Search results

Using cross-sectional household survey data, this paper aims to determine the impact of food price increases on poverty in Indonesia.

This paper uses the quadratic almost ideal demand system applied to the 2013 Indonesian household survey data. The impact of food price increase on household welfare is calculated using a welfare measure, compensating variation.

Three food groups with the most outstanding price impact on poverty, rice, vegetables and fish, were studied. The 20% increase in the price of each food group causes an increase in the headcount ratio by 1.360 points (rice), 0.737 points (vegetables) and 0.636 points (fish). Maintaining food price stability for these food groups is very important because the more the price increases, the more the impact on poverty. Food price policies in rural areas are also more critical than in urban areas because the impact of food price increases in rural areas is higher.

This paper does not consider the positive impact of rising food prices on food-producing households.

Implementing appropriate poverty alleviation policies through food policies for main food groups and social protection.

Promoting rural development policies and agricultural growth.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical results regarding the impact of domestic food prices increase on poverty in Indonesia.

The purpose of this study is to create an opportunity to see what is wrong with agriculture and provide an opportunity for much needed change. It identified who benefits or bears the pains of food prices increase, examines the causes and effects of the increase and discusses policy responses by various countries and the implications of such interventions.

Secondary data were employed and analyzed through simple descriptive statistics.

The results of the findings showed that increase in food prices affects the nutrition of not only the poor but also the working and middle classes. It limits the food consumption of the poor and worsens the dietary quality. It revealed that foods are available in many countries but millions of people have no purchasing power. Some of the driving forces of price increase include expansion of biofuels, high demand for food, and high cost of food production, climate change, unfavorable government policy and underinvestment in agricultural innovation. Contrary to the opinion that increased food prices benefit farmers, this study observed that the marketers benefit most. High costs of inputs and inflation make it difficult or impossible to produce by smallholder farmers.

The recent increase in food prices around the world has raised serious concerns about food and nutrition security of people. As part of intervention, several countries have banned grain exports and tariff reductions on imported foods in others. The export restrictions and import subsidies have harmful effects on import‐dependent trading partners and give wrong incentives to farmers by reducing their potential market size. The price controls employed by some countries reduce farmers' incentives to produce more food.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the impact of the global food crisis of 2007–2008 on Tanzania’s real retail-food prices and on the cost of the typical food basket. The methodological approach is to compare real retail-food prices and food-basket costs in 20 regions of Tanzania with global food prices. The findings are that the global food crisis of 2007–2008 did not significantly cause food prices in Tanzania to increase and that domestic factors were more important drivers of food prices and food-basket costs. The social implication is that the impacts of the global food crisis on food prices and food-basket costs in developing countries may have been overestimated in previous research and the policy responses of the global community may have been inappropriate.

This chapter examines the long-run behavior of real food prices and the impact of food prices on poor and vulnerable households. It also examines the price policy responses of governments to high and volatile food prices, and the impact of food prices and policies on the poorest in the society.

We focus on the impacts of food price changes on individual households, particularly on those living near the poverty line using the standard World Bank measure of poverty at US$1.25 per day in purchasing power.

We found that the effect of an exogenous increase in food prices typically raises poverty in the short run when many poor households are net buyers of grain and wage rates do not have time to fully adjust. In the long run, higher food prices increase food output and raise the wage rates of poor households from unskilled off-farm labor. The end result is that higher food prices can contribute to long-run poverty reduction.

Combining the impact of the price changes and government policy responses allows an assessment of the overall impact of higher world food prices on poverty.

This paper aims to investigate consumers’ demand patterns for products with nutritional benefits and products with no nutritional benefits across processed healthy and unhealthy foods. This paper integrates price changes (i.e. increases and decreases) into a demand model and quantifies their relative impact on the quantity of food purchased. First, how demand patterns vary across processed healthy and unhealthy products is investigated; second, how demand patterns vary across nutrition-benefited (NB) products and non-nutrition-benefited (NNB) products is examined; and third, how consumers respond to price increases and decreases for NB across processed healthy and unhealthy foods is investigated.

Here, a demand model quantifying scenarios for price changes in consumer food choice behaviour is proposed, and controlled for heterogeneity at household, store and brand levels.

Consumers exhibit greater sensitivity to price decreases and less sensitivity to price increases across both processed healthy and unhealthy foods. Moreover, the research shows that consumers’ demand sensitivity is greater for NNB products than for NB products, supporting our prediction that NB products have higher brand equity than NNB products. Furthermore, the research shows that consumers are more responsive to price decreases than price increases for processed healthy NB foods, but more responsive to price increases than price decreases for unhealthy NB foods. The findings suggest that consumers exhibit a desirable demand pattern for products with nutritional benefits.

Although studies on the effects of nutritional benefits on demand have proliferated in recent years, researchers have only estimated their impact without considering the effect of price changes. This paper contributes by examining consumers’ price sensitivity for NB products across processed healthy and unhealthy foods based on consumer scanner data, considering both directionalities of price changes.

This paper investigates the effects of the total abolition of all forms of agricultural subsidies to producers and border tariffs on the prices of staple cereals.

The authors use the GTAP global economy-wide model and focus on 27 countries and 8 regions. The GTAP database that is used contains information on budgetary transfers to producers and market price support such as domestic price support, tariffs, export subsidies, quotas on exports or imports and other border measures.

The removal of subsidies is estimated to significantly increase the prices of wheat and other cereal grains in Japan, paddy rice in Malaysia and Indonesia, processed rice in Malaysia and Indonesia and wheat in Brazil and India. When border tariffs are removed, cereal prices are projected to fall in several countries, but the decline is more pronounced for wheat in Kenya and Japan, other cereal grains in South Korea and all staples in Nepal.

The alternative scenarios on the removal of agricultural subsidies in all agricultural sectors and the elimination of border tariffs are purely speculative as the analysis ignores important political economy considerations of agricultural and food policy reforms.

The findings from this study point to the importance of implementing additional policy measures to mitigate the possible negative effect of repurposing the support to agriculture and ensure the food security and welfare of those categories of buyers who heavily depend on the price of staple food for their livelihoods.

This study’s findings confirm that the elimination of agricultural subsidies would impact global food security directly by making staple food less affordable to the poorest and indirectly by decreasing the available household budget for other presumably more nutritious food groups. Consequently, it is expected that these price increases could make segments of the world population poorer, particularly the net-food buyers due to a decline in their real income.

The authors assess the impact of removing the subsidies on the economy in a comprehensive way, particularly given the recent policy focus on net zero emissions and Sustainable Development Goals that include healthy foods. The authors also consider the counter effects of tariff reduction on this, which is price-reducing.

Purpose – This chapter discusses farmers' and policy responses to global shocks, specifically in terms of soaring prices for agricultural products in 2007. We discuss whether these shocks influenced Norwegian agricultural policy and Norwegian farmers perceptions of their situation.

Design/methodology/approach – As a background, we review trends in agricultural policy post-World War II both globally and in Norway, including empirical evidence for the changing global situation of agriculture. This chapter also analyses farmers' perceptions of their situation from 2002 to 2010 in light of these changing reality and policy response.

Findings – One immediate effect of increasing food prices was increasing incomes for food exporters and food exporting countries, an increase which also trickled down to the producers. Simultaneously, production costs rose as many input-factors became more expensive. In Norway, we saw the emergence of more optimism among farmers, more willingness to invest in farming (as opposed to a focus on cost reduction), and clear signs of a ‘repositioned productivism’.

Originality/value – In this chapter, we present an analysis of the relationship between global events, agricultural restructuring and local responses. The chapter also discusses the case of productivism along the lines drawn by Burton and Wilson (this volume), and argues that in the Norwegian system we can indeed see traces of an emerging ‘repositioned productivism’.

This chapter examines whether the supply of food is large enough to feed an increasing world population for the 2012–2050 period. Special attention is given to the implications of bioenergy production on global and regional food security.

For this analysis, a global food security simulation model was developed to determine if the global and regional supply of food, in terms of calories, is large enough to meet the demand and also to estimate the impact on food prices.

This chapter found that the global supply of food in terms of calories is insufficient to satisfy food demand in 2050, with food shortages especially significant in Africa.

The estimated shortage of food may result in significant food-price inflation by 2050.

To understand the political economy of export restrictions for grain commodities in Vietnam and India.

Two theoretical models were developed (one for each country) to analyze government policies for export restrictions in Vietnam and India based on price fluctuations. In Vietnam, there was one choice variable – export tariffs. In India, there were two choice variables – export tariffs and procurements. In both cases, the elite were assumed to maximize expected rents.

Export restrictions have become an important feature of trade policy in Vietnam and India and are unlikely to be eliminated in the foreseeable future because to do so would be costly both politically and economically to local elites. The impact of food price increases can be particularly large given the importance of loss aversion.

Understanding export restrictions as the outcome of a political-economic calculation is important because it suggests that efforts to limit export restrictions in countries like Vietnam and India are unlikely to be successful.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a modelling approach that enables the analysis of long-term food security policies. Specifically, the authors explore the effect of China’s agricultural domestic support on its agricultural and food market by also considering the impact of incomplete price transmission.

The authors extend the standard Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) modelling framework. First, the authors incorporate incomplete price transmission into the GTAP model by generating tariff-equivalent price transmission elasticities. Second, the authors improve the current representation of China’s agricultural domestic support in the GTAP model and the underlying database by considering the production requirements and the trade-distorting effect of different policy instruments. Running a set of simulations, the authors examine first how the incorporation of incomplete price transmission affects the model’s results and second how increased agricultural domestic support affects China’s agricultural and food market accounting for incomplete price transmission.

Considering incomplete price transmission mitigates the domestic price increases as responses to high international agricultural prices, which also lead to an increase in China’s trade deficit and prohibits net food sellers from receiving high prices. In the long term, an increase in China’s agricultural domestic support to its World Trade Organisation de minimis commitment level would increase domestic agricultural production and reduce its demand pressure on the international market.

This paper contributes to the literature by examining the impact of increased agricultural domestic support on the domestic market while innovatively accounting for incomplete food price transmission. The authors combine econometric estimated price transmission elasticities and an extended GTAP framework to underscore the importance of enhancing the model’s ability in accounting for incomplete price transmission when analysing the impact of agricultural policies.