Crop choices: How price supports can contribute to healthier diets

When it comes to pegging the blame for the obesity crisis, farm subsidies are a popular target. Subsidies, the argument goes, encourage farmers to grow less-healthy foods — corn, turned into corn syrup, is the common culprit here — and fewer unsubsidized fruits and vegetables.Not everyone agrees. Experts caution that cheap corn isn't the only cause of poor nutrition and that other factors, like technology, are responsible for the low cost of field crops. Still, it's reasonable to ask: How can subsidies be used to make healthier food options more available?One answer: by making sure that subsidies take into account consumer welfare as well as farmers' incomes, suggest UCLA Anderson's Prashant Chintapalli, a Ph.D student, and Christopher S. Tang. In a  working paper examining a type of subsidy called "minimum support prices," or MSPs, the authors suggest that backing a diverse mix of crops — including fruits and vegetables — would give consumers a wider selection and be most effective at raising farmer profits at a lower cost to the government."We learn that the government can indeed tilt the balance by offering MSPs to vegetables as well," Tang says in an interview.Minimum support prices are used by India and other developing countries to boost farm incomes and to assure an adequate supply of locally grown crops. In India, beginning with the Green Revolution of the 1960s, the government wanted to increase domestic production and reduce imports of wheat and rice. Toda...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news