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Evidence shows that the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is underutilized. WIC enrolls 52.7% of eligible persons and participants claim a fraction of available benefits. Researchers suggest that people underutilize WIC because of the time needed to enroll in and use WIC and because participants may believe that, if others notice them participating in WIC, community members will stigmatize them. Recently enacted policies may reduce both time costs and potential for stigma associated with WIC. Congress mandated that, by 2020, all states disburse WIC benefits through an Electronic Benefits Transfer (eWIC) system. Given that eWIC reduces the time required for each transaction and and makes it more difficult to identify beneficiaries, we expect WIC redemptions to increase. In addition, eWIC might also increase the chance WIC recipients choose non-WIC foods for redemption increasing non-WIC expenditures. To measure the impact of eWIC on WIC redemptions and non-WIC food expenditures we analyze data on grocery expenditures of 11,887 WIC-participating households in one state over the period it implemented eWIC. We find that, after beneficiaries began redeeming WIC benefits through eWIC, spending on non-WIC eligible foods did not change but redemptions of WIC benefits increased.

Despite significant improvements over recent decades, rates of undernutrition remain high in South Asia, with adverse impacts on morbidity and mortality. Overweight/obesity, among children and adults, is now an additional and major public health concern. While agriculture has the potential to improve nutrition through several pathways, this potential is currently not being realised in the region. The Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) research consortium (2012–2018) set out to improve understanding about how agriculture and related food policies and programs in South Asia (specifically in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan) can be better conceptualised and implemented in order to enhance impacts on nutrition outcomes, especially those of young children and adolescent girls. This paper provides a snapshot of the agriculture-nutrition nexus in the region, outlines the pathways through which agriculture can influence nutrition outcomes, elaborates on the objectives of the LANSA research consortium within this context, and highlights the core findings of the six papers that form the body of this Special Issue. The paper ends with five key lessons that have emerged from this research, during this decade.

Research on the potential impact of interventions in agriculture on nutrition outcomes is of particular relevance in South Asia where agriculture-related activities are a major source of livelihoods for large sections of society and where the population suffers from one of the highest global burdens of malnutrition in all its forms. This systematic review aims to assess the strength of the available evidence that agricultural interventions have an impact on intermediate and final nutrition outcomes in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We searched five literature databases and reference lists of previous systematic reviews to identify peer-reviewed studies published between 2012 and 2017, detailing impacts of household- or farm-level agricultural interventions on nutritional outcomes in South Asia. We identified six intervention studies (reported in nine papers) conducted in Bangladesh (two studies), India (two studies) and Nepal (two studies). The majority of studies examined the impact of provision of seed, plants and training to increase home garden fruit and vegetable production with or without integrated poultry provision and training. Other studies evaluated the impact of livestock or aquaculture provision and training. Study designs and quality were mixed; heterogeneity across studies precluded formal meta-analysis. Interventions had a positive impact on intermediate outcomes on the pathway from agricultural intervention to nutritional or health status including dietary quality and dietary diversity of households and individuals (reported in seven papers). The evidence on the impact on final nutritional outcomes was mixed: one paper reported that home gardens with poultry reduced the odds of anaemia but there was no convincing evidence of an impact of agricultural interventions on child anthropometric measurement (reported in four papers). In recent years, the Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA) research programme consortium has significantly expanded research on agricultural interventions for nutrition outcomes by conducting and commissioning a suite of formative and feasibility studies that have extended both the range and geographic location of interventions under study. This expanding body of research should, in the future, enable the identification of cost-effective interventions to enhance the impact of agricultural interventions sustainably to improve nutrition outcomes especially in women and children in South Asia.

Food security and agricultural-led industrialisation are pivotal development objectives in Ethiopia. One of the main challenges this country faces is increasing agricultural productivity by integrating smallholder farmers into a high-value agricultural commodity supply chain. This paper examines an integrated project—the Agricultural Value Chains Project in Oromia (AVCPO)—that aims to improve the livelihoods of smallholders in the Bale Zone by involving them in the production of high-quality durum wheat and linking them to the pasta industry via farmers’ cooperatives. Using primary data collected in 2014 and retrospective information, this paper investigates the AVCPO’s effects on the quantity of cereal production, the share of cereals that have been sold through cooperatives, food security, and education. In order to account for potential violations of the exclusion restriction assumption, an instrumental variable approach is applied, together with three additional estimation strategies. The results suggest that the project has had a large and positive effect on gross and net values of cereal production per hectare, as well as on the share of production sold to pasta makers through cooperatives. These benefits accrue equally to land-rich and land-poor farmers. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that the AVCPO has improved educational outcomes and reduced food insecurity, without affecting crop rotation practices. Overall, our findings point to the effectiveness of the project. Before replicating or scaling up this intervention, however, it is necessary to understand how to better involve poorer farmers and which adjustments are needed if the areas selected have a lower potential than Bale Zone.

This paper assesses the impact of three methodologies of food data collection on the welfare distribution, and poverty and inequality measures in Niger. The first methodology is a 7-day recall period, the second one is a usual month, and the third one is a 7-day diary. The paper finds that there is a difference in the distribution of welfare between, on the one hand, the two first methodologies (7-day recall and a usual month, which give results close to each other) and, on the other hand, the 7-day diary method. When considering annual per capita consumption, the 7-day diary lags the 7-day recall by 28 percent. This gap is not only at the mean of the distribution, it has been found at any level. These differences lead to differences in poverty and inequality measures even when alternate poverty lines are used. This study underscores the problem that many developing countries face when it comes to monitoring poverty indicators over time where different methodologies have been used over the years.

Policymakers acknowledge that the food system is multidimensional and that social determinants affect diet-related health outcomes, yet cities have emphasized programs and policies narrowly connected to food access and nutritional health. Over the past fifteen years, the boundaries of food governance have expanded to include a wider range of issues and domains not previously considered within the purview of food policy, like labor, housing, and education policies. This paper illustrates the processes by which this shift occurs by presenting the case of New York City, which has broadened its food governance to a larger set of issues, requiring cross-sectoral initiatives that have led to a more expansive notion of food policy. This shift has resulted from an increased political salience of income inequality and poverty, and a change in municipal leadership that led to a greater emphasis on equity and social justice. Efforts to address equity affected the food system, and in turn led to diverse policies that have expanded the boundaries of food policy. The paper traces this evolution and outlines the implications of these findings for food governance and future urban food policy development and research.

In the context of pressing socio-ecological challenges, from poverty and pandemics to climate change, urban food policies are expanding across the globe. The special issue on “Urban food policies for a sustainable and just future” aims to reflect on a decade of work and identify key concepts to deepen and broaden a transformative urban food agenda. This editorial provides an overview of the twelve papers that make up this collection, demonstrating some of the breadth of approaches used to study this phenomenon in different regions of the world, informed by different epistemic traditions and exemplified by diverse case studies such as urban agriculture, street vending, public procurement, spatial planning, city networks or deep explorations of specific urban policy-making processes. Building on this work and the broader literature, in this paper we identify three core turns in the urban food governance scholarship: a shift towards systemic engagement with the food system; increased engagement with scalar complexity; and a growing focus on relational aspects of urban food governance and policy-making dynamics. However, our analysis also points out three key aspects that require further focus for the field to be transformative: a stronger conceptualisation of the urban; a clearer definition and articulation of the nature of governance and policy; and a more engaged focus on issues of power and inequities. To address these gaps, we propose a set of tools in the form of definitions and frameworks to support the unfolding of an urgently needed more just and transformative urban food agenda.

The U.S. Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) requires monitoring and evaluating (M&E) of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) food safety capacity building programs. M&E provides feedback to the agency on the impact of capacity building. This paper evaluates the direct impacts of International Good Agricultural Practices trainings delivered to trainers in Latin American countries from 2013 to 2017 and discusses policy implications. The evaluations consisted of in-class knowledge tests and questionnaires. Analyses of tests scores and improvements and participant characteristics show how specific characteristics affected classroom learning outcomes. The evaluation points to the usefulness of objective measurements and toward the need for close collaboration and communication with country partners on training needs and participant recruitment. The findings suggest that candidate screening could be useful to distribute scarce training resources to trainers who benefit better from the program and thereby facilitate food safety capacity building. The evaluation approach used in this paper is the first step of the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition’s (JIFSAN) “Chain of Impacts” M&E framework. The same approach will be used for evaluating the impact of international Produce Safety Rule (PSR) training under FSMA. The approach can be applied more widely to other global food safety capacity building efforts.

This paper provides an econometric estimation of the economic determinants of differences in the composition of seemingly identical branded food products (DC-SIP) in the European Union. The DC-SIP issue has previously been referred to in the media as the “dual food quality” issue. The analyses in this paper are based on the results from the EU wide testing survey (European Commission, 2019a) in combination with economic data collected from different statistical sources (e.g. Eurostat, Eurobarometer, World Bank, Global Dietary Database). Econometric estimation—probit estimator—is performed on the combined dataset to identify drivers of DC-SIP quantitatively. The estimated results show that the difference in income levels between two Member States (MS) has a statistically significant positive effect on the probability that the versions of seemingly identical branded food products offered in these two MS are different. The estimation of this paper also shows that other factors—such as heterogeneous consumer preferences across MS, distance, price level, and product complexity—contribute to a firm’s incentive to offer different versions of seemingly identical branded food products in different MS. Further, specific characteristics of different product categories and country-specific factors are also found to impact the presence of DC-SIP between MS.

In 2011–12, Somalia experienced the worst famine of the twenty- first century. Since then, research on the famine has focused almost exclusively on the external response, the reasons for the delay in the international response, and the implications for international humanitarian action in the context of the “global war on terror.” This paper focuses on the internal, Somali response to the famine. Themes of diversification, mobility and flexibility are all important to understanding how people coped with the famine, but this paper focuses on the factor that seemed to determine whether and how well people survived the famine: social connectedness, the extent of the social networks of affected populations, and the ability of these networks to mobilize resources. These factors ultimately determined how well people coped with the famine. The nature of reciprocity, the resources available within people’s networks, and the collective risks and hazards faced within networks, all determined people’s individual and household outcomes in the famine and are related to the social structures and social hierarchies within Somali society. But these networks had a distinctly negative side as well—social identity and social networks were also exploited to trap humanitarian assistance, turn displaced people into “aid bait,” and to a large degree, determined who benefited from aid once it started to flow. This paper addresses several questions: How did Somali communities and households cope with the famine of 2011 in the absence of any state-led response—and a significant delay in a major international response? What can be learned from these practices to improve our understanding of famine, and of mitigation, response and building resilience to future crises?

This paper examines the rationale for pursuing environmental objectives by reducing food loss and waste (FLW). The main thrust of the literature on this issue is that FLW reduction can make a major contribution to making food systems more sustainable. Using a stylized analytical framework, we find that reducing FLW always improves resource use efficiency for land and water, and reduces the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted per unit of food consumed. However, whether the actual environmental outcome is improved will depend on where environmental damage and FLW reduction occur, and the way price transmission connects these along the food supply chain. We find that, while a food waste reduction at the consumer level always improves the environmental outcome, this is not guaranteed when reducing losses from farm to retail. We thus derive a condition linking the price transmission mechanism and the environmental impact of a loss reduction. Simulating environmental outcomes based on a range of parameter values found in the literature, we find that reducing losses at or close to the farm level can increase the aggregate amount of GHG emissions, and therefore focusing on reducing consumer waste is more effective in reducing emissions. As for reducing natural resource use, both loss and waste reductions reduce the amount of land and water use, but effectiveness is reduced by heterogeneity in environmental impact. Relative to loss reductions, effectiveness of a waste reduction is amplified if there are environmentally damaging losses upstream in the value chain, but also dampened by vertical heterogeneity of sourcing along a value chain. The paper makes the case that more targeted instruments may be better suited to address typically local water scarcity and land use and degradation issues.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda makes achieving food security and ending malnutrition a global priority. Within this framework, the importance of fisheries in local and global food systems and its contribution to nutrition and health, particularly for the poor are overlooked and undervalued. This paper reviews current fish production and consumption from capture fisheries and aquaculture, highlights opportunities for enhancing healthy diets and outlines key multi-sectoral policy solutions. Mirroring the call for a diversification of agricultural research and investment beyond a few staple grains, it is anticipated that productivity gains for a few farmed aquatic species will not suffice. Capture fisheries and aquaculture have a complementary role to play in increasing fish availability and access, and must be promoted in ways that support measurable nutrition and health gains. This paper argues that the lack of a nutrition-sensitive policy focus on capture fisheries and aquaculture represents an untapped opportunity that must be realised for ensuring sustainable healthy diets for all.

This paper identifies several positive synergies between social protection programmes and food security outcomes. One function of social protection is to manage and reduce vulnerability, and several instruments are reviewed – weather-indexed insurance, public works programmes, emergency food aid and buffer stock management – which all contribute to stabilising income and access to food across good and bad years, or between the harvest and the hungry season. Other social protection instruments aim to contribute to raising household income and crop production, for instance agricultural input subsidies or input trade fairs, as well as public works projects that construct or maintain physical infrastructure such as rural feeder roads and irrigation canals. This paper also argues that food security can be strengthened if social justice is introduced to the design and delivery of social protection programmes. Examples reviewed include rights-based approaches such as employment guarantee schemes, community-based targeting and social audits. The paper concludes by arguing for a comprehensive approach to social protection that will achieve sustainable food security, by combining interventions that stabilise income or food production with those that raise income or food production, and are designed and delivered in ways that enhance social justice.

This paper provides a critical assessment of the literature estimating the consequences of climate impacts in agriculture and the food system. This literature focuses overwhelmingly on the impact of elevated CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, higher temperatures and changing precipitation on staple crop yields. While critically important for food security, we argue that researchers have gravitated to measuring impacts ‘under the streetlight’ where data and models are plentiful. We argue that prior work has largely neglected the vast majority of potential economic impacts of climate change on agriculture. A broader view must extend the impacts analysis to inputs beyond land, including the consequences of climate change for labor productivity, as well as for purchased intermediate inputs. Largely overlooked is the impact of climate change on the rate of total factor productivity growth and the potential for more rapid depreciation of the underlying knowledge capital underpinning this key driver of agricultural output growth. This broader view must also focus more attention on non-staple crops, which, while less important from a caloric point of view, are critically important in redressing current micronutrient deficiencies in many diets around the world. The paper closes with numerical simulations that demonstrate the extent to which limited input and output coverage of climate impacts can lead to considerable underestimation of the consequences for food security and economic welfare. Of particular significance is the finding that humans in the humid tropics are likely more vulnerable to heat stress than are many of the well-adapted crops, such as rice. By omitting the impact of heat stress on humans, most studies of climate impacts greatly understate the welfare losses in the world’s poorest economies.

In developing countries, a significant share of land transactions occurs among closely related parties and often does not entail any specific compensation (in-kind or monetary). Despite the prevalence of these non-market or informal transactions, the literature has paid little attention to the determinants and consequences of these exchanges. In this paper we shed light on the role land use certificates play on the agreed compensation of rental agreements when landlords, particularly those with weaker ex-ante tenure security (i.e. women), rent out land to their relatives in Viet Nam. We find that female-headed households who lease their plots to relatives are less likely to receive any type of payment, unless they possess a title for the plot they leased. A regional decomposition of our results shows that this effect is more predominant in the Northern regions.

This paper offers an empirical analysis of the proposal by some developing countries for an agricultural Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) in the World Trade Organization. It draws on political economy and market theory to demonstrate that the loss-averting domestic producer benefits that proponents believe the SSM would offer agricultural-importing developing countries may be illusory, insofar as agricultural-exporting countries also seek to avert producer losses. By way of illustration, the paper then uses time series data to analyze past government responses to fluctuations in the world’s rice markets. The results suggest that the proposed SSM would deliver at most only a small fraction of the loss-averting benefits that have been advertised by the proponents of the SSM. Since the analysis applies to upward as well as downward spikes in international prices, it underscores the importance of strengthening multilateral disciplines on both import and export trade interventions to reduce beggar-thy-neighbor unilateral trade policy responses to food price fluctuations.

International audience; The aim of this article is to analyze how market actors, and farmers in particular, mobilize collective coordination capacities to face global changes – market price or sectorial policies – within different regional contexts. A multi-scale conceptual framework is proposed to analyze market functioning and transformation over time and space. We extend Commons and Fligstein’s work on market institutions to define the notion of competition regime as a combination of four market institutions that legitimizes competition strategies. We also mobilize Ostrom’s work on common property rights regimes to show that a competition regime relies on the creation and management of two systems of common-pool resources, namely innovation capacity and reputation-building. This paper then shows the relevance of this framework through the case study of the current restructuring of dairy supply chains in mountainous areas in France. It shows that market liberalization strongly destabilizes the regional competition regimes that were based on the appropriation of social rights inherent to the national public policies. In the hybrid and specific competition regimes, existing territorial coordination devices are not directly threatened and can support the development of new cooperative strategies. In all cases, with the development of a contractual economy, farmers are incited to develop or to strengthen coordination devices to become effective market participants. Through the development of large territorial producers’ organizations capable of managing milk supply in volume and quality, they would be able to take part in the management of the supply chains. To do so, the present paper suggests that farmers’ organizations need material and immaterial investments and assistance from regional public players to build new local collective capacities. The competition regime framework is an asset for the design of such public supports in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, taking the regional specificity of the markets’ institutions and collective capacities into account.

This paper uses comparable income aggregates from 41 national household surveys from 22 countries to explore the patterns of income generation among rural households in Sub-Saharan Africa, and to compare household income strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa with those in other regions. The paper seeks to understand how geography drives these strategies, focusing on the role of agricultural potential and distance to urban areas. Specialization in on-farm activities continues to be the norm in rural Africa, practiced by 52 percent of households (as opposed to 21 percent of households in other regions). Regardless of distance and integration in the urban context, when agro-climatic conditions are favorable, farming remains the occupation of choice for most households in the African countries for which the study has geographically explicit information. However, the paper finds no evidence that African households are on a different trajectory than households in other regions in terms of transitioning to non-agricultural based income strategies.

This paper uses the recently collected Living Standard Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture Initiative data sets from five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to provide a comprehensive overview of factor market participation by agrarian households and to formally test for failures in rural markets. Under complete and competitive markets, households can solve their consumption and production problems separately, so that household factor endowments do not predict input demand. This paper implements a simple, theoretically grounded test of this separation hypothesis, which can be interpreted as a reduced form test of market failure. In all five study countries, the analysis finds strong evidence of factor market failure. Moreover, those failures appear general and structural, not specific to subpopulations defined by gender, geography, human capital, or land quality. However, we show that rural markets are not generally missing in an absolute sense, suggesting that market existence is less of a problem than market function.

Expectations are high that transition in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen will bring about more freedom, justice, and economic opportunities. However, experiences from other world regions show that countries in transition are at high risk of entering conflicts, which often come at large economic, social and political costs. In order to identify options on how conflict may be prevented in Arab transition countries, this paper assesses the key global drivers of conflicts based on a dataset from 1960 to 2010 and improved cross-country regression techniques. Results show that unlike in other studies where per capita incomes, inequality, and poor governance, among other factors, emerge as the major determinants of conflict, food security at macro and household-levels emerges as the main cause of conflicts in the Arab World. The high exposure of Arab countries to global food price variations proves to be an important source of vulnerability for a peaceful Arab transition. If history is also a guide to the future, improving food security is not only important for improving the lives of rural and urban people; it is also likely to be the key for a peaceful transition. The paper concludes with a set of policy options on how to improve food security at macro and household-levels, including safeguard mechanisms against excessive price volatility, export-led and pro-poor growth, the creation/expansion of social safety nets and targeted nutrition programs.

Highlights • Somalia experienced the worst famine of the twenty-first century in 2011. • People’s ability to cope with the famine depended on diversification, mobility and flexibility. • People’s social connections were instrumental in how well they coped with the famine. • Social networks functioned differently in famine—and were not always able to sustain members. • Understanding social connectedness will improve famine prevention and response., In 2011–12, Somalia experienced the worst famine of the twenty- first century. Since then, research on the famine has focused almost exclusively on the external response, the reasons for the delay in the international response, and the implications for international humanitarian action in the context of the “global war on terror.” This paper focuses on the internal, Somali response to the famine. Themes of diversification, mobility and flexibility are all important to understanding how people coped with the famine, but this paper focuses on the factor that seemed to determine whether and how well people survived the famine: social connectedness, the extent of the social networks of affected populations, and the ability of these networks to mobilize resources. These factors ultimately determined how well people coped with the famine. The nature of reciprocity, the resources available within people’s networks, and the collective risks and hazards faced within networks, all determined people’s individual and household outcomes in the famine and are related to the social structures and social hierarchies within Somali society. But these networks had a distinctly negative side as well—social identity and social networks were also exploited to trap humanitarian assistance, turn displaced people into “aid bait,” and to a large degree, determined who benefited from aid once it started to flow. This paper addresses several questions: How did Somali communities and households cope with the famine of 2011 in the absence of any state-led response—and a significant delay in a major international response? What can be learned from these practices to improve our understanding of famine, and of mitigation, response and building resilience to future crises?

This paper uses the recently collected Living Standard Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture Initiative data sets from five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to provide a comprehensive overview of factor market participation by agrarian households and to formally test for failures in rural markets. Under complete and competitive markets, households can solve their consumption and production problems separately, so that household factor endowments do not predict input demand. This paper implements a simple, theoretically grounded test of this separation hypothesis, which can be interpreted as a reduced form test of market failure. In all five study countries, the analysis finds strong evidence of factor market failure. Moreover, those failures appear general and structural, not specific to subpopulations defined by gender, geography, human capital, or land quality. However, we show that rural markets are not generally missing in an absolute sense, suggesting that market existence is less of a problem than market function.

India imports about half of its domestic consumption needs of edible oils. Groundnuts are a major source of edible oils in India. One of the central problems of groundnut production and processing is huge inefficiencies due to an uncertain production environment owing to rainfed cultivation, the low resource base of smallholder farmers and processors, and the low adoption rates of improved technology. This paper addresses critical issues that impair the groundnut sector’s international competitiveness and efficiency. The paper uses primary data collected from Indian farmers and processors of groundnuts to measure efficiency, and it suggests policies for reducing yield gaps and increasing efficiency. Specific policies suggested from the study are (a) the harnessing of improved varieties with attributes like drought tolerance, high oil content, high productivity for large-scale seed multiplication and distribution by public and private agencies; (b) viable village seed banks and seed networks through cycles of post-rainy season seed multiplication to meet the seed requirements in the rainy season and vice versa; (c) adoption of low-cost technologies to increase profitability and reduce risk; (d) oilseed clusters to facilitate scale and scope economies in processing units; and (e) capital subsidies to accelerate technological upgrading to shed inefficiency in the processing sector. The expected gains in efficiency in the production and processing of oilseeds are expected to result in producer and consumer gains which would justify the proposed incentives for seeds and for technological upgrading in the processing sector.

This paper is a summary of the behaviour of food commodity prices in 2007–2008 and a review of the causes of the price increases, extracted from a report to the Chief Scientific Advisor to Her Majesty’s Government [Thirtle, C., Piesse, J., 2008. An Explanatory Review of the World Food Commodity Price Events of 2007–2008. A Report to the Chief Scientific Advisor. Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, London]. The historical background shows that the price spike was much less severe than in the 1970s. The conventional wisdom that prices of the main food commodities were falling prior to 2006 is questioned. Most ceased falling and were quite stable from the 1980s. The paper separates the causes of the spike from the underlying changes driving the long run trends. The literature on the causes of the spike is critically reviewed and summarised. There is a reasonably broad consensus on most of the causes, but much less on the impact of the depreciation of the US Dollar. There are also concluding speculations on the future.

Rapid economic and income growth, urbanization, and globalization are leading to a dramatic shift of Asian diets away from staples and increasingly towards livestock and dairy products, vegetables and fruit, and fats and oils. While the diversification of diets away from the traditional dominance of rice with rising incomes is expected and observed, current food consumption patterns are showing signs of convergence towards a Western diet. The diet transition is characterized by increased consumption of: wheat; temperate fruit and vegetables and high protein and energy dense food. Globalization and the consequent global interconnectedness of the urban middle class, is the driving force behind the convergence of diets. The rapid spread of global supermarket chains and fast food restaurants is reinforcing the above trends. The growing demand for diet diversity cannot be met solely by the traditional food supply chain. It requires the modernisation of the food retail sector, and the vertical integration of the food supply chain, in effect linking the consumers’ plate to the farmers’ plow. As a consequence, Asian agriculture is on an irreversible path leading away from its traditional pre-occupation with cereal crop production, especially rice, towards a production system that is becoming increasingly commercialized and diversified. This paper describes the determinants and trends in the diversification and Westernization of Asian diets. Implications of the evolving demand trends for food supply and retail systems are presented. The paper discusses the prospects for small farmer participation in the emerging food supply system, with a particular emphasis on Asian rice production systems. Finally, the paper considers emerging challenges for food policy, small holder welfare, and agricultural research and development priorities.

The paper first presents a 10-year outlook for major Asian dairy markets (China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) based on a world dairy model. Then, using Heien and Wessells’s (1988) [Heien, D.M., Wessells, C., 1988. The demand for dairy products: structure, prediction, and decomposition. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 70, 219-28] technique, dairy product consumption growth is decomposed into contributions generated by income growth, population growth, price change, and urbanization and these contributions are quantified. Using the world dairy model, the paper also analyzes the impacts of alternative assumptions of higher income levels and technology development in Asia on Asian dairy consumptions and world dairy prices. The outlook projects that Asian dairy consumption will continue to grow strongly in the next decade. The consumption decomposition suggests that the growth would be mostly driven by income and population growth and, as a result, would raise world dairy prices. The simulation results show that technology improvement in Asian countries would dampen world dairy prices and meanwhile boost domestic dairy consumption.

The overall goal of our paper is to understand the impact that irrigation in China has had on grain production and incomes, in general, and income and poverty alleviation in poor areas, in particular. The paper seeks to meet three objectives. First, we describe the relationship among irrigation status, yields and household crop revenue. Second, we seek to understand the magnitude and nature of the effect that irrigation has on yields and crop revenue. Finally, we seek to understand the impact that irrigation has on incomes in poor areas. Our analysis shows that irrigation contributes to increases in yields for almost all crops and in income for farmers in all areas. The importance of crop income in poor areas and the strong relationship between crop revenue and irrigation provides evidence of the importance of irrigation in past and future poverty alleviation in China. We also show that in the majority of the villages that invested in new irrigation, returns are positive even after accounting for increases in capital and production costs. 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper argues that research and extension have failed to (1) develop technologies that take into account farmers’ resource constraints and risks; and (2) improve farmers’ capacity to adapt technologies to their own situations. The paper critiques continued use of blanket, high-dose fertilizer recommendations, arguing for approaches that teach farmers how to maximize returns from smaller, more affordable input purchases. Developingsuch technologies requires that researchers integrate a wider range of stakeholders (farmers, extension agents, agricultural exporters and processors) into research activities at an earlier point in time than has been the case. Although evidence that these new approaches are increasing the use of purchased inputs remains weak, a number of important lessons are emerging about how research and extension outcomes are influenced by institutional culture and incentives. The authors conclude that developingrecommendations for small, affordable input doses and trainingfarmers so they can adapt recommendations to their particular circumstances is as much an institutional challenge as a technology challenge. # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper provides a micro-level foundation for discussions of land allocation and its relation to income poverty within the smallholder sectors of Eastern and Southern Africa. Results are drawn from nationally-representative household surveys between 1990 and 2000 in five countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Zambia. The paper shows that farm sizes are declining over time; that roughly a quarter of the agricultural households in each country are virtually landless, controlling less than 0.10 hectares per capita, including rented land; that non-farm income shares are below 40% even for the households in the bottom land quartile; and that because of this, there is a strong relationship between access to land and household income, particularly for farm sizes below 1.0 hectares per capita. Land distribution within these small-farm sectors appears to be becoming more concentrated over time, and their Gini coefficients are comparable to those of many Asian countries at the time of their green revolutions. Lastly, the largest part of the variation in per capita farm sizes within the small-farm sectors is, in every country, predominantly within-village rather than between-village. Realistic discussions of poverty alleviation strategies in Africa need to be grounded in the context of these land distribution patterns and trends.

This paper assesses the problems of financing Central and Eastern European agriculture during the present transitionary period and the role of government in this process. Initially the paper looks at why credit markets work imperfectly, even in well developed market economies, focusing on problems related to asymmetric information, adverse selection, moral hazard, credit rationing, optimal debt instrument choice and initial wealth. It shows why these and related problems may cause transaction costs to be so high that credit rationing and high interest rates are rational and efficient responses by lenders to the imperfect information problems of the agricultural sector. A series of specific, transition-related issues are then discussed which have worsened these problems within the Central and Eastern European agricultural sector. The potential roles of governments in solving these issues and actual observed interventions by Central and Eastern Europe governments through credit subsidies, loan guarantees and specialised agricultural lending institutions are analysed. Finally, the paper discusses how financial market innovations have solved some of the credit market problems and derives the implications for government policies.

In its Sixth World Food Survey released at the 1996 World Food Summit, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported that 841 million people in developing countries are chronically undernourished. This number and its country and regional-level disaggregations have proved tremendously useful to countless development aid agencies and researchers. In the context of a recent wave of new nationally-representative household food consumption and expenditure surveys, this paper examines the estimation methodology underlying the food insecurity measure, which relies on national aggregate measures of food availability and distribution. The paper finds that the measure largely reflects national food availabilities and does not adequately capture people's ability to gain access to food – the ultimate key to food security. The implications for the indicator's use by policy makers in geographical targeting and tracking changes in food insecurity over time are drawn out. The paper concludes by arguing that the time has come to review the potential for employing the new household survey data, along with new methods, to strengthen the empirical foundations of FAO's measure.

This paper synthesizes the main findings and highlights the insights of six articles that examine how China has managed its agricultural resources in the past, how agriculture is performing at present, and what challenges lie ahead as the country seeks to meet the food needs of its growing population. It provides common threads of empirical evidence on China's agricultural growth, describing its interrelationships with institutions, development policies and environmental degradation, and examines the sensitivity of China's trade balances and world prices to environmental and growth outcomes, using six income growth and resource degradation scenarios. This paper notes that, hampered by chronic fiscal problems and restrictions that will be imposed when it joins the World Trade Organization, China can meet its food supply goals by increasing reliance on international markets, establishing stable trading relationships with the rest of the world, and by exploiting its agricultural comparative advantage. However, the most likely scenario is for China to continue producing most of its own food while gradually increasing food imports without exerting severe upward pressure on the world markets. The paper concludes that China needs to prioritize investments in agricultural research for new technologies raising agricultural productivity, and mitigating rural environmental problems.

The impact of risk on agriculture and the alternative ways of dealing with it has captured the attention of economists and policy makers for a long time. In recent years, the issue has gained renewed interest. Many countries have started policy reforms aimed at liberalizing domestic markets, removing quantitative restrictions on trade, and opening up their economies to international trade opportunities. As this process develops, producers in different region of the world will start facing increased price variability arising from world market fluctuations, as up to now, mainly due to government marke interventions, domestic producer prices have varied substantially less than international ones (Hazell et. al., 1990; Schiff and Valdes,1992). Hence, risk,and price risk in particular, will most probably be at the core of the implementation problems associated with policy reform packages. It is well known that diversification of the production mix can be a particularly efficient mechanism for diminishing the impact of risk on producers' welfare. In this regard, different public policies may help to deepen diversification in agriculture, public investment in irrigation being the most important example. However, since many of these policies entail a significant use of resources, an important policy question concerns the impact that trade and macro reform may have on risk in agricultural activities, and on the endogenous diversification response by producers. The main objectives of this paper are to: 1) review the problem of price risk in agriculture, especially in the case of domestic markets facing international price fluctuations; 2) examine the potential role for diversification as a way of diffusing price risk; and 3) analyze the interaction between the process of trade and macro reform; price risk, and agricultural diversification. It is important to mention at the outset that the risk perspective - the one adopted in this paper - is just one of the many angles from which the issue of agricultural diversification and policy reform can be analyzed. Another, would be the wealth impact of adding a new good to the production possibilities of agriculture, under the assumption that a policy reform, by removing many underlying distortions and rigidities in the economy, might encourage the discovery and development of new alternatives of production that before were not available to economic agents. It should be fairly clear that if a policy reform implies adding new production possibilities to agriculture, then that "diversification" by itself - which takes the form of a positive shift in the production possibilities of the economy - should lead to a wealth increase, and that the net wealth effect should be significantly higher than any risk effects, which typically tend to be of second order magnitude when compared with wealth effects. However, it is not completely evident that policy reform should always lead to that result, or that the scope for adding new products to the production possibilities is unlimited and open to any country engaging in a reform process. This issue, although important, is not included in the present paper which concentrates mainly on the interaction between diversification and policy reform from a risk perspective. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section we review the problem of price risk in agriculture. There, we submit the view that most probably, the welfare effects of price risk are higher than those most common measures would suggest. This puts price risk at the core of the implementation problems associated with policy reform efforts. Section 3 deals with the role of agricultural diversification as a mean of diffusing price risk. As a policy option, we contend that the objective of diversification should play an indirect role, and should be restricted mainly to public expenditure decisions and policie aimed at increasing the integration of domestic with international asset markets. By an endogenous response from producers, we conclude that the alternatives that agricultural diversification offer are somewhat limited to a sizable degree by co-movement of international prices of commodities. Section 4 explores the interaction between diversification and trade and macro reform. We conjecture that, given the available causal evidence, a probable outcome of trade reform will be an increased diversification in an economy-wide sense, although not necessarily an increased diversification at the unit-of-production level. This will probably require a re-focus of agricultural pricing and public expenditure policies.

Sub-Saharan African countries experience various market failures and other constraints in food production, marketing, and food consumption. Consequently, sub-Saharan Africa governments have put in place a myriad of policies to counter these failures. Agricultural, food and nutrition policies address nutrition outcomes, such as hunger, undernourishment, wasting, stunting, child mortality, inadequate food consumption, food insecurity, and volatile food prices, thus improve nutrition outcomes among the population. However, malnutrition persists among the population in the region. To mitigate this challenge, informed, evidence-based policy development and implementation by policy practitioners is of essence. The solutions to the double burden of undernutrition and obesity cut across the agriculture, rural development, and public health sectors. This essay introduces twenty papers of this Special Issue of the Food Policy journal which analyzes 8 policy domains, contributes to the debate on the linkages and pathways through which policies influence food security, nutrition outcomes, and related indicators and points to policy directions in these domains.

The egalitarian allocation of agricultural land and small operational farm sizes in rural China raise questions about the implications for overall productivity given that there exists potentially large heterogeneity in farm-level productivities. This paper examines to what extent land and capital are misallocated in a region in the North China Plain that is characterized by small and relatively equally distributed farm sizes. Using a survey data set collected from wheat-maize double-cropping farms, we find that the dispersion in farm-level total factor productivities is small, and the quantified gains in aggregate agricultural output (productivity) by reallocating factors from less productive to more productive farms are moderate compared to the findings in the previous literature. The estimated output (productivity) gains range from 7% for within-village reallocation to 10% for between-village reallocation in the region. We argue that these findings are largely explained by the high-level use of hired machinery services among smallholders in the region.

The world population is ageing, and as lifestyle related illnesses and multi-morbidity increase with ageing, prevention with modifiable factors is becoming an increasingly important issue. In the current paper, we revisit the retirement (food) consumption puzzle in a welfare state context and examine how retirement affects food expenditure and energy intake as well as the dietary healthiness of elderly individuals with different marital and labor market status. We use a unique household panel data set covering the period from 2007–2017 with monthly food purchases from a sample of households above 55 years of age. We supplement the purchase data with official register data on income, health-contact days, unemployment, early voluntary and old age retirement at the individual level. The structure of the data set facilitates the identification of any associations between retirement and dietary behavior while controlling for important confounding factors such as the number of health-contact days as a proxy for health shocks and income as a proxy for wealth shocks. We compare the results with the results from estimations using instruments for the retirement decision. We do not find any evidence to support a retirement (food) consumption puzzle. Generally, the healthiness of diets increases at the point of retirement, and even more so for those who had the most unhealthy diets before retirement. Since the diets of individuals outside the labor market are less healthy both before and after retirement compared to other groups, the focus of dietary policy should be directed at this group.

Extreme weather events frequently cause severe crop yield losses, affecting food security and farmers’ incomes. In this paper, we aim to provide a holistic assessment of these impacts across various extreme weather events and multiple crops. More specifically, we estimate and compare the impact of frost, heat, drought and waterlogging on yields of winter wheat, winter barley, winter rapeseed and grain maize production in Germany. We analyse 423,815 farm-level yield observations between 1995 and 2019, and account for extreme weather conditions within critical phenological phases. Furthermore, we monetarize historical yield losses due to extreme weather events on a spatially disaggregated level. We find that drought is a main driver for farm-level grain yield and monetary losses in German agriculture. For instance, a single drought day can reduce winter wheat yields by up to 0.36%. It is estimated that during the period 1995–2019, summer drought led to yield losses in winter wheat, which, on average, caused annual revenues to sink by over 23 million Euro across Germany. We find that the impacts of extreme weather events vary considerably across space and time. For example, only the most important winter rapeseed production region in the North of Germany was prone to winter rapeseed yield losses due to heat during flowering. Moreover, waterlogging and frost are generally less relevant from an economic point of view, but can nevertheless cause crop- and regional-specific damage. Our analysis provides stakeholders with information for weather-related risk management and adaptation strategies., Food Policy, 112, ISSN:0306-9192, ISSN:1873-5657

We use the full administrative records from four leading agricultural economics journals to study the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on manuscript submission, editorial desk rejection and reviewer acceptance rates, and time to editorial decision. We also test for gender differences in these impacts. Manuscript submissions increased sharply and equi-proportionately by gender. Desk rejection rates remained stable, leading to increased demand for reviews. Female reviewers became eight percentage points more likely to decline a review invitation during the early stage of the pandemic. First editorial decisions for papers sent out for peer review occurred significantly faster after pandemic lockdowns began. Overall, the initial effects of the pandemic on journal editorial tasks and review patterns appear relatively modest, despite the increased number of submissions handled by editors and reviewers. We find no evidence in agricultural economics of a generalized disruption to near-term, peer-reviewed publication.

This paper examines the agricultural productivity–farm size relationship in the context of Bangladesh. Features of Bangladesh's agriculture help overcome several limitations in testing the inverse farm size–productivity relationship in other developing country settings. A stochastic production frontier model is applied using data from three rounds of a household panel survey to estimate simultaneously the production frontier and the technical inefficiency functions. The “correlated random effects” approach is used to control for unobserved heterogeneous household effects. Methodologically, the results suggest that the stochastic production frontier models that ignore the inefficiency function are likely mis-specified, and may result in misleading conclusions on the farm size–productivity relationship. Empirically, the findings confirm that the farm size and productivity relationship is negative, but with the inverse relationship diminishing over time. Total factor productivity growth, driven by technical change, is found to have been robust across the sample. Across farm size groups, the relatively larger farmers experienced faster technical change, which helped them to catch up and narrow the productivity gap with the smaller farmers.

After years of neglect, there is a renewed interest in agricultural mechanization in Africa. Since government initiatives to promote mechanization are confronted with major governance challenges, private-sector initiatives may offer a promising alternative. However, given limited scientific studies on such private-sector options such approaches are often viewed skeptically. One concern is that multi-national agribusiness companies take advantage of smallholder farmers. Another concern is that mechanization causes rural unemployment. To shed light on these concerns, this paper analyzes an initiative of the agricultural machinery manufacturer John Deere to promote smallholder mechanization in Zambia through a contractor model. The analysis focuses on the impact of this initiative on farmers who receive tractor services using Propensity Score Matching. The results indicate that farmers can almost double their income by cultivating a much larger share of their land. The analysis suggests that the increased income is used for children’s education and more food, but does not result in increased food diversity. The demand for hired labor increases due to land expansion and due to a shift from family labor, including that of children, to hired labor. Questions that require further investigation are identified, including strategies to incentivize tractor owners to provide services, to also increase land productivity, and to avoid new forms of dependency of agricultural laborers that may result from a shift in the timing of the labor demand.

This paper presents a simple simulation framework for understanding and analyzing vulnerability to stunting. We utilize Demographic and Health Surveys merged with satellite data on climatic shocks. Children aged 0–5 years are grouped into three categories: consistently stunted, vulnerable, and non-vulnerable. The first group constitutes those who are stunted and will also be stunted in any hypothetical period. Non-vulnerable are those whose likelihood to be stunted is zero. The vulnerable face a probability between 0 and 1 of being stunted. The probability is calculated as the share of years in which the child would be stunted, given the village level distribution of weather shocks over the period 2000–2013. We provide estimates of vulnerability to stunting in Burkina Faso, Northern Ghana, Mali, Northern Nigeria, and Senegal by aggregating over villages, districts and countries.

This paper systematically reviews the evidence on what capacities the state requires to leverage agriculture for nutrition in fragile contexts, maintaining a focus on state in South Asia (especially India). It uses the framework of what the state ought to do (in terms of pathways), can do (in relation to parts of the enabling environment it is able to deliver) and is willing to do (addressing constraints in terms of political choices). The results of the search were sorted into three further themes: capacity of the state to intervene systemically and intersectorally; engage with participatory and locally relevant understandings of agriculture-nutrition linkages, and to create, maintain and engage in formal spaces for dialogue.

Malnutrition is a multicausal challenge that requires multisectoral responses to make comprehensive and sustainable progress, over the long term. How is agriculture and the wider agri-food system positioned within the constellation of factors and processes that determine nutrition outcomes in different contexts and countries? What is known about the role of enabling environments and the governance of agri-food systems in driving nutrition outcomes, for better or worse? In this paper we will highlight the findings of a systematic review that focuses on this question, drawing on work from the South Asian region including research undertaken by LANSA. We conclude with a discussion of the major implications and recommendations for future policy and practice.

Background Food assistance interventions directed at households may miss undernourished individuals if intra-household equity in nutrient allocation is assumed. A recent study from Ethiopia revealed that, while all age groups consumed calories in proportion to their fair share, iron and protein were inequitably allocated among household members. Further exploration of individual and household characteristics associated with these allocation patterns is necessary to gain a more complete understanding of existing disparities. Objective This paper sought to quantify energy, protein, and iron allocation inequity between four age and sex groups of household members (children and adults) commonly assumed to be disadvantaged versus preferentially treated in intra-household resource distribution. It then sought to identify individual and household factors that explained the inequity of intra-household nutrient allocation among these paired groups. Methods Data from a survey of 1185 households located in rural Oromiya and SNNPR regions of Ethiopia. A single quantitative 24-hour household-level dietary recall was collected from the primary food preparer who reported the proportion of household food distributed to each household member. Continuous ratios of relative calorie, protein, and iron adequacy for four pairs of age-sex groups (any child vs. any adult, any child vs. adult male, female child vs. male child, and adult female vs. adult male) in the household were computed and compared, along with a binary indicator of inequity. Logistic regressions and standard linear regression with Huber-White heteroscedasticity-adjusted standard errors were run to determine the predictors of household inequity for each pair-group and nutrient, on the full sample as well as on nutrient inadequate households. Results Common assumptions about inequitable distribution of nutrients within households were not consistently supported by this analysis. Significant intra-household nutrient inequities did exist in these rural Ethiopian households for certain nutrients, but household subgroups commonly presumed to be nutritionally vulnerable in the Ethiopian context were not always affected by detrimental inequity. Generally, household inequity favored children over adults or adult males, and female children over male children for protein consumption. Inequities were greatest against presumed vulnerable groups (adult women, children) for ‘invisible’ nutrients (iron) rather than calories or protein. There were relatively few households in which one of the interest groups (groups presumed vulnerable) experienced inequitable nutrient allocation and nutrient inadequacy. The number of households where inequity was present for a subgroup who also experienced nutrient inadequacy while the reference group (group presumed to be preferred) was nutrient adequate was negligible, suggesting that in very few of these household are there members who are “haves”, benefiting nutritionally to the nutritional detriment of “have nots”. The analysis of determinants did not reveal any single, consistent set of factors driving decisions across all pair groups and nutrients, but these factors were not substantially different for households that were and were not nutrient adequate. Household dependency ratio, higher relative male education, female household headship, and women’s decision-making power provided mixed results for pairwise comparisons. Conclusions The variable pattern of nutrient inequities underscores the risk of overlooking intra-household nutrient allocation disparity or making assumptions about a particular intra-household food and nutrient distribution pattern in any context where programs are intended to benefit particular household members.

The introduction of an effective Front of Pack food labelling (FoPL) system is at the forefront of the food policy debate. Nutritional information is seen as an effective tool to help fight obesity and its associated co-morbidities, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease, for which unhealthy diet represent a major preventable risk factor. This paper explores the influence of FoPL formats on consumer’s stated choice of weekly food baskets using data from a discrete choice experiment carried out in Northern Ireland in 2011. Two of the three baskets were experimentally designed while the third represented the respondent’s actual current food choice (or status-quo basket). Four nutritional attributes were used: (i) total fat, (ii) saturated fat, (iii) salt, and (iv) sugar. Baskets were portrayed at different price levels to elicit the sensitivity of choice to price and to derive marginal willingness to pay estimates. Results from random utility models with various forms of heterogeneity reject the null of no association between preference classes and healthier food baskets and also the null of no effect of the nutritional information described. We find that the influence of the FoPL format used to convey nutritional information combines with selected socio-demographic covariates to determine membership to preference classes. A sensitivity analysis is used to validate the preferred model and the response sensitivity of selection probabilities to potential policy levers, such as a more realistic appreciation of self-body image and the habit of reading labels.

Graphical abstract, Highlights • Policies and programs often aim to bring nutritious diets within reach of the poor. • We use food prices and composition to compare least-cost diets around the world. • Globally, nutrient adequacy costs 2.66 times the cost of subsistence daily energy. • Affordability of nutritious diets is negatively associated with rural travel times. • Differences in least-cost foods across countries reveal targets for intervention., Many policies and programs aim to bring nutritious diets within reach of the poor. This paper uses retail prices and nutrient composition for 671 foods and beverages to compute the daily cost of essential nutrients required for an active and healthy life in 177 countries around the world. We compare this minimum cost of nutrient adequacy with the subsistence cost of dietary energy and per-capita spending on all goods and services, to identify stylized facts about how diet cost and affordability relate to economic development and nutrition outcomes. On average, the most affordable nutrient adequate diet exceeds the cost of adequate energy by a factor of 2.66, costing US$1.35 per day to meet median requirements of healthy adult women in 2011. Affordability is lowest in Sub-Saharan Africa. The sensitivity of diet costs to each requirement reveals the high cost of staying within acceptable macronutrient ranges, particularly the upper limit for carbohydrates. Among micronutrients, total diet costs are most sensitive to requirements for calcium as well as vitamins A, C, E, B12, folate and riboflavin. On average, about 5% of dietary energy in the least-cost nutrient adequate diets is derived from animal source foods, with small quantities of meat and fish. Over 70% of all animal products in least-cost diets is eggs and dairy, but only in upper-middle and high-income countries. In lower income countries where egg and dairy prices are significantly higher, they are replaced by larger volumes of vegetal foods. When controlling for national income, diet costs are most significantly correlated with rural travel times and rural electrification. These data suggest opportunities for targeted policies and programs that reduce market prices and the cost of nutritious diets, while improving affordability through nutrition assistance, safety nets and higher earnings among low-income households.

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face survey data collection efforts came to a halt due to lockdowns, limitations on mobility and social distancing requirements. What followed was a surge in phone surveys to fulfill rapidly evolving needs for timely and policy-relevant microdata for understanding the socioeconomic impacts of and responses to the pandemic. Even as the face-to-face survey data collection efforts are resuming in different parts of the world with COVID-19 safety protocols, the rapidly-acquired experience with phone surveys on the part of national statistical offices and survey practitioners in low- and middle-income countries appears to have formed the foundation for phone surveys to be more commonly implemented in the post-pandemic era, in response to other shocks and as complementary efforts to face-to-face surveys. Informed by the practical experience with the high-frequency phone surveys that have been implemented with support from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) to monitor the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper provides an overview of options for the design and implementation of phone surveys to collect representative data from households and individuals. Further, the discussion identifies the requirements for phone surveys to be a mainstay in the toolkits of national statistical offices and the directions for future research on the design and implementation of phone surveys.

Highlights • Food advertising regulation a contentious policy issue. • Framing strategies used by policy actors important to capture for policy analysis. • Policy actors use different moral frameworks to support or oppose policies. • Tension between children’s rights and industry rights moral frameworks identified., Exposure to advertising of food and beverages high in fat sugar and salt (HFSS) is considered a factor in the development of childhood obesity. This paper uses framing analysis to examine the strategic discursive practices employed by non-industry and industry responders to the Committee of Advertising Practice’s consultation responses (n = 86) on UK regulation of non-broadcast advertising of foods and soft drinks to children. Our analysis demonstrates non-industry and industry responders engaged in a moral framing battle centred on whose rights were deemed as being of greatest importance to protect: children or industry. Both industry and non-industry responders acknowledged that childhood obesity and non-broadcast advertising were complex issues but diverged on how they morally framed their arguments. Non-industry responders employed a moral framework that aligned with the values represented in social justice approaches to public health policy, where children were identified as vulnerable, in need of protection from harmful HFSS product advertising and childhood obesity was a societal problem to solve. In contrast, industry responders emphasised industry rights, portraying themselves as a responsible industry that is victim to perceived disproportionate policymaking, and values more closely aligned with a market justice approach to public health policy. Our analysis provides detailed insights into the framing strategies used in the policy debate surrounding the non-broadcast advertising of HFSS foods to children. This has relevance as to how advocacy organisations can develop counter-framing to industry frames which seek to limit effective regulation.