Food Waste Research

Back in 2013, I wrote this post decrying the lack of good research on the economics of food waste.  It wasn't that no research was being done on the issue, only that a lot of the research that had been published at that time is what I'd call food waste accounting, which didn't didn't rely much on the economic way of thinking.

I'm pleased to now see a nice stream of economic research on the subject.  I've blogged on several of these papers before, but now many are starting to appear in print at peer reviewed journals.  Here'a a hopefully handy list of references.

• "On the Measurement of Food Waste" by Marc Bellemare,  Metin Çakir,  Hikaru Peterson, Lindsey Novak, and Jeta Rudi, forthcoming the American  Journal of Agricultural Economics (This is an important - and likely to be influential - paper that is critical of previous attempts to measure the economic costs of waste and suggests better ways forward).
• "A Note on Modelling Household Food Waste Behavior"  by Brenna Ellison and me, published in Applied Economics Letters in 2017 (This is a short note showing what is probably obvious to every economist but perhaps not to others: that the optimal amount of waste isn't zero and it depends on various economic variables like food prices and income).
• "Food waste: The role of date labels, package size, and product category" by Norbert Wilson, Brad Rickard, Rachel Saputob,  and Shuay-Tsyr Hob, published in Food Quality and Preference in 2017 (The authors crafted a clever experimental approach to measure waste in a lab setting and looked at how how measured wasted varied with across date labels, among other factors).
• "Social-Optimal Household Food Waste: Taxes and Government Incentives" by Bhagyashree Katare,  Dmytro Serebrennikov,  Holly Wang,  and Michael Wetzstein published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics in 2017 (This paper presents a more developed model than in the Ellison and Lusk paper mentioned above including factors like externalities; they  likewise situate food waste in the context of optimal consumer decision making, considering the effects of various policies on the social well-being).
• "Examining Household Food Waste Decisions: A Vignette Approach", a working paper by Brenna Ellison and me (This paper uses vignettes to study how food waste behaviors vary with various economic variables and consumer demographics).
• "Foodservice Composting Crowds out Consumer Food Waste Reduction Behavior in a Dining Experiment", a working paper by Danyi Qi and Brian Roe (This paper also constructs an economic model of food waste behavior and studies how consumers' waste behaviors respond to information about whether waste is composed).
• "Food loss and waste in Sub-Saharan Africa: A critical review", by Megan Sheahana and Chris Barrett published in Food Policy in 2017 (This is a helpful review paper that discusses the economics of food waste in a developing-country context; the focus is much broader than just considering household food waste, which is the focus of many of the above papers). 

There are no doubt other papers out there on the subject.  Let me know what I've missed.

If you brew it, who will come?

That's the title of a new paper I have with Trey Malone in the journal Agribusiness.  The paper uses survey data from over 1,500 U.S. beer drinkers to investigate different types of consumers (or market segments) mainly based on familiarity and taste perceptions of different brands.  Trey pulled together these figures based on the different segments identified.

We had this to say:

“the objective of this article is to compare differences in perceptions for each of the brewery groups (domestic, import, large craft, and microbrewery).Figures 4 and 5 display the taste perception and brand familiarity averages for each beer segment we included. As canbe seen in Figure 4, the uninformed cluster has consistently low perceptions of the taste of the beers in all segments,whereas the maven cluster has consistently high perceptions of taste of the beers in all segments. Premium patronsrate the domestic beers as one of the worst tasting and appreciate the taste of the large craft and import optionssubstantially more. Traditional drinkers prefer the taste of domestic and import beers more than the beers provided inthe large craft and microbrew segments. Finally, the locavores did not heavily prefer the taste of any of the beers. Ascan be seen in Figure 5, few consumers were familiar with the microbrew options at all, although the mavens weremost familiar. Uninformed participants were only somewhat familiar with the other beers in the sample, whereasthe premium patrons were very familiar with all of the beers in the sample, with the exception of the microbrews.Traditional drinkers were most familiar with domestic and import beers, whereas the locavores were also very familiarwith all of the beers with the exception of the microbrews. These differences in perceptions suggest that consumers inthe locavore segment, while unfamiliar with the microbrews listed, still consider those beers to taste good.”

Impact of Bird Flu on Turkey Producers

There's an interesting new paper in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy by Cakir, Boland, and Wang that studies the impacts of the   2015 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI or avian flu) outbreak in the US.  The authors draw attention to the free-trade deals signed by our trading partners and highlight a beneficial aspect of those trade deals that allow other countries to place bans on imports only only those specific regions or states that have infected animals.  As the authors show, the economic losses from the bird flu outbreak would have been much worse had other countries simply banned all imports of US turkey.  

Here are the author's main findings:

“Our main findings show that the U.S. turkey producers lost approximately $225 million due to the 2015 HPAI outbreak. Of the $225 million, $101 million is borne by the producers in Minnesota and $124 million is borne by the producers in other states outside Minnesota. Furthermore, the results show that $207 million of the total loss to turkey producers is due to the loss in exports. In particular, the decrease in exports affects the producers in states outside Minnesota, costing them about $181 million. The additional loss to Minnesota producers due to the loss in exports is about $26 million. The counterfactual decrease in exports had the importing countries not used rolling bans during the 2015 outbreak is unknown. However, the model estimates indicate that for every percentage point of additional exports during the outbreak the U.S. turkey producers avoided a loss of about $6 million.”

This is from the conclusions:

“Our ex-post analysis of the 2015 HPAI outbreak provides important insight into the value of effective communication with domestic stakeholders and trading partners. Many national media predicted that the economic impact of the avian flu on the U.S. turkey industry was going to be dramatic in early 2015. There is no doubt that the economic impact was great. However, the total estimated producer loss would have been much greater if a domestic food scare had happened or if many of the importing countries did not implement regional bans. The ability of the U.S. turkey industry to work with U.S. and international stakeholders who included scientists, veterinarians, and others through protocols established in SPS policies in free trade agreements facilitated trade in U.S. turkey products to continue. This provided great benefits to the turkey producers during a difficult period. In fact, the model estimates indicate that for every percentage point of additional exports during the outbreak the U.S. turkey producers avoided a loss of about $6 million.”

Investments in Land Grant Universities?

This was from POLITICO's Morning Agriculture report yesterday: 

“CAN TRUMP SOLVE THE LAND-GRANT AG RESEARCH PROBLEM? Deferred maintenance on facilities at land-grant universities across the country is threatening to undercut U.S. agricultural research efforts and, with that, the long-term competitiveness of the American farmer. President Donald Trump’s promised infrastructure package could be a solution to the staggering backlog, but competition for federal dollars if Trump comes through will be fierce. Anticipating that, the Association for Public Land-grant Universities is working with farm groups to prepare a pitch to get Congress and the administration to use the expected infusion of cash to help fix or replace aging labs, greenhouses and other facilities, where researchers labor in an effort to develop solutions to feed the world’s growing population, Pro Agriculture’s Jenny Hopkinson reports this morning. The ask: somewhere in the ballpark of $10 billion over the next 10 years, a sum the groups believe can be leveraged into several times that in private investments.”

Fights over Pigweed

None of this will be new to the farmers out there (indeed, there is already an ongoing lawsuit), but this episode of NPR's Planet Money podcast covers a problem that can arise when one farmer's pesticide winds up killing another farmer's crops.  Here's a summary of the story:

“Farmers are in constant conflict with the weed. Some have turned to a powerful pesticide called Dicamba. Dicamba kills the pigweed, but it also kills the neighbors’ plants, including farmer Mike Wallace’s crops. The conflict was no longer farmer versus weed, but also farmer versus farmer. When his neighbors illegally sprayed the pesticide, Wallace reported it. After harvest, Wallace was shot and killed.”

The story is a powerful lesson about externalities that can arise with herbicide resistant genetically engineered crops (this one is largely negative, but note that GE Bt crops can create positive externalities). Who's to blame in this case?  Monsanto for releasing GE Dicamba-resistant seed before a new version of Dicamba was released? Regulators for their slowness in approving the new Dicamba? Farmers who improperly used and applied the old version of Dicamba?  You'll have to listen and form your own judgement.