Egypt was evaluated in the final study 14. Two studies reported change in body weight as their health outcome,12–14 and one study estimated change in disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) and life expectancy 11…”

“…The models suggested that removal of the subsidy policy which would act to increase the price of grains would modestly reduce average adult weight by 0.11 kg/year 12 13…”

U.S. Food Policy and Obesity

“…Miao, Beghin and Jensen (2010) reported similar findings for taxing the sugar content of foods. Okrent and Alston (2012) developed a model of the U.S. farm and food industry expressly designed for analyzing such questions. Key findings from this work are in keeping with economic intuition.…”

“…Such policies generally are found to have small effects on food consumption, obesity and overall nutrition and health; to be regressive; and to enhance government revenue but sometimes with large social welfare costs (e.g., Kuchler, Tegene, and Harris 2004;Chouinard et al 2007). However, Okrent and Alston (2012) found that taxes on calories would be comparatively efficient as a means of reducing obesity, and would yield significant net social benefits. Some have proposed changes to food and nutrition programs, to limit the use of food stamps (SNAP benefits) to certain types of 'healthy' foods, but economic arguments suggest that such changes may introduce more problems than they would solve ).…”