Australian Consumers' Concerns and Preferences for Food Policy Alternatives

Results from a 2007 Australian consumer survey conducted at a large farmers market are used to explore the hypothesis that consumers who are more concerned about certain types of food labeling information, particularly information related to food production attributes, are more likely to support policies which help develop farmers markets and support mandatory labeling policies. Product information and attributes such as Country-of-Origin, No Growth Hormones Used, Free Range and Animals Treated Humanely and Environmentally-friendly appear to be very important to consumers. It appears that respondents want increased government involvement in developing consistent food labelling standards for these attributes and support mandatory food labelling policies, however, respondents are split between whether third-parties or the Australian government should oversee regulation of the program. Some respondents appear to view a mandatory labelling policy as a method to improve competitiveness and sustainability of small food producers who want to use labelling to differentiate themselves. Respondents also tended to support the government subsidizing the development of farmers markets. Respondents viewed FM as an opportunity to gain additional information or purchase foods that have credence attributes such as pesticide-free. Thus, policies supporting FM may help alleviate market failures related to asymmetric information and lack of choice.market failure, consumers, farmers markets, labelling, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Creation of a public LCA database of French agricultural raw products : agriBALYSE

ADEME, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency, sees Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as an essential tool to guide the evolution of agricultural production chains towards environmental sustainability. ADEME implements a recent French law aiming to introduce environmental labelling of consumer products, including food, by end of 2012. Labelling should indicate the product's carbon-footprint, but also other impacts. In this context it was decided to create a public life cycle inventory (LCI) database of French agricultural raw products. The database, named agriBALYSE, will be developed by a consortium consisting of ten institutes for applied agricultural research and three agricultural research institutes specialised in the environmental analysis of farming systems. The database will apply a consistent methodology for the establishment of LCIs of plant and animal products at the farm gate. The methods used and the data format will be in accordance with ISO norms, the ILCD handbook and the general methodology adopted for the environmental labelling of consumer products in France. The methods will be developed in the project, and will be based, as much as possible, on the involvement and the consensus of the concerned stakeholders. The LCI data should allow the calculation of the indicators identified for environmental labelling, but also of other frequently used LCA indicators. By the end of June 2011 the 3-year project should deliver LCIs for the most representative production systems of the main French crop and animal products, using existing methods and data. By the end of 2012, more LCIs, based on methods developed in the project, will be available for a wider range of production systems and production modes per product, and the range of products covered will be larger. (Réumé d'auteur

Provenance, Purity & Price Premiums: Consumer Valuations of Organic & Place-of-Origin Food Labelling (Executive Summary)

China is now the world’s largest food producer for many food categories, and has recently embarked on a major conversion to organic agriculture. Australian farmers have described their industry as in crisis due to increasing competition from imports; they have called for strengthening of country of origin labelling on food. Priestley (2005) noted the absence of data on the premium Australian consumers will pay, if any, for Australian food produce. Halpin (2004) has reported that the current premiums on organic food are well beyond what Australian consumers are likely to be willing to pay, and that this will probably inhibit the growth of the industry in Australia. Vogl, Kilcher & Schmidt (2005) declare that consumers expect organic produce to be labelled with a regional identity. The present study set out to establish the values consumers place on organic, on provenance, and on faux-organic claims (Type II eco-labels), and to determine the interactions between these factors. Australian consumers (N=221) were surveyed online. Organic was valued at an 8.12% premium, and Certified Organic was valued at a 15.63% premium. The provenance Australia was valued at a 25.98% premium over China, and Tasmania was valued at a 31.59% premium over China. Both Natural and Eco added value, 2.48% and 2.84% respectively. Certified Organic attracted a lower premium when coupled with China (11.62%). This Organic x Provenance interaction was consistent with respondents declaring they lacked trust in Chinese labelling. Interaction effects for eight demographic variables, including age, education, and place of residence, are reported. Gender and income do not have a significant influence on consumer values. This study found that adjunctive labelling offers both Australian and Chinese producers the opportunity to add value to their produce. It found that Australian producers would be beneficiaries from implementation of the Fair Dinkum Food Campaign's call for Country of Origin Labelling (CoOL), which is currently lacking on processed food. It establishes that organic is a path for both Australian and Chinese producers to add value. It suggests that China’s push into organic production has the potential to lead the world to an organic future, and continuing on this path may give China the opportunity to redefine the standard for internationally traded food as Certified Organic

The New Narrow "D_s" States -- A Minireview

The experimental status concerning the two new narrow states with charm-strange content is reviewed. The states have masses of 2317 and 2460 MeV, widths less than 10 MeV, isospin consistent with zero, and spin-parities consistent with being 0^+ and 1^+, respectively. Although the masses are lower than the conventional expectation, these states appear to be the j=1/2 P-wave levels of the D_s system, where j is the light quark angular momentum; there may be mixing with the j=3/2 level for the 1^+ state.Comment: 4 pages, 10 figures LaTeX; To appear in Proceedings of the International Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, July 17-23, 2003, Aachen. A (long file) version with some clearer figures may be found at: http://www.hep.caltech.edu/~fcp/papers/eps03.pdf This version updates version 1 with a correction to labelling of Fig. 8 (Thanks to U.Karshon for noticing this

Zero Temperature Dynamics of the Weakly Disordered Ising Model

The Glauber dynamics of the pure and weakly disordered random-bond 2d Ising model is studied at zero-temperature. A single characteristic length scale, $L(t)$, is extracted from the equal time correlation function. In the pure case, the persistence probability decreases algebraically with the coarsening length scale. In the disordered case, three distinct regimes are identified: a short time regime where the behaviour is pure-like; an intermediate regime where the persistence probability decays non-algebraically with time; and a long time regime where the domains freeze and there is a cessation of growth. In the intermediate regime, we find that $P(t)\sim L(t)^{-\theta'}$, where $\theta' = 0.420\pm 0.009$. The value of $\theta'$ is consistent with that found for the pure 2d Ising model at zero-temperature. Our results in the intermediate regime are consistent with a logarithmic decay of the persistence probability with time, $P(t)\sim (\ln t)^{-\theta_d}$, where $\theta_d = 0.63\pm 0.01$.Comment: references updated, very minor amendment to abstract and the labelling of figures. To be published in Phys Rev E (Rapid Communications), 1 March 199

Predicting the labelling of a graph via minimum p-seminorm interpolation

We study the problem of predicting the labelling of a graph. The graph is given and a trial sequence of (vertex,label) pairs is then incrementally revealed to the learner. On each trial a vertex is queried and the learner predicts a boolean label. The true label is then returned. The learner’s goal is to minimise mistaken predictions. We propose minimum p-seminorm interpolation to solve this problem. To this end we give a p-seminorm on the space of graph labellings. Thus on every trial we predict using the labelling which minimises the p-seminorm and is also consistent with the revealed (vertex, label) pairs. When p = 2 this is the harmonic energy minimisation procedure of [22], also called (Laplacian) interpolated regularisation in [1]. In the limit as p → 1 this is equivalent to predicting with a label-consistent mincut. We give mistake bounds relative to a label-consistent mincut and a resistive cover of the graph. We say an edge is cut with respect to a labelling if the connected vertices have disagreeing labels. We find that minimising the p-seminorm with p = 1 + ɛ where ɛ → 0 as the graph diameter D → ∞ gives a bound of O(Φ 2 log D) versus a bound of O(ΦD) when p = 2 where Φ is the number of cut edges.