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The need for, and objectives of, a food policy and Ministry of Food are considered by reference to research investigating the views of the food chain, and the relevant literature. It is suggested that over half of the food chain would welcome a food policy and Ministry of Food, the reasons for these views and the possible effects of these suggestions being discussed. A number of contradictions in Government policy relating to food are considered. Even if the need for a food policy/Ministry of Food is agreed, their objectives and roles need to be clearly established, and this could be a major stumbling‐block to their implementation. These conclusions are based on research involving 683 farmers, companies and retailers in the food chain.

The aim of this paper is to understand young consumers' (students') opinions about the mandatory labeling policy for genetically modified foods (GMF), and in-depth analysis of determinants of young consumer support for this policy.

Consumer survey was conducted by using a face to face interview method for a sample of 298 students. The hypotheses of this study are risk benefit perceptions and concerns about the current labeling policy likely to determine students' support for mandatory labeling of GMF. The questionnaire employed for the survey mainly focuses on the questions such as students' perceptions about GMF and opinions about current labeling policy in India. Probit model was used to analyze the determinants of young consumers' support for this policy.

The authors found that 58 per cent of the students support mandatory labeling of GMF and 39 per cent of the students are willing to pay 10-15 per cent more price for foods under this policy. Young consumers who have knowledge about GM technology are more likely to support this policy. Young consumers' dissatisfaction with the current labeling, and demand for information about food production have a positive influence on support for this policy. Those young consumers who use food labels regularly are likely to support this policy and young consumers' trust in university for truthful information about GMF has a positive influence. Whereas, students' risk benefits perception and moral concerns about GMF have an insignificant influence.

Limitations of the study are that it focused only on university students and used small sample size. Hence, further studies are recommended for overall consumer representative sample.

The findings of this study will be helpful for further research on consumers and mandatory labeling of GMF in India, and also provide some useful information for marketing of GMF in India.

To the authors' knowledge this is the first study that analyzes the determinants of young consumers' support for mandatory labeling policy for GMF in India.

This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of “choice” as it appears in UK policy documents relating to food and public health. A dominant policy approach to improving public health has been health promotion and health education with the intention to change behaviour and encourage healthier eating. Given the emphasis on evidence-based policy making within the UK, the continued abstraction of choice without definition or explanation provoked us to conduct this analysis, which focuses on 1976 to the present.

The technique of discourse analysis was used to analyse selected food policy documents and to trace any shifts in the discourses of choice across policy periods and their implications in terms of governance and the individualisation of responsibility.

We identified five dominant repertoires of choice in UK food policy over this period: as personal responsibility, as an instrument of change, as an editing tool, as a problem and freedom of choice. Underpinning these is a continued reliance on the rational actor model, which is consonant with neoliberal governance and its constructions of populations as body of self-governing individuals. The self-regulating, self-governing individual is obliged to choose as a condition of citizenship.

This analysis highlights the need for a more sophisticated approach to understanding “choice” in the context of public health and food policy in order to improve diet outcomes in the UK and perhaps elsewhere.

This is the first comprehensive analysis of the discourse of choice in UK food policy.

Mexico has an economic dynamic mostly associated with low added value sectors; regions of Guerrero and Michoacan highlight at national and even international levels in the agri-food production, however, they present substantial lags in their development and competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the innovation policy in the agri-food sector of these regions through its regulations and local policy.

The present work has a qualitative approach through a case study with the treatment of units of analysis (UA), in which innovation policy in the agri-food sector as main UA, whose sources of interpretation have been direct observation and documentary sources such as laws and the guiding instruments of the regional public policy on innovation and the agri-food sector.

This paper identifies severe institutional weaknesses, a lack of incentives and structures for generating certainty and innovation capabilities in the agri-food sector. Both regions have weak and poorly articulated institutions in their innovation policy, with few incentives and scarcely defined property rights tending to increase uncertainty among the actors participating in the agri-food sector, although the economic dynamics of both regions is mostly associated with that sector, therefore, the low development and lack of competitiveness are a direct consequence of a minimum priority of innovation policy.

Our research is useful for the academic sphere by contributing to applied knowledge on the implications of innovation policy at the sectoral level on the development and competitiveness of regions, particularly in an emerging country such as Mexico, allowing to generate bridges gaps between theory and practice.

The main contribution is for policymakers, allowing them to compare and facilitate a better design of regulatory and public policy instruments that enable them to address and enhance economic vocations through innovation for regional development.

The research focuses on a debate at the regional level on the institutional limitations of promoting innovation through public policy. This study approaches economic and political processes having as empirical evidence of two undeveloped Mexican regions that stand out internationally in agri-food production. These regions have sectoral dynamics inserted in global value chains but have not achieved a local articulation, which has negatively affected their competitiveness and development. The cases of Guerrero and Michoacan are examples of regions like many others, which present diverse institutional weaknesses and lack of incentives associated with innovation policy that limit the development and articulation of their territorial capabilities.

Purpose – This chapter explores the way in which the food crisis of 2008 and issues of food security have impinged upon debates about agriculture and agricultural support in Scotland.

Methodology/approach – Adopting a discourse analytic approach, a series of pivotal Scottish agricultural policy documents produced between 2001 and 2010 are examined. Official agricultural policy discourse over time is traced as is the nature of that discourse as the food crisis impinged upon and altered the context of debates about agricultural policy reform.

Findings – The chapter finds that prior to the food crisis, agricultural policy documents were dominated by neoliberal discourse that emphasised the importance of agriculture becoming more oriented towards the market and by a growing emphasis on multifunctionality. But after the food crisis, the dominant political rhetoric utilised different arguments to defend agricultural subsidies and argue for a continuing role for the state in perpetuating agricultural production. It is suggested, however, that the key factor in this retrenchment to continued farm support was not the food crisis per se; rather, it was the intersection of issues of food security with the rise to power of the Scottish nationalists and their resistance to the UK's neoliberal position.

Originality/value – The chapter provides the key insight that, for Scotland at least, the food crisis did not spark a change in domestic agricultural policies, but rather became an argumentative resource that was opportunistically deployed in established debates about agricultural policy reform.

This chapter places the discussion of trade and food security in a more general macroeconomic context.

This chapter uses historical analysis to briefly trace the debate on economy-wide policies, starting with the 1943 United Nations (UN) Conference on Food and Agriculture that led to the creation of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1945. A general economic framework is used to organize the different channels through which macroeconomic policies may affect food and nutrition security.

Examples of monetary, financial, fiscal, and exchange rate policies are presented, along with their implications for food and nutrition security.

The current debates about trade and food security must be placed in the context of the overall macroeconomic framework: a single trade policy may have different impacts depending on its interactions with other macroeconomic policies and structural factors.

Purpose – This chapter introduces the book collection and sets the theoretical framework for the subsequent chapters.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach of the book is to re-interpret major challenges to global agriculture – particularly climate change and the food crisis of 2008 – as demonstrating shocks to the resilience of global food systems.

Findings – Using resilience to shocks as a key quality of food systems enables recent crises to be understood as central to the ongoing dynamics of food systems rather than simply atypical events. Alongside climate change and food security, other potential shocks are identified: biosecurity, energy, financial and volcanic.

Originality/value – This framework establishes new criteria for examining the potential merit of multifunctional and neo-liberal policy regimes with world food systems.

This article addresses the health problems of Puerto Rico by looking at them from the perspective of food and agriculture, underlining that there is a substantial policy divide between agricultural policy and health. This reframing insists that we attend to the relationships between agriculture and food policy in order to offer new ways to think about the prevalence of so-called “lifestyle diseases” in Puerto Rico.

This study draws on a forensic research strategy that follows the framing of food and agriculture policies through a three-step diagnosis process using a mixed method approach. This three-dimensional analysis focuses on (1) history, (2) statistics, and (3) policies and legislations.

The disconnection between health and agriculture policies materializes (1) throughout 19-20^th century agricultural developments, (2) across the current agriculture organization, and, (3) through legislations and policies. A dominant understanding of agriculture as a predominantly economic and trade-driven sector fuels this policy divide.

This article calls for a new policy imagination that will allow for a re-conceptualization of agriculture policies as health policies. In order to bring forward this policy imagination, this article suggests returning to ideas that precede the production and articulation of the policy divide through a re-appropriation of Latin American indigenous knowledge and ideas. As such, the Andean concept of Buen Vivir represents a particularly promising path explored in this article.

The purpose of this paper is to model the distribution stage of the public distribution system (PDS) and optimize the inventory policy during this stage of the PDS to address some of the inefficiencies present in the system. This study models this supply chain as a multistage supply chain consisting of storage depots, issue centers, fair price shops and card holders.

A two-stage modeling approach is used to model the distribution stage in the PDS. In the first stage, the authors developed a simulation model for periodic review-based stock policy with appropriate assumptions. This helped minimize the total supply chain cost (TSCC). The TSCC consists of three cost elements, namely, ordering cost, holding cost and shortage cost. These three cost elements, in turn, depend on inventory policy parameters, such as review periods and base stock levels, at various echelons. In the second stage, a Genetic Algorithm based optimization approach was used.

A set of optimal policy parameters was identified. It is observed that base stock levels at issue centers are higher as compared to those in the FPS and the TSCC is less in scenario, when backorder cost is equal to the holding cost.

Present study will be useful to policy makers in improving PDS performance. This optimization of inventory policies helps actors in the PDS supply chain to choose appropriate policy parameters in the present inventory policy so as to reduce the overall distribution cost.

Unlike the previous researchers who examined the PDS from the social security perspective and tried to address specific problems to improve functioning of the PDS, this study looked at the problem as a supply chain-related problem and optimized the inventory parameters in one of the subsets of the PDS supply chain.

Many grain exporting/importing countries implement temporary trade policies to intervene in grain trade volume during food crises. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of Chinese soybean trade policies on the domestic soybean market during the food crisis.

A Markov switching error correction model is constructed for the empirical analysis. Market integration, market equilibrium and market stability are compared among three regimes: the normal state, crisis state and post-crisis state. In order to reduce the disturbance from external markets factors on the results, the US soybean market is selected as a control group in that it did not use any soybean intervention trade policies during the food crisis.

The empirical results indicate that China’s temporary soybean trade policies lead to a decrease in market integration between domestic and international soybean markets and a reduction in domestic soybean market stability.

It is the first time that China’s soybean market is selected as a sample and case on this issue. The regime shifting non-linear model could be more applicable because there exists a non-linear transmission relationship between grains markets during food crises. The results imply that China’s temporary soybean trade policies do not improve market integration and stability. China should reconsider implementing soybean trade intervening policies to protect the domestic market and safeguard food security.