The Hippy Gourmet

The Hippy Gourmet has more interesting food policy coverage than your typical TV cooking show. And not every TV cooking show's website offers as many as six links for viewers who are following current events and want to join the peace movement.

www.afsc.org
www.unitedforpeace.org
www.globalexchange.org
www.war-times.org
www.wn.com
www.nonviolence.org

U.S. Food Policy stays away from such divisive and off-topic controversies. I'm just reporting that the silly hippy linked to these sites.

Food aid and the collapse of the Doha Round

The Food Safety and Nutrition Section, in collaboration with the International Section, hosted a fascinating panel on food aid at the annual meeting of the American Agricultural Economics Association last week. My Friedman School colleague Patrick Webb described the increasing professionalism of the food aid community, and the increasing importance of emergency food to alleviate crises, in place of food aid as a form of agricultural dumping. Other participants included Terri Raney from the Food and Agriculture Organization, Chris Barrett from Cornell, and Linda Young from Montana State.

Barrett's book with Dan Maxwell last year raised many of the critical problems with U.S. food aid programs. Even while acknowledging those problems, Young makes an eloquent argument against using the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a way of "disciplining" food aid to solve them (see this .pdf file for some of her themes). As she tells it, the WTO shows symptoms of being more interested in protecting export markets for rich countries than it really is in protecting farmers in poor countries from dumping. In some of the lively back and forth discussion, Barrett and Young both seemed to agree on the need for some sort of trade discipline to make sure countries don't return to their old practices of using food aid for surplus disposal rather than humanitarian purposes. At the same time, they both appeared to recommend some method other than the WTO, such as perhaps an expanded version of the Food Aid Convention, to impose the necessary disciplines.

Of course, all of this may be moot, since the Doha round of WTO trade negotiations collapsed this month. This collapse gets interesting coverage from many sources including Time and Reason. The latter magazine writes:

Who does the U.S. trade delegation represent when it refuses to budge on farm subsidies and market access? Certainly not American taxpayers or consumers. Farm subsidies cost taxpayers about $19 billion last year. For their money, consumers got the privilege of paying more for some food because farm supports (and quotas on some imports, such as sugar) distort markets.

Much of U.S. agricultural policy is designed to protect the interests of a small number of large and wealthy producers. Laws originally passed to aid small farmers during the Depression now result in astonishing inequities and are often counterproductive. The Washington Post recently revealed that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion since 2000 to people who don't farm at all — they simply happen to own property that was once used as a farm. Meanwhile, real farmers who rent cropland are being forced out of business by landowners who find it more profitable to use their property for other purposes while continuing to collect federal cash for crops they aren't growing.

Ending these subsidies and lowering agricultural tariffs would boost the U.S. economy, eliminate waste and help farmers in the Third World trade their way out of poverty. It's a shame Washington thinks that its protectionist farm policies are something to be surrendered only grudgingly, and only if others do so. Good riddance, we say.

The permanent dilemma

Aaron's tattoos posted at Alaina Browne's weblog a full belly hit dead center the visual message I could only distantly aim for in my side-bar photo, caught between my children's holiday gingerbread house and a piece of broccoli. If only I had the courage!

Also at a full belly, see interesting coverage of the constructive latest round in the Pollan / Mackey debate about Whole Foods.

Food safety and nutrition, at the AAEA annual meeting in Long Beach

This week in Long Beach, CA, the Food Safety and Nutrition section completed a fine pre-conference and still to come has a whole track of sessions on food safety and nutrition topics, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Agricultural Economics Association. See the section website for a list of the section's sessions and activities.

Dietary Guidelines and checkoff programs, in the journal Obesity

The new issue of the journal Obesity offers my full perspective article comparing and contrasting the federal government's messages in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the generic commodity promotion or "checkoff" programs.

sigh

When was the last time a computer-generated message brought tears to your eyes?

Here is the eloquent robot prose I received in response to my email yesterday to a Lebanese friend and colleague who now teaches at the American University in Beirut.

The message identifier is: 1G2Wfq-0005Ei-S6
The subject of the message is: sorrow and concern
The date of the message is: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 13:14:25 -0400

The following address(es) have not yet been delivered:
----@aub.edu.lb

Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:: host mx1.aub.edu.lb [62.84.82.3]: 451 Temporary local problem - please try later

No action is required on your part. Delivery attempts will continue for some time, and this warning may be repeated at intervals if the message remains undelivered. Eventually the mail delivery software will give up, and when that happens, the message will be returned to you.

Temporary local problem. Please try later. Eventually we will give up, and when that happens, the message will be returned to you.

I don't care what Revere or Majikthise say in their Sunday Sermonettes about my quaint traditions. In such times, my family and I pray for peace.

Update. My friend and his wife and children are safely out of the country. He writes, "The situation is all so sad and surreal. Most AUB people I know have been evacuated. Many of those remaining behind are joining relief efforts.... I hope and pray that sanity prevails soon..."

Choices Magazine covers generic commodity promotion or "checkoff" programs

The new issue of Choices Magazine, the American Agricultural Economics Association's flagship publication for non-economists, offers a special section on USDA's generic commodity promotion or "checkoff" programs.

I have written previously for Choices about these controversial programs. Checkoff programs use the federal government's powers of taxation to collect hundreds of millions of dollars each year in mandatory assessments from producers, in order to fund well-known advertising campaigns, such as "Beef. It's what's for dinner," and "Pork. The other white meat." They have been roundly criticized in the nutrition half of the "nutrition economics" world (Laura Sims has called them “an anathema to most nutritionists and health professionals"). While the programs are treated more sympathetically by some agricultural economists, others have been critical.

In the new issue, the article by John Crespi and Roger McEowen reviews the ferocious legal history of the programs, ending with the Supreme Court's May, 2005, decision that beef producers must pay the tax for these programs even if they object to them and disagree with the advertising message:

While the opponents of the beef advertising program had argued that the Operating Committee was a nongovernmental entity and, thus, the advertising cannot be considered government speech, the Court rejected this premise: "The message of the promotional campaigns is effectively controlled by the Federal Government itself. The message set out in the beef promotions is from beginning to end the message established by the Federal Government.... Congress and the Secretary have set out the overarching message and some of its elements, and they have left the development of the remaining details to an entity whose members are answerable to the Secretary.... Moreover, the record demonstrates that the Secretary exercises final approval authority over every word used in every promotional campaign" (125 S.Ct. 2055 at 2063 (2005)).

Several of the new articles raise questions about the checkoff-funded economic research on the programs' effectiveness, which routinely concludes that producers more than make back the money they pay in to the system. In an article about measuring the effectiveness of the programs, Gary Williams and Oral Capps write:

Evaluations of checkoff programs specifically are intended to measure the portion of revenues at various levels in the industry that can be directly attributable to the checkoff programs. But in doing so, researchers must compare actual revenues or sales over some time period to nebulous, intangible concepts like "what might have been earned or sold in the absence of the program." In other words, the results imply that $2, $5, or $10 for every dollar they were assessed are in their pockets, but they just don't know it because their earnings would have been lower if the checkoff program had not existed. This concept has proved extremely difficult to communicate to producers.

Compounding that problem is the tendency of many checkoff program staffs and boards to oversell the actual and potential impacts of their programs to insure a positive outcome from producer referenda and otherwise justify continuation of their programs. Contributors come to expect large impacts on prices and profits because of the anecdotes they have been told about how successful various activities have been and how large the benefits to them are from contributing to the program. Estimated [benefit-cost ratios] much in excess of 1:1 often are taken to imply large absolute impacts of a checkoff program on the market. Nothing could be less true. A BCR of 5:1 results by dividing a $5 billion industry profit benefit by a $1 billion checkoff investment or by dividing a $5 benefit by a $1 investment. For most commodity promotion programs, the value of the expenditures in research and promotion activities is extremely small in comparison to the total value of industry sales. Commodity promotion expenditures generally amount to a fraction of 1% of the total industry sales each year. With such a low level of investment compared to sales, the overall impact of a commodity promotion program could hardly be expected to be significant in a practical sense in its effects on production, prices, sales, and market share even if the impact could be said to be statistically significant.

When producers and other contributors fail to see the large impact on their returns that they have been led to expect, they tend to disbelieve the measured effectiveness of the checkoff program.

In another article, Michael Wohlgenant reviews no fewer than six reasons why the actual benefit received by farmers might be different from the widely-touted benefit-cost ratios.

Despite the amount of econometric research indicating high rates of return to generic advertising, there is disenchantment and disbelief among some producers and commodity groups as to whether producers actually benefit from generic advertising. More accurate measurement of the farm-level effects of retail-level generic advertising must account for various factors that influence the transmission of retail demand changes from advertising to the farm level.

In the final article, Chanjin Chung, Bailey Norwood, and Clement Ward report results from a survey of Oklahoma beef producers. Of the 17% of producer respondents who were members of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (see previous post), 63% were supportive of the beef checkoff program.

Does that sound low? Wait, there's more. Of the much larger fraction of Oklahoma beef producers who were not members of NCBA, only 50% were supportive of the checkoff program. It is easy to see why several of the largest checkoff programs are trying to avoid producer referenda on the question of their continuation.


Source: Chung, Norwood, and Ward (2006). Click for larger image.