New approaches to food safety economics

Highlights and important insights from the presentations and discussions, concluded with the major research areas identified for future wor

IDENTIFYING PRIORITIES FOR PESTICIDE RESIDUE REDUCTION

Pesticide residues, dietary intakes, dietary risks, fruits and vegetables, Crop Production/Industries,

Food safety policy issues for developing countries

"Food safety issues have attracted international attention because they play an increasingly important role in determining whether developing countries have access to export markets.At the same time, food suppliers in developing countries face the challenge of improving food safety for their growing urban middle classes, and the large burden of disease that poor food safety generates in developing countries is more widely appreciated. Because developing countries produce and consume more perishable foods than before, such as meat, milk, fish, and eggs, food safety has become especially important to domestic consumers and in trade among developing countries.... Food safety is no longer simply a public health issue. It is also a market development issue. The focus on food safety in international trade and in trade agreements has also made it a trade issue for many countries—developed and developing alike." from TextFood safety ,food security ,Public health ,

Is there sufficient consumer demand for certified safer pork?

A number of new product labels for different foods have been developed to assure consumers that food has been produced and handled in a particular manner (e.g. responsibly grown apples; natural beet). Mechanisms are being developed to enhance safety of pork products, such as the efforts of the Trichina Working Group. Recently the USDN AMS Quality Systems Certification Program (QSCP) certified a fully integrated pork producer I processor as producing under consistent procedures; some of these procedures relate to food safety. Some pork producers believe that there is market advantage to be gained from enhanced pork safety

Understanding the Relationship Between Perceived Quality Cues and Quality Attributes in the Purchase of Meat in Malaysia

This study utilizes the Total Food Quality Model to gain a better understanding of how Malaysian consumers make their decision to purchase fresh/chilled meat. We examine the association between quality cues and desired values (quality attributes) with regard to food that is guaranteed Halal, safe to eat, healthy and nutritious, has a good taste, represents good value for money, and is produced in a way that protects the environment and worker welfare. The findings reveal that different quality cues assume different levels of importance when pursuing different desired values

Use of twitter data for waste minimisation in beef supply chain

Approximately one third of the food produced is discarded or lost, which accounts for 1.3 billion tons per annum. The waste is being generated throughout the supply chain viz. farmers, wholesalers/processors, logistics, retailers and consumers. The majority of waste occurs at the interface of retailers and consumers. Many global retailers are making efforts to extract intelligence from customer’s complaints left at retail store to backtrack their supply chain to mitigate the waste. However, majority of the customers don’t leave the complaints in the store because of various reasons like inconvenience, lack of time, distance, ignorance etc. In current digital world, consumers are active on social media and express their sentiments, thoughts, and opinions about a particular product freely. For example, on an average, 45,000 tweets are tweeted daily related to beef products to express their likes and dislikes. These tweets are large in volume, scattered and unstructured in nature. In this study, twitter data is utilised to develop waste minimization strategies by backtracking the supply chain. The execution process of proposed framework is demonstrated for beef supply chain. The proposed model is generic enough and can be applied to other domains as well

Trade, Standards, and Poverty: Evidence from Senegal

An emerging literature on standards, global supply chains, and development argues that enhanced quality and safety standards are major trade barriers for developing country exports and cause the marginalization of small businesses and poor households in developing countries. This paper is the first to quantify income and poverty effects of such high-standards trade and to integrate labor market effects, by using company and household survey data from the vegetable export chain in Senegal. First, horticultural exports from Senegal to the EU have grown sharply over the past decade, despite strongly increasing food standards in the EU. Second, these exports have strong positive effects on poor households?income. We estimate that these exports reduced regional poverty by around 12 percentage points and reduced extreme poverty by half. Third, tightening food standards induced structural changes in the supply chain including a shift from smallholder contract-based firming to large-scale integrated estate production. However, these changes mainly altered the mechanism through which poor households benefit: through labor markets instead of product markets. Moreover, the impact on poverty reduction is stronger as the poorest benefit relatively more from working on large-scale firms than from contract firming. These findings challenge several basic arguments in this research field

Food Standards and Welfare: A General Equilibrium Model with Market Imperfections

We analyze the effects of high standards food chains on household welfare taking into account general equilibrium effects and market imperfections. To measure structural production changes and welfare effects on rural and urban households, our model has two types of agents, five kinds of products and four types of factors. We calibrate the model using dataset from China. The simulation results show that how poor rural households are affected depends on a variety of factors, including the nature of the shocks leading to the expansion of high standards sector, production technologies, trade effects, spillover effects on low standards markets, market imperfections, and labor market effects