The true cost of food: a preliminary assessment

Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing their environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. One of the central problems of current food systems is that many of the costs of harmful foods are externalized, i.e., are not reflected in market prices. At the same time, the benefits of healthful foods are not appreciated. Due to externalities, sustainable and healthy food is often less affordable to consumers and less profitable for businesses than unsustainable and unhealthy food. Externalities and other market failures lead to unintended consequences for present and future generations, destroying nature and perpetuating social injustices such as underpay for workers, food insecurity, illness, premature death and other harms. We urgently need to address the fundamental causes of these problems. This chapter sets out the results of an analysis to determine the current cost of externalities in food systems and the potential impact of a shift in diets to more healthy and sustainable production and consumption patterns. The current externalities were estimated to be almost double (19.8 trillion USD) the current total global food consumption (9 trillion USD). These externalities accrue from 7 trillion USD (range 4–11) in environmental costs, 11 trillion USD (range 3–39) in costs to human life and 1 trillion USD (range 0.2–1.7) in economic costs. This means that food is roughly a third cheaper than it would be if these externalities were included. More studies are needed to quantify the costs and benefits of food systems that would support a global shift to more sustainable and healthy diets. However, the evidence presented in this chapter points to the urgent need for a system reset to account for these ‘hidden costs’ in food systems and calls for bold actions to redefine the incentives for producing and consuming healthier and more sustainable diets. The first step to correct for these ‘hidden costs’ is to redefine the value of food through true-cost accounting (TCA) so as to address externalities and other market failures. TCA reveals the true value of food by making the benefits of affordable and healthy food visible and revealing the costs of damage to the environment and human health 3

The true cost of food : a preliminary sssessment

Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing their environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. One of the central problems of current food systems is that many of the costs of harmful foods are externalized, i.e., are not reflected in market prices. At the same time, the benefits of healthful foods are not appreciated. Due to externalities, sustainable and healthy food is often less affordable to consumers and less profitable for businesses than unsustainable and unhealthy food. Externalities and other market failures lead to unintended consequences for present and future generations, destroying nature and perpetuating social injustices such as underpay for workers, food insecurity, illness, premature death and other harms. We urgently need to address the fundamental causes of these problems. This chapter sets out the results of an analysis to determine the current cost of externalities in food systems and the potential impact of a shift in diets to more healthy and sustainable production and consumption patterns. The current externalities were estimated to be almost double (19.8 trillion USD) the current total global food consumption (9 trillion USD). These externalities accrue from 7 trillion USD (range 4–11) in environmental costs, 11 trillion USD (range 3–39) in costs to human life and 1 trillion USD (range 0.2–1.7) in economic costs. This means that food is roughly a third cheaper than it would be if these externalities were included. More studies are needed to quantify the costs and benefits of food systems that would support a global shift to more sustainable and healthy diets. However, the evidence presented in this chapter points to the urgent need for a system reset to account for these ‘hidden costs’ in food systems and calls for bold actions to redefine the incentives for producing and consuming healthier and more sustainable diets. The first step to correct for these ‘hidden costs’ is to redefine the value of food through true-cost accounting (TCA) so as to address externalities and other market failures. TCA reveals the true value of food by making the benefits of affordable and healthy food visible and revealing the costs of damage to the environment and human health 3.https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-15703-5hj2024Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural DevelopmentSDG-02:Zero Hunge

Jumping numbers in higher dimensions: computation and contribution by exceptional divisors

In this thesis, we investigate how certain results for jumping numbers on surfaces can be generalized to higher dimensions. We focus on two particular problems. Firstly, we generalize the algorithm by Alberich-Carramiñana, Àlvarez Montaner and Dachs Cadefau for jumping numbers of ideals on surfaces with rational singularities. We introduce antieffective divisors in order to develop an algorithm that generates a small set of numbers, called supercandidates, containing the jumping numbers. Every supercandidate comes with a divisor, the minimal jumping divisor. This divisor gives an upper bound for possible divisors critically contributing the supercandidate as a jumping number. If the minimal jumping divisor is irreducible, which is often the case, the supercandidate is a jumping number. We also provide some other techniques, so that this can be easily checked in many other cases. Secondly, we try to generalize the results of Smith and Thompson and Tucker on contribution of jumping numbers by exceptional divisors. In particular, we study the relation between contributing divisors, the log canonical model and the intersection configuration in a log resolution. We show that if an exceptional divisor belongs to certain isomorphism classes, it contributes jumping numbers if and only if it survives in the log canonical model, and that we can see from the intersection configuration whether this is the case. We provide some counterexamples to show that this result does not hold in general. In particular, we construct an example of an exceptional divisor that does not contribute jumping numbers, but survives in the log canonical model.status: publishe