Public policies that regulate the promotion or sale of unhealthy food and beverages in schools are relevant to prevent obesity in children and adolescents. However, the relationship between food and beverage laws within schools and obesity in Brazilian adolescents needs further study. Thus, this study aims to evaluate the association between laws that restrict the sale of food and beverages in school cafeterias and obesity in adolescents from public and private schools in Brazilian capitals. Data were provided by the ERICA study, which followed a cross-sectional school-based approach. The sample consisted of adolescents aged between 12 and 17 years (n = 19,024) from Brazilian capitals (n = 27) enrolled in schools that sell food and beverages in their dependence (n = 486). The dependent variable was the presence of obesity, and the main effect was the coverage of laws restricting the sale of food and beverages in school cafeterias. Data analysis was carried out using multilevel logistic regression models. Adolescents covered by laws restricting the sale of food and beverages in school cafeterias had an 11 % lower chance of obesity (adjusted OR = 0.89; 95 % CI 0.88 – 0.91). In conclusion, laws restricting the sale of food and beverages inside schools were associated with a decrease in the chance of obesity in adolescents in Brazilian state capitals.

Poverty alleviation products are made by impoverished producers and marketed as such to improve producers’ returns. We implement an online discrete choice experiment on rice in China to explore consumer preference for products specifically labelled as poverty alleviation products that represent multiple dimensions of poverty. We also differentiate the nature of public and private goods in terms of poverty alleviation products. Compared to products with unknown producer income, rice produced by impoverished producers with the lowest income attracts a higher willingness to pay (WTP). Poor women producers lead to the highest WTP compared to poor senior producers and producers with disabilities. Offering additional income information after revealing types of impoverished producers may not continuously improve WTP. However, presenting the private good attributes supplements the value of public good characteristics. Our analysis provides implications on how to combat poverty through the market, and policymakers may consider a complete labelling scheme to facilitate the development of poverty alleviation products.

Farmers’ behavior towards sustainable agricultural production is key to reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture and conserving biodiversity. We investigate the causal effect of culture on pro-environmental behaviors of farmers, and how policy instruments interact with culture to influence behavior. We exploit a unique natural experiment in Switzerland, which consists of two parts. First, there is an inner-Swiss cultural border between German- and French-speaking farmers who share the same natural environment, economy, and institutions, but differ culturally in their norms and values. Second, we exploit the effects of an agri-environmental policy reform that increased the monetary incentives to enroll land into biodiversity conservation. Using a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design and panel census data of all Swiss farms between 2010 and 2017, we show the following findings: Before the reform, farmers on the French-speaking side of the cultural border systematically enrolled less land into biodiversity conservation, compared to the German-speaking side. With increased monetary incentives following the policy reform in 2014, the French-speaking farmers enrolled relatively more additional land than the German-speaking farmers, shrinking the discontinuity. These findings indicate that while there exist cultural differences in pro-environmental behaviors, increased monetary incentives can reduce the importance of cultural differences. We discuss the implications for policy.

A widespread transition towards diets based on plant proteins as substitutes for animal proteins would contribute to food system sustainability. Such changes in consumer food choices can be fostered by public policy. We conducted a field experiment to test whether providing consumers with information regarding the negative consequences of meat consumption on the environment or health increases the substitution of animal-based proteins with plant-based proteins. The consumers had to make three meal selections online and consume the products at home, the first without exposure to information and the latter two after exposure to environmental or health information. One group of consumers served as the control and received no information. The results show that half of the consumers consumed meals with animal proteins in all three cases. Observational learning does not enhance the impact of the information intervention. However, for a sub-sample of consumers, environmental information increases the likelihood of consuming plant-based protein products. Overall, a short-term information policy does not appear to be sufficient for altering consumer behaviour regarding the consumption of animal proteins.

Despite the high value of the global chocolate market and the high profitability of the few multinational companies dominating it, the farmers growing cocoa beans remain poor. To change this, the two biggest cocoa producers, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, have jointly introduced the cocoa Living Income Differential (LID) policy. Charging higher prices for beans, the policy might help mitigate both poverty and the serious child labour and deforestation issues associated with cocoa farming, for which poverty is regarded as a root cause. Nevertheless, the design of the policy and the current lack of complementary measures raise doubts about the success and longevity of the policy and concerns about the implications for farmers in other countries. Accounting for the repercussions with international cocoa markets, this study quantifies the magnitude of the policy’s effects in the LID countries and elsewhere under several alternative configurations of policies and market reactions with the support of model simulations and finds increases in farmer income ranging from zero to sizeable. Discussing the policy’s potential impacts in the past and present context of the cocoa industry, it identifies a number of issues threatening its sustainability. Moreover, it underlines the strong dependence of the policy’s success on chocolate manufacturers’ support unless complemented by supply management measures. Such measures could limit the aggravation of, or even improve, the income situation for farmers elsewhere and the child labour and deforestation issues.

Development programs often rely on locally hired agents for service delivery, especially for interventions promoting agricultural practices, health, and nutrition. These agents are key to reaching underserved communities, especially women, with information and services around recommended practices. However, where societies are socially stratified, differences in ethnic identities between agents and beneficiaries may impact the effectiveness of information and service delivery and the uptake of recommended behaviors. We explore the salience of shared ethnic identity between agents and beneficiaries in promoting collective action using a field experiment with women’s self-help groups (SHGs) in India. We cross-randomize an information treatment and a group-agent shared ethnicity treatment at the SHG level. We measure impacts on individual group member information retention and willingness to contribute to a group-owned kitchen garden that could improve access to a diverse and nutritious diet. We find information retention is better when the group is matched with an agent lower in the ethnic hierarchy, but that agents higher in the hierarchy elicit greater individual contributions to the group-owned kitchen garden. We suggest some hypotheses for these seemingly contradictory results. Other characteristics like education, group cohesion and perceived agent ability also matter in changing knowledge and contribution. Our findings have important implications for effective program design and implementation, suggesting that implementers need to consider factors beyond the information content, target group and pedagogical mode of delivery for their strategies to be transformative.

The adoption of ISO 9001 quality certification for agri-food products may promote China’s relatively weak competitiveness in agri-food exports compared with industrial sectors. To explore this, we construct a panel data set of Chinese listed firms in agri-food sectors from 2000 to 2016 and use staggered Difference-in-Difference (DID) method to investigate the causal relationship between the adoption of ISO 9001 quality certification and agri-food exports. Three main findings are obtained in this study. First, we find that the adoption of ISO 9001 certification is positively associated with exports for agri-food listed firms. Second, we find that ISO 9001 certification promotes firms’ exports by increasing their innovation activities. Third, the export effects are greater for food (vs. non-food) manufacturing firms and non-SOEs (vs. SOEs). Identification problems are addressed by utilizing randomly generated certification status, two-part fractional regression model, controlling and excluding other quality certifications, etc. This study provides important implications for China’s food and agricultural development strategy, which emphasises the transition from quantity expansion to quality enhancement.

Coastal Indigenous people access and maintain customary connections to seafood for nourishment, livelihoods and Indigenous values. It is recognised that seafood contributes significantly to coastal Indigenous people’s diets. Despite this, global fisheries sectors have overlooked the role seafood plays in contributing to nutritional, health and wellbeing outcomes of coastal Indigenous communities. Global entities have called for ‘nutrition sensitive policies’ to improve nutritional, health and wellbeing outcomes. The aim of this study was to apply an ‘Indigenist’ inquiry lens and ‘yarning’ as a method to further understand from an Indigenous perspective how concepts of nutritional, health and wellbeing outcomes are represented and connected to seafood. Research involved 16 Aboriginal informants, six women and ten men from a fishing enterprise, arts and culture centre and a women’s centre with a connection to commercial and customary fishing in Maningrida community in the Northern Territory of Australia, 2019–2022. Key themes related to respecting of Elders, culture, country, Aboriginal nutrition, traditional medicinal knowledge, Aboriginal fishing enterprises, barriers to accessing seafood, lived experience, intergenerational knowledge transfer and interconnectedness. It is clear that fishing and access to seafood for Aboriginal people is a pathway to healthier food provision within coastal Indigenous communities. It needs to be recognised however, that Indigenous nutritional, health and wellbeing concepts and self-determination principles need to be integrated into ‘nutrition sensitive policies’ within fisheries and mariculture sectors.

We use five waves of household surveys in Uganda, from 1992/3 to 2011/12, to study income diversification and its effect on the welfare of rural and urban households during a period of sustained economic growth and poverty reduction, comparing the 1990s to the 2000s, and disaggregating by gender of the household head. Diversification is measured in terms of access to incomes from agriculture (farming), agricultural wage, self-employment (informal), wage employment and remittances. The analysis shows substantial and evolving variation in the effects of diversification across rural/urban locations and gender of the household head. Diversification became increasingly beneficial for welfare over time in rural areas, particularly for male headed households, but not for female headed households that diversified into agricultural wage employment. Diversification was also important for the livelihoods of urban households, but with large differences across male and female headed households likely reflecting differentials in the returns to non-agricultural employment. Remittances were associated with increasing welfare in the 2000s for all households, although the proportion of households receiving remittances has been declining.

Mongolia’s projected warming is far above the global average and could exceed 5 °C by the end of the century. The reliance on pastoral livestock and rainfed agriculture along with its fragile ecosystems put Mongolia’s economy at risk of adverse climate change impacts, particularly from climate extreme events. Eighty percent of Mongolia’s agricultural sector is concentrated in animal husbandry with around one third of the population relying on this livelihood. Beyond livestock, food production is concentrated in few crops: wheat; potatoes; and three vegetables (cabbage, carrot, and turnip). Climate change does not only affect food production but can exacerbate malnutrition by removing food and nutrients in all stages of the food value chain. To identify perceived effects of climate change and measures to reduce climate change impacts in Mongolia's’s key food value chains, we implemented focus group discussions with 214 livestock and vegetable producers, traders, and food consumers. We also conducted 30 key informant interviews at the soum, provincial, and national levels across four agroecosystems in three provinces. Based on this community engagement analysis, we identify interventions that the government and private sector, including herders and farmers, should undertake to increase the food security and nutrition of the country’s prioritized food value chains under climate change.

Food rescue organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand help to reduce food waste and provide temporary relief to food insecurity. However, many of these organisations depend on donations and short-term philanthropic or government funding, which creates financial uncertainty and often requires them to demonstrate the impacts of their work with limited resourcing. While frameworks exist to demonstrate social value and associated monetary proxies like social return on investment (SROI), they are often resource-intensive and challenging to apply to multiple actors with different operating models like food rescue groups. This paper presents a SROI approach to measure the social value of three different food rescue models (Community Hub, Free Store, and Mixed model) in Aotearoa New Zealand. We describe how we adapted the seven guiding principles of SROI to explore how food rescue creates value for different actors in the food rescue process, including food donors, food recipient organisations, food rescue volunteers, and food rescue recipients. We used stakeholder interviews and quantitative data to develop nine primary outcomes. Financial proxy values were assigned to these outcomes, calculating an SROI ratio of NZD 4.5:1, indicating that an investment of $1 in food rescue delivers $4.5 of social value. This study adds to the growing literature on the impact of food rescue organisations and highlights the importance of taking a multi-case study approach to capture the true value created by this sector. Additionally, it emphasises the crucial role of food rescue organisations as ‘community connectors’ and their transformative potential in addressing food security issues.

This study focuses on the impact of invisible markets such as price, supply, demand, and public intervention through building intermediary organizations on rural households’ decisions to rent in or rent out land, and it compares factors that are critical in the current development of the land rental market. The study uses nationally representative farm and village survey datasets and the Box-Cox double-hurdle model. The study finds that public intervention, represented by intermediary organizations established at the grassroots level, plays a more significant role than invisible markets in improving the probability that farm households rent in or rent out land and increasing the amount of land rented. The intermediary organizations have increased the share of land area transferred to the total area at the village level. However, the price mechanisms, represented by the village-level land transfer rate and the village’s average land rent, failed to guide the flow of land resources. We put forward policy implications for how public institutions and market intermediaries can promote China’s land rental markets and how to perform price mechanisms more effectively.

The ‘State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020′ report states that switching to healthy diets will both prevent backsliding into hunger and help countries meet their sustainability goals. In 2019–2020, 17 percent of India’s adult population was undernourished. At the same time, however, 23 percent of all adults were obese. The increasing prevalence of obesity implies that improving diets and reducing risks for obesity and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) is a major food security challenge for India in the coming years. Overconsumption of calories from processed foods is known to increase the risk of obesity. To gain insights into the dietary transition and its relationship with obesity, we use cross-sectional data from a primary socio-economic survey conducted in the rural-urban interface of Bangalore, a mega-city in India that is characterized by high economic development. We show that for women in lower-middle socio-economic status (SES) groups, higher share of calories from semi-processed foods (SPF) is associated with a higher prevalence of obesity, while excess consumption of calories from ultra-processed foods (UPF) is associated with a higher obesity prevalence among women in higher SES groups. Older women and women who consume above the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of calories are more vulnerable to excess calories from SPF consumption than younger women and women who consume less than the RDA of calories. Furthermore, a lower prevalence of obesity is observed among women who consume excess calories from SPF but engage in labor-intensive occupational activity. These results speak to the need for interventions that incentivize weight loss and increased physical activity. The result that SPF consumption is associated with an increased prevalence of obesity especially among lower-middle SES group calls for interventions that increase access to and affordability of healthy diets. Policy instruments such as diversifying the public distribution system (PDS) are important to improve accessibility and affordability of healthy diets. In addition, increasing sugar and processed food taxes and incentivizing companies to invest in culturally sensitive food labeling should be considered to shift consumer demand towards healthier diet choices.

Technological advancements that enable countries to produce farmed seafood domestically, including land-based production, could potentially improve sustainability measures. However, whether consumers prefer domestic farmed seafood to imported seafood is unclear. This paper aims to fill this gap by employing hypothetical choice experiments from the US, France, and Japan. We find that, in each country, there is a sizable consumer segment (varying from one-quarter to two-thirds of the market) with a strong preference for domestic farmed salmon, including those from land-based production. These consumers associate domestic origin with higher qualities in all relevant dimensions and are willing to pay a price premium. There is also a segment of consumers with a strong preference for imported Norwegian salmon (from one-fifth to two-thirds of the market), linking Norwegian origin to higher qualities, and willing to pay higher prices. Consumers’ attitudes towards the environment and food, usage of label information, age, income, and consumption frequencies, are among the characteristics that explain consumer heterogeneity. Our results show the market potential for domestic farmed seafood, thus, providing consumers with reliable origin information for farmed seafood that also covers land-based production would be important. At the same time, the existence of a segment with a preference for imported seafood implies that active trade will remain, indicating the importance of continued international corporation for a holistic and transparent policy framework and common standards for a sustainable aquatic food system.

We use a 4-year panel (2019–2022) of 10,125 village councils in Ukraine to estimate effects of the war started by Russia on area and expected yield of winter crops aggregated up from the field level. Satellite imagery is used to provide information on direct damage to agricultural fields; classify crop cover using machine learning; and compute the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for winter cereal fields as a proxy for yield. Without conflict, winter crop area would have been 9.35 rather than 8.38 million ha, a 0.97 million ha reduction, only 14% of which can be attributed to direct conflict effects. The estimated drop associated with the conflict in NDVI for winter wheat, which is particularly pronounced for small farms, translates into an additional reduction of output by about 1.9 million tons for a total of 4.84 million tons. Taking area and yield reduction together suggests a war-induced loss of winter wheat output of up to 17% assuming the 2022 winter wheat crop was fully harvested.

We examine the relationship between the retail food environment for individual households and household food waste. Conceptually the relationship is ambiguous and depends on how store access interacts with frequency, size, and the composition of food purchases. We use FoodAPS data to estimate the relationship between store proximity and household food waste. We measure this relationship for different retail food store formats and also investigate heterogeneity and mediating factors. We find that a 1% increase in the distance to the nearest small food store is associated with 0.02% more food waste among all households. A 1% increase in the distance to the nearest large food store – such as supermarkets and grocery stores – is associated with 0.05% more food waste among households in poverty, with larger associations among households without cars. We find that shopping frequency and size do not mediate the relationship between large food store proximity and food waste, but we find differences over the amount of fresh foods purchased on the average shopping trip. Among households that purchase large amounts of fresh foods per trip, greater distance to a large food store is substantially associated with more food waste. Our results contribute to policy discussions surrounding food waste as well as food access.

Households living in conflict-affected areas are vulnerable to violence and crime perpetrated by various types of actors. By exploiting variation in the timing, intensity, and spatial distribution of attacks against households in Nigeria, this study finds that becoming a victim leads to higher food insecurity and decreased food and non-food consumption. Property crimes are more detrimental to consumption and food insecurity than violence is. The findings remain robust to accounting for conflict in the geographical proximity to the household. Our results indicate that information on victimization can be used for building safety nets in conflict-affected areas.

As China is the world’s largest producer, importer, and consumer of agricultural products, the new agricultural subsidy policy has significant implications for the global agricultural market. We assess the impact of the new agricultural subsidy on the grain crops acreage by applying difference-in-difference estimation to the China Rural Household Panel Survey (CRHPS) data. Results indicate that the new agricultural subsidy increases grain crop acreage. The results remain robust even after controlling for the effects from other policy measures. The study also identified the mechanism behind the subsidy’s effect. Namely, the new program encourages operators to increase their grain crop acreage by renting more land and increasing the share of grain crops grown. Regarding heterogeneity of the results, the subsidy policy has a more positive impact on grain crop growers than on mixed crop growers, it does not affect large farms (>100 Mu) and its influence is greater among operators in the Northern regions of China. Our findings are relevant for understanding the effect of China’s new agricultural subsidy policies and agrarian market reforms.

Improving the performance of low-productivity smallholder farmers is a pathway with great potential for reducing poverty and enhancing food security and nutrition in sub-Saharan Africa. Using experimental data from Ethiopia and a mediated stochastic frontier model that accounts for endogenous treatment status, we examine the impact of advisory services and technology channeling on farm yields and efficiency. Our results show that the impact of improved extension services on yields is positive and statistically significant and that advisory services constitute a significant proportion of the output effect.

Obesity has been characterized as an ongoing pandemic. This swift and continuous weight increase cannot be explained solely by individual factors. High availability of Ultra Processed Food (UPF) and reduced supply or absence of unprocessed/minimally processed foods in food environments can influence food choices and promote a syndemic process involving overweight and food insecurity. We evaluate the association between overweight and food community and consumer environment among adults in the Metropolitan Region of Recife, Brazil and discuss within syndemic theory. Data was collected at individual and environment levels in 2019. Information on 446 individuals and 231 food stores was gathered. Logistic multi-level regression models assessed the association between overweight and neighborhood and food environment measurements which have been adjusted by individual characteristics and census track data. Prevalence of overweight and food insecurity was high, 70.9 % and 72 % respectively. Each participant had, on average, 20.64 ± 5.78 food stores in their food environment. Stores that sell UPF had the highest density rates. People living within a milieu with the highest density of stores predominantly selling UPF (OR = 1.92; p < 0.05), with the highest average UPF sold at check-out (OR = 2.19; p < 0.05), with the highest average of soft drinks available in the stores (OR = 1.68; p < 0.05), and availability of filled cookies within the intermediate category (OR = 2.26; p < 0.01), had the highest probability of being overweight. Food environment is associated with overweight, after controlling for individual factors, and it is suggested that there is a food syndemic involving overweight and food insecurity, which is influenced by the food environment.