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Externalities

Back in April I gave a talk at a workshop organized by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and the CDC entitled Exploring the Health and Environmental Costs of Food (you can read a summary of what went on at the workshop here).  

The premise of the workshop was that there are externalities in food production and our job was to quantify them and think about correctives.  There were many very smart people in the room but only a handful of economists.  If you read the summary report (see parts in chapters 6 and 7), you can get a bit of a sense of the disagreement that went on between economists on the one hand and nutritionists/epidemiologists/ecologists on the other (the report calls it "lively") about what constitutes an externality and whether "experts" can properly devise taxes to fix the problem.   

This video by Mike Munger should have been required viewing for everyone at the workshop.

Find LearnLiberty on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/VLLCWp If Art sells potato chips to Betty, both Art and Betty are happy with the transaction. Betty has chips, and Art has been paid for them. If Betty eats her chips loudly and it irritates Carl, then Carl bears a cost because of Art and Betty's transaction.

Give (Frozen) Peas a Chance — and Carrots Too

That's the title of a nice article by Dr. Oz in Time Magazine earlier this month and he echos several themes in my forthcoming book, The Food Police.  I was pleased to finally see some good sense on food by someone so prominent in the media.  Here are some excerpts:   

Nutritionally speaking, there is little difference between the farmer’s-market bounty and the humble brick from the freezer case. It’s true for many other supermarket foods too. And in my view, dispelling these myths–that boutique foods are good, supermarket foods are suspect and you have to spend a lot to eat well–is critical to improving our nation’s health. Organic food is great, it’s just not very democratic. As a food lover, I enjoy truffle oil, European cheeses and heirloom tomatoes as much as the next person. But as a doctor, I know that patients don’t always have the time, energy or budget to shop for artisanal ingredients and whip them into a meal.”

and:

The rise of foodie culture over the past decade has venerated all things small-batch, local-farm and organic–all with premium price tags. But let’s be clear: you don’t need to eat like the 1% to eat healthily. After several years of research and experience, I have come to an encouraging conclusion: the American food supply is abundant, nutritionally sound, affordable and, with a few simple considerations, comparable to the most elite organic diets

and

But for the most part, it's O.K. to skip the meat boutiques and the high-end butchers. Nutritionally, there is not much difference between, say, grass-fed beef and the feedlot variety. The calories, sodium and protein content are all very close.


 

Deck the hall with boughs of holly (unless holly doesn't grow where you live)

Today Forbes.com published a piece I wrote with Henry Miller, who is a fellow at the the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.  The piece is on local foods, and now (in the winter, at Christmas) is perhaps one of the best times to think through the logic of locavorism.  

Here are a few snippets from the beginning:

The Christmas season brings visions of candy canes, cider and sugar plums dancing in the head.  Unless, that is, you’re a committed locavore who has scorned peppermint, sugar beets and apples, because they’re not found in your neck of the woods in the summertime, much less the dead of winter.
The desire to help out a neighbor or even a local farmer can be a noble one, especially in this gift-giving season, but sentiment shouldn’t keep us from thinking critically about the consequences of forcing municipal hospitals, schools and other institutions to source an arbitrary percentage of their food locally.

and the end:

If we are to live by the locavore’s mantra that we will consume only what can be made locally, we had better board up our chimneys on Christmas Eve.  No matter how magical are his reindeer or how benevolent his elves, we daren’t accept Santa’s wares because, well, the vast majority of them are made far away.  No self-respecting locavore would be caught dead sucking on a candy cane made at the North Pole.
Yet, St. Nick is a good guy and deserves our respect and patronage as much anyone else.  The same goes for our local farmers.  If we trust our local farmer to give us what we want and you do the same, then surely we can trust your local farmer too.  And your local farmer is probably better at growing some things than ours.  So as we send holiday greetings to dear friends far and wide, let’s not demonize those who want to do the same with food

What are the Environmental Costs of Moving Toward Lower Yielding Cropping Systems?

Here are the conclusions from an article just published online in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics

Crop yield development will play a critical role in future land use dynamics. Indeed, it will determine the requirements for additional cropland, and also have a strong impact on grassland expansion. We have illustrated that compared with yield stagnation, maintaining past trends in crop yield growth would save 290 Mha of cropland and avoid additional expansion of about 120 Mha of grassland by 2030. Our results suggest that failing to take into account the effects of livestock sector dynamics and the corresponding grassland requirements when assessing the effect on land sparing of increasing crop yield may lead to significant inaccuracy–a difference of 17% in our example.
With respect to GHG emissions, we show that by 2030 these would be lower by more than 2 GtCO2-eq per year if crop yields grew according to the past trends as compared to yield stagnation. Crop yield growth also seems to be a cost efficient way of abating GHGs, as the estimated R&D cost involved would be about U.S. $25 per tCO2-eq, while the marginal cost of reaching this target with stagnating yields would be U.S. $75 per tCO2-eq. However, to be effective as a mitigation option, crop yield increases need to be accompanied by policies that prevent further expansion of consumption in rich countries in order to avoid the potential rebound effects illustrated by Choi et al. (2011).
Overall, policies and investments targeting crop yield enhancement should be an important priority for the future of agricultural development (Herrero et al. 2010). Such measures could help to fight food insecurity, while at the same time contributing to climate change mitigation at a cost that is competitive with other mitigation strategies.