Effects of fat taxes and thin subsidies on the poor

I've been working on a paper with some French colleagues (Laurent Mueller and Bernard Ruffieux) using data from a food purchasing experiment in Grenoble and Lyon France looking at the effects of  "fat taxes" and "thin subsidies" on poorer vs. richer households.  The paper is still in review, so I won't yet go into the details of the results, but I can say that they closely align with the results of this new paper by Richard Tiffin and Matthew Salois that was just published in the European Review of Agricultural Economics.

They write that their:

“results reinforce the finding that a fiscal food policy based on a tax on saturated fats and a subsidy of fruits and vegetables is socially regressive”

and

“not only are the poorest households more negatively effected by the policy, but that even a subsidy is regressive because of the distribution of consumption of fruits and vegetables”

As they discuss, and we are finding in our work, such effects can occur through a number of channels.  Take a subsidy on fruits and veggies.  If richer households are already eating more fruits and veggies, who do you think receives the largest gains from the subsidy?  Fat taxes are regressive because the poor spend a larger share of their income on food (so taxes take a proportionally bigger chunk of their income) than the rich, but also because they are often eating more of the foods that will be taxed and because they may be less responsive to such price changes.  

The social and distributional consequences of these sorts of price policies are seldom discussed with any seriousness by those who promote the policies.   

Assorted Links

This Canadian wheat farmer would like access to GMO wheat

Bloomberg's large soda ban is officially dead says the highest court in NY

A website dedicated to the idea that "corporations are tainting our democracy and our dinner plates"

I wonder if people in the "food movement" will look more kindly on checkoffs if they can be used for organic food

The Food Industry as a Stock Villian

An interesting interview with Trevor Butterworth on whether food science gets the press it deserves.

Butterworth explains how the food industry has become a "black box" which holds all sorts of societal fears.  He argues that the food industry has become a "stock villain" that is "enemy to be attacked but rarely understood."

You can watch the video here.

Is Local Food More Environmentally Friendly?

As should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it a bit, the environmental impacts of consuming a local food depends on how efficient your particular locale is at producing the particular food.  One of the ironies of this insight is that areas that have more intensified livestock operations may, at least in some dimensions, be more environmentally friendly than areas with less intensified production (because greater intensity often means more efficient).

Some empirical support for these these insights was recently provided in an article by  Misak Avetisyan, Tom Hertel, and Gregory Sampson just published in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics.   

The abstract:

“With the increased interest in the ‘carbon footprint’ of global economic activities, civil society, governments and the private sector are calling into question the wisdom of transporting food products across continents instead of consuming locally produced food. While the proposition that local consumption will reduce one’s carbon footprint may seem obvious at first glance, this conclusion is not at all clear when one considers that the economic emissions intensity of food production varies widely across regions. In this paper we concentrate on the tradeoff between production and transport emissions reductions by testing the following hypothesis: Substitution of domestic for imported food will reduce the direct and indirect Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions associated with consumption. We focus on ruminant livestock since it has the highest emissions intensity across food sectors, but we also consider other food products as well, and alternately perturb the mix of domestic and imported food products by a marginal (equal) amount. We then compare the emissions associated with each of these consumption changes in order to compute a marginal emissions intensity of local food consumption, by country and product. The variations in regional ruminant emissions intensities have profound implications for the food miles debate. While shifting consumption patterns in wealthy countries from imported to domestic livestock products reduces GHG emissions associated with international trade and transport activity, we find that these transport emissions reductions are swamped by changes in global emissions due to differences in GHG emissions intensities of production. Therefore, diverting consumption to local goods only reduces global emissions when undertaken in regions with relatively low emissions intensities. For non-ruminant products, the story is more nuanced. Transport costs are more important in the case of dairy products and vegetable oils. Overall, domestic emissions intensities are the dominant part of the food miles story in about 90 % of the country/commodity cases examined here.”

The Food Babe

I first ran across the Food Babe several months ago when I came across her ridiculous assertion that everyone should avoid "Monsanto Butter."

The Food Babe appears, in the intervening time, to have gained ever more followers and media attention.  But, her most recent campaign against an ingredient in beer, by drawing the attention of actual experts on the topic, may turn one of her greatest successes (getting Anheuser-Busch to disclose ingredients and alter their production process) into a credibility stumbling block that she is likely to have trouble overcoming.   

Indeed, it's been a bad few days for the Food Babe.  Her latest campaign has even spawned several new phrases from the blogosphere.

• From Trevor Butterworth at Forbes: "quackmail" - as in using quack-science to blackmail food companies 
• From David Gorski at Science Based Medicine: The "Jenny McCarthy of the food industry" 
• From Tom Cizauskas at Yours for Good Fermentables:  "Food McCarthyism"
• From Jay Brooks at the Beer Bulletin:  "Yellow journalism", which is “a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism.”

Each of the above links roundly criticize and debunk the fear-mongering and pseudo-scientific approach taken by the Food Babe.  To those I'll also add posts by Hank Campbell at Science 2.0 and Maureen Ogle,  author of Ambitious Brew.  There really isn't much left to add to these critiques.

While there has been some positive discussion of the Food Babe's activities (e.g., see this article in Business Insider), mainly focusing on the power of social media to force food company change, one must ultimately ask whether the change is good or bad, and whether the methods used to obtain such change are justifiable.  And, when we see the Food Babe's other writings against GMOs or against the flu vaccine, there is cause for concern (those efforts have also been criticized, for example, see here and here).