Mothers' milk and measures of economic output

This recent abstract from Julie Smith and Lindy Ingham in the journal Feminist Economics suggests that national income and product accounts should include the value of breastmilk in the category for food production:

Thoughtful economists have long been aware of the limitations of national accounting and GDP in measuring economic activity and material well-being. Feminist economists criticize the failure to count women's unpaid and reproductive work in measures of economic production. This paper examines the treatment of human milk production in national accounting guidelines. Human milk is an important resource produced by women. Significant maternal and child health costs result from children's premature weaning onto formula or solid food. While human milk production meets the standard national accounting criteria for inclusion in GDP, current practice is to ignore its significant economic value and the substantial private and public health costs of commercial breastmilk substitutes. Economic output measures such as GDP thus are incomplete and biased estimates of national food production and overall economic output, and they distort policy priorities to the disadvantage of women and children.

Okay, mother's milk on its own might not compete in quantity or economic importance with the major industrial contributors to our national well-being, such as Cargill or Coca Cola. But most economists would acknowledge that national income accounts don't handle home production of goods and services very well.

The abstract is a reminder about how difficult it is to quantify the value of the goods and services that count most. Take parenting, for example. Faced with the two income trap, many middle-class families I know -- including ours -- have lowered their stress and improved their quality of life by scaling back to one wage or salary. In many of these families, but still surely far short of half, the father is the main daytime caretaker for children. For all its faults, modern American society seems to offer a number of options for fathers to be full-time caretakers and still be men by whatever definition they like (I was reflecting on this yesterday afternoon while struggling up a grueling rocky mountain bike trail, far behind a friend who is a full-time dad, who just popped his front wheel over the boulders and sailed right up). In another fraction of these families, the father is the main salary earner, but the division of parenting and household labor is fair to both parents. Breastmilk may not have a market price, but it provides a nice example of a valuable home produced good. And it's not the only one. I think many families that put one person's full-time work into home production could only look poorer than a comparable two-salary family when viewed through green eye shades.

Soft drink warning labels?

Jack from Fork and Bottle writes us to point out that conventional news coverage generally requires nearly equal space for public interest group suggestions and the industry response. One side claims sugary soda is unhealthy, and the other side claims you should let your kids get 15 percent of their total daily calories from sugary soda (I'm not making this up -- that's the average daily calories from soda among teens who drink soft drinks). The matter is disputed and who knows what to believe? I enjoyed reading the actual text of the Center for Science in the Public Interest's recently proposed labels:

• The U.S. Government recommends that you drink less (non-diet) soda to help prevent weight gain, tooth decay, and other health problems.
• To help protect your waistline and your teeth, consider drinking diet sodas or water.
• Drinking soft drinks instead of milk or calcium-fortified beverages may increase your risk of brittle bones (osteoporosis).
• CSPI also said that caffeinated drinks should bear a notice that reads "This drink contains x grams of caffeine, which is a mildly addictive stimulant drug. Not appropriate for children."

Incidently, the ubiquitous industry response line in the Reuters coverage argues that individuals, not the government, should be allowed to make decisions about food and beverage consumption. Nice slight of hand, eh? The proposal was for truthful warning labels, not food police.

Summer reading list for food lovers

Rebecca's Pocket links to a summer reading list for food lovers, from Rachel Forrest of the Portsmouth Herald.

Failed self-regulation of children's advertising

From the advance text of Senator Tom Harkin's speech yesterday to the Federal Trade Commission about advertising to children and the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU), the marketing industry's toothless effort at self-regulation:

I understand that the Grocery Manufacturers of America is set to unveil new, supposedly tougher proposals for voluntary restrictions. Based on a story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, GMA will offer many perfectly fine ideas. For instance, it would limit product placements in TV shows, and the use of licensed characters in ads and food packaging. I’m all for it.

I have not seen details of the GMA proposals, so I will withhold any final judgment. But based on what I have read so far, there appears to be no meaningful enforcement mechanism . . . no truly independent body with the will and the power to crack down on offenders.

If CARU is the model, that is a non-starter. CARU, frankly, has become a poster child for how not to conduct self-regulation. Time and again, it has shown itself to be a captive of the industry. It has no real independence. No sanction authority. No teeth.

The current situation is like a game with a rule book, but no real referee. CARU is a tiny group tasked with oversight of a multibillion-dollar industry. To me, the deck seems a bit stacked.

And the proof is in the pudding. Look at the deluge of junk food advertising aimed at kids that we see today. CARU has given the green light to all of it!

The Public Health Advocacy Institute has a new report, which includes convincing examples of advertisements that CARU allowed to proceed despite their clear failure to meet the review unit's own standards. The Center for Science in the Public interest today reiterated its call for stronger protections for children.

Growing meat in a laboratory

Here's the conclusion of Effect Measure's commentary on the recent scientific paper describing new methods for culturing meat:

Let's assume for the moment some untoward consequence doesn't come along to spoil the party. Will future generations look back on the twentieth century and early twenty-first as a time of high barbarism where gigantic industrial killing machines ("the food industry") were used to feed the ravenous maw of a world population out of control, spawning the seeds of mass extinction by zoonotic disease? Or will mass extinction via a "natural" population crash make the point for us?

Tigers and Strawberries has a long and entertaining post, essentially about what good-hearted people should do until such time as laboratory grown meat becomes a reality. For one thing, she says they should stop complaining that meat looks like it was once alive:

I suspect that I will never stop hearing that particular complaint, at least until humans figure out how to safely clone and culture animal muscle cells in vats, like they do in some of Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction novels. I jokingly made reference to that last week, and then this week, was surprised to see a news story on the issue at Sustainable Table.

In her book several years ago, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce and Agriculture: Who Will Produce Tomorrow's Food?, Columbia nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow had no patience with this type of industrial development. She would not have been surprised by this week's news.

AAEA's Choices Magazine explains trade policy

The latest issue of Choices Magazine, the lay publication of the American Agricultural Economics Association, has a wonderful explanation of how recent trade negotiations and court rulings will affect U.S. agriculture.

First, Timothy Josling summarizes the Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations. These global negotiations have increased the pressure on the United States and European Union to reduce their trade-distorting domestic agricultural subsidies. Second, Mechel Paggi, Lynn Kennedy, Fumiko Yamazaki, and Tim Josling review regional trade agreements, such as the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). A particularly interesting article, by Darren Hudson, C. Parr Rosson III, John Robinson, and Jaime Malaga discusses the implications of the recent WTO ruling against U.S. cotton subsidies, which may in fact call into question a broader range of domestic farm programs.

The authors begin:

Once in a while, an event comes along that portends to reshape agricultural policy. Brazil's complaint in the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the United States on domestic support for cotton, export credit guarantees, and export subsidies could be one such event....

And conclude:

US farm policy is formed in a dynamic setting. Agriculture is becoming an ever-shrinking share of the US federal budget; demographic trends make the population further removed from the farm and rural life. As international problems and goals consume more time and money, agriculture will increasingly become the residual claimant for federal resources. Agriculture may increasingly become the carrot for the United States to use in trade negotiations, because agriculture is a larger relative share of the economy of developing and less developed countries.

Although US agricultural tariffs are already among the world's lowest, its trade-distorting domestic farm support ranks near the top, along with the European Union and Japan. The farm programs of all three countries may be targets of challenge in the future. A successful conclusion to the Doha Round would likely mitigate this outcome, whereas failure in Doha will almost certainly ensure a future fraught with litigation.

I've recently added KickAAS ("Kick all agricultural subsidies"), a strongly anti-farm-program weblog, to my regular reading schedule. It reports that most national leaders at the recent G8 summit in Scotland gave tepid statements rehashing earlier positions in favor of agricultural trade negotiations, but without firm deadlines, while President Bush more boldly offered a specific deadline of 2010 for changing U.S. farm programs if other aspects of international negotiations meet U.S. agreement. For balance, the progressive Institute on Agricultural and Trade Policy (IATP) covers recent developments on the same topics from a well-articulated position much less favorable to the trade agreements.

Farmers and estate taxes

Protecting farmers is an important part of the rhetoric that has been used to promote emasculating or entirely repealing federal estate taxes. David Cay Johnston reported in the New York Times yesterday:

The number of farms on which estate tax is owed when the owners die has fallen by 82 percent since 2000, to just 300 farms, as Congress has more than doubled the threshold at which the tax applies, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released last week.

All but 27 farmers left enough liquid assets to pay taxes owed, the budget office found, although it hinted that the actual number might be zero. The study examined how much in cash, stocks and bonds these farmers left to pay estate taxes, but the report noted that no data existed on how much life insurance the farmers had put into trusts. Virtually all wealthy farmers own life insurance in trusts, say estate tax lawyers who specialize in working with farmers.

These findings come as the Senate is poised to vote this month on repeal of the estate tax. Advocates of repeal have begun showing commercials criticizing senators who oppose repeal, like Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington. Many of the criticisms focus on a supposed threat to family farms.

The link to the Congressional Budget Office report is here (.pdf). Thanks to Jonathan Weiler of the Gadflyer weblog for the link. Weiler challenges readers to uncover just one farmer nationwide whose farm was lost to his or her descendents due to the estate tax.

Update (7/19/2005): fixed typo in Johnston's name.