Economics of Food System Transformation (Part 2)

500 scientists from 60 countries gathered at the 5th Global Food Security Conference in Leuven, Belgium. Instead of saying, "you had to be there," we bring you voices and reflections from the conference. Host Matthew Kessler recorded dozens of interviews, asking experts what key messages they want to deliver to those with the power to change food systems, what are the economics of food systems transformation, and which solutions to make food systems more resilient deserve more attention.

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series, made with the support from ‘shout it out’, an instrument of the Global Minds program.

For more info and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/episode64

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Guests

• David Laborde, Director of the Agri-food Economics and Policy Division at FAO
• Charlotte Janssens, Researcher at KU Leuven
• Koen Deconinck, Economist in Trade and Agricultural Directorate at OECD
• Steven Lord, Researcher at U Oxford
• Purnima Menon, Sr Director for Food and Nutritional Policy at IFPRI
• Ewout Frankema, Prof at Wageningen U

Conference Organizers

• Elsevier
• KU Leuven
• Wageningen University and Research
• TABLE

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Gerard Govers

So food is really very close to you know, the essence of our being.

Ken Giller

One of the reasons we're sitting here at this conference in global food security is that that's been a conference which really does cut across disciplines. So you meet people from a lot of different walks of life in the science world.

Renuka Attanayake

Being a plant pathologist 

Ewout Frankema

Professor of economic and environmental history

Koen Dekoninck

I’m an economist in the Trade and Agriculture Directorate of the OECD.

Charlotte Janssens

My research is on agricultural trade

Carla Fabiana Crespo Melgar 

I'm biotechnologist. And I'm researching on microbial solutions for agriculture and climate change. 

Matthew

Welcome to Feed, a food systems podcast presented by TABLE, I'm Matthew Kessler. 

Last April I interviewed 20 experts at the fifth global food security conference hosted by KU Leuven in Belgium.  You can listen to part-1 where we heard about the different regional and global challenges to food security and how we can make food systems more resilient.

In this episode, we continue this exploration, but we focus specifically on the economics of the food systems, and the economics of food systems transformation. First of all, if you're not an economist, don't be intimidated. They all do a very good job of explaining their work. Though I also don't blame you, if you have to pause to take in everything. We’ll link to all the reports referenced in the episode on our show notes. 

Here we cover the differences between efficient trade and inefficient trade, how the scientific reporting of environmental impacts of food has developed over time, what factors shape what people eat, and a possible pathway to transform the food system that's still good for the economy. And we end with an analysis of why food prices in Sub Saharan Africa have been relatively higher than they have been across Southeast Asia. 

If that's not enough, we first start with David Laborde at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, who talks about the need for solutions to global food security to be located both within and outside of the food system.

David Laborde 

I am David Laborde. I am the director of the agri food Economics and Policy Division at the Food and Agriculture Organization based in Rome, and I'm an economist by training and trade. So the situation today on food security and global food security is not great, as you may have heard about it, we have 735 million people that are in chronic hunger, meaning that every day they don't have enough calories to operate properly. That's 135 million more than in 2015. Part of this is due to a number of shocks that we have suffered globally. So you can think climate shock, conflict, economic crises. And all of these lead to a number of big challenges. Because the goal of the world was by 2030 to eradicate hunger, we are not on the right track. So part of these shocks can occur in different places in the world where the people that suffer at the end will be. And that's the result of globalization, we are dealing with shocks all over the planet. And we have to react to them. But it's also an opportunity because we can find solutions much more quickly, we can find alternative sources of food, we can find alternative technology, and we can use global solidarity to deal with that.

Matthew

Do you think if you can name one or one leading factor, you think the obstacles to Zero Hunger are more political or economic or more technological in nature? 

David Laborde

The foundations are economic, that's economic inequalities, that drive hunger, basically half of hunger can be attributed to inequalities across countries, and the other half of inequalities within countries. Now why we cannot solve it, it's a political choice, it’s how much we prioritize it. Do we want to make the right to food the reality or just a motto? 

Matthew

What solution would you advocate for to confront economic inequalities and achieve zero hunger? 

David Laborde

We need to improve girls’ education and having gender transformative actions that may not be directly linked to what people think about food systems. But when we look at more technical or practical solutions, there is no one silver bullet, we have to think that in every context, the mix of solutions can be different and what within the portfolio. But girl education is key because it actually change how in low income countries farmers operate. The gender gap is a productivity gap with a cost in terms of economic food security or mental impact. But also at a wider level. We see that when the shocks occur, how women react both in terms of providing food to their family is a choice we make. That's where the long term impact and without good human capital for women, we will not make it. 

Matthew

We have a set of solutions that kind of exist within the food system and ones that exist outside of the food system but they're very much interacting with it. We also have different regional challenges across the world. So some of them will neatly align, and others, you have completely different needs. Are there particular solutions you'd like to point out that can balance and address both of these simultaneously?

David Laborde

We are going to have different mix of solutions in different places, but that will contribute to his great rebalancing. There are places in the world where we are using too much fertilizer, other places where we are using not enough, there is a place in the world where we're consuming too much meat in places where we are not consuming enough. And that's why we do want to simplify the story, but use the complexity over the next 25 years to put the world on a track that is sustainable and just.

Matthew

Are there any final messages that you want to share?

David Laborde 

So I don't want that we fall in terms of all doom and gloom, we have solution that can be implemented if we put resources on this money, human capital and political capital,

Matthew

David Laborde, Director of Agri food Economics and Policy Division at FAO, thank you so much for speaking with us.

David Laborde 

Thank you for having me.

Matthew

Next up, we hear from a researcher who challenges the idea that eating locally is better from an emissions and trade perspective.

Can you introduce yourself? What's your name? What's your position? What do you do for a living? 

Charlotte Janssens 

So my name is Charlotte Janssens. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven. And my research is on agricultural trade. So I fill my days looking at agricultural trade and climate change. 

Matthew 

Can you make the case for the importance of markets and trade in the food system? 

Charlotte Janssens  

Well, trade is a unique tool, because it allows you to utilize differences that are out there. And so we all know, all regions are very different. And so that also means that agriculture and regions are different. And so by connecting different countries, different regions with each other through trade, we can use the advantages that are out there in each country. 

Matthew  

So your talk focused on emissions associated with trading key crops such as maize, soybean and rice, I want to focus in on one thing first, which is land use change. Can you talk a little bit about what role land use change plays in emissions more generally, and  how trade interfaces with that. 

Charlotte Janssens 

It's a very important element. So when we talk about emissions related to the land use sector, then about half is coming from land use change. So half is related to agricultural processes themselves, half is land use change, that means, a typical example  is deforestation when you're cutting forests in order to increase cows or cropland. And so that's, that's a big part of the emissions that are related to food systems. Now, what's the links with trade? Well, a considerable part of products that are produced on lands that are deforested, and otherwise, they are destined for the international market. So that's where this link comes from. So we think about oil seeds such as soybeans, or tropical commodities, such as cocoa or coffee. 

Matthew  

Can you maybe talk about two different commodity crops or two different foods and an example of a more efficient system and an inefficient system that perhaps caused more emissions? 

Charlotte Janssens

When I talked about efficiency in relation to trade, we're talking about whether specific trade flows are efficient in terms of emissions. That means if you would, instead of importing a good, produce it domestically, would this create actually more or less emissions, and so we're doing this type of analysis for all different commodities, we see that on average for wheat trade flows are rather efficient. So that means it's actually from an emissions point of view, it makes sense to import the good rather than then produce it domestically. While when it comes to soybeans, it was on average, inefficient. Soybeans takes place in areas where there's a lot of deforestation happening. Another example is some fresh vegetables. So these might be transported by plane. And then, I'm talking about for example, asparagus or green beans. And then also in those cases, these trade flows can be on average, inefficient. 

Matthew 

Are there other dimensions that are important to look at in terms of thinking about where food should be traded around the world? 

Charlotte Janssens  

Yeah of course. So we've been just discussing now on emissions, but there are many other impacts that are that are important to consider and when we're just talking about the sustainable food system, so it's not only emissions, it's also biodiversity impacts, its other pollutants or it's like the more social indicators, food security, etc. It’s all linked to agricultural production and as such also to trade patterns.

Matthew 

I'm curious what you think is one food system solution to make the food system more resilient, that deserves more attention. 

Charlotte Janssens

I have maybe one suggestion which links a bit to the responsibility and to the climate change problem because countries are responsible for their emissions and reporting and managing those from a production based perspective. So it's based on production accounting, but you see that more and more people are becoming aware that you can also look at this based on consumption-based accounting, so you're responsible for your, what you're consuming. And so this links for example, to, to Yeah, if these products are produced on deforested land, but they're there for the European market, like who's responsible for that. And so I think that having more consumption-based approaches in policy but also in the private sector and our scientific thinking can help.

Matthew

Next, we ask if the future of food sustainability can be found in data rather than on  labels, and what’s behind the rise of environmental impact reporting.

Koen Deconinck 

My name is Koen Deconinck, I'm an economist in the trade and agriculture Directorate of the OECD.

Matthew  

Last year Koen, you were the lead author of the OECD paper, Fast and Furious: the rise of Environmental Impact Reporting in food systems, what prompted you and your team to take on this piece of work?

Koen Deconinck  

People used to think of sustainability and food systems in terms of a checklist of practices, right? The key example would be Organic, or Fairtrade, where he would have a long list that says you should do this, you should not do that. And then you would basically go to a farmer with that checklist and see whether or not they meet all of those criteria. And then they get certified. You either are or you are not certified. And then you might be in a supermarket and find a product that has either it has a label on it, or it doesn't have a label on it. So it's a very yes or no type of approach. It's based on a checklist. And what experts were telling us is, take a closer look now because there's this new approach that is getting a lot of momentum. And it is the idea that you can actually measure environmental impacts. You can measure greenhouse gas emissions, water use etc. And they say this is actually a big change in how we think about sustainability and food systems. And the more we looked into it, the more we realized this is absolutely true. It is indeed, it's a very different paradigm, a very different way of thinking about sustainability. It would, for example, make it easier to compare between different types of products. In the past, you could either have the fairtrade bananas, or the regular bananas, but you wouldn't necessarily know if the bananas were better than the apples, if you actually quantify things like greenhouse gas emissions, and well, now you can start making those comparisons. So that is indeed a really important change. We realized that it wasn't just in terms of labels, it's actually happening in many different levels. So there's research happening where people are trying to quantify these things, for specific projects, for companies, for products, even for entire countries, what are the environmental impacts of consumption of food in Sweden, for example. So it seems that there's something bigger happening right now, which is this rise of what we call Environmental Impact Reporting. The key idea is that it's quantified rather than sort of a 0-1, checklist based approach. And there's several drivers behind that, it’s not only consumers who are increasingly asking for that information, it's also governments who are asking it and even financial investors. So investors might be worried that the company they're investing in might be very vulnerable to strict regulations on environmental impact. So they want to know, what are your environmental impacts? What exactly am I investing in here? So there's this greater push for transparency for quantification. So that's the demand side of it in parallel, it's also becoming easier to supply that information. If you had asked this question, 10-15 years ago, it would have been very difficult to quantify these things, because we wouldn't have known exactly what you should include and how you should include it. So there were no reporting standards. Now we have them, they're not yet perfect, people are still working on improving them. But there's a solid foundation there. In addition, there's a lot of databases that weren't there 10, 15, 20 years ago, when those databases are giving us a pretty good first view of the environmental impacts of different kinds of products in different kinds of countries. And there's new tools that you could use that you can actually plug in farm level data, and then get an estimate of your greenhouse gas emissions out there. We also see a lot of activity at the moment where people are trying to come up with ways that you could share primary data like that along your supply chain, so the farmer could calculate carbon footprints, then transmit that to the processor, who in turn could then calculate carbon footprints of their products and and give that to retailers, for example. So if you put all that together, we thought, well, this is an incredible story. That's incredible development that could potentially be quite impactful because you might create a data infrastructure that you could use for many kinds of initiatives, private initiative, voluntary initiatives, but also public initiatives to build on top of that data infrastructure. And nobody seemed to have told that story yet. Nobody seemed to have put together all those pieces of the puzzle. So from many conversations with many experts, we basically try to put that together and tell that story.

Matthew  

So what you were just describing seems like there's widespread interest from farmers and producers to food business to people working across the supply chain to policymakers to consumers trying to understand what are the environmental impacts of the food that they're purchasing? How can or should we act on this knowledge? What needs to be implemented? And by whom?

Koen Deconinck 

It's a great question. It's something that we're looking at right now, we're asking, if you wanted to have a perfect system for measuring the environmental impacts of food and transmitting that data all the way from the farm to the supermarket? What are the building blocks that you would need for that? And how far are we at the moment with those building blocks. So we've identified several building blocks, it's not just one or two elements, there's eight elements. So there's a lot of different things that need to fall into place. What's interesting there is that we do have many of those elements already. Some of them are not yet as well developed as they should be, there's a few other areas where we really need a lot more work. And there's a couple of areas where we have the building blocks, but they're not yet complementary to each other, we still need to modify them a little bit so that they can actually be interoperable. So the idea is that once those building blocks are in place, that then might be much easier to actually calculate, to measure and communicate environmental impacts along the food supply chain, which in turn would make it easier for people like you and me to make the right decisions in the supermarket, but also for everybody else along the supply chain to make informed decisions about how they can reduce their environmental impacts. I think the low hanging fruit is to connect different communities, because I mentioned that there are several building blocks. And a lot of the work on those building blocks historically was done by different communities of researchers or civil society actors. And what you still see today is that a lot of the interesting work is happening. And people may not necessarily know what the others are working on. There's low hanging fruit there to bring together those communities to make sure that we all know what everybody else is working on. And we start to work towards harmonizing and aligning all those different initiatives.

 Matthew  

So building a community of practice around environmental impact reporting.

Koen Deconinck

Exactly.

Matthew

Koen Deconinck from the OECD, thanks so much for speaking with us.

Koen Deconinck

Thank you.

 Matthew

To transform food systems, there are calls to shift diets, change how we use land, and change how we farm. Can that be done in a way that’s good for the economy?

Steven Lord

Dietary intake is one of the fundamental inputs to labor and labor is one of the fundamental inputs to the economy, so that the way that we feel and how much energy we have, the clarity of our thinking, these are all affected by our diets. And that in turn affects our work, our creativity. And so those are the types of benefits that are possible. But your trade offs are, of course, people enjoy what they eat. 

Matthew 

Can you introduce yourself?

Steven Lord 

Steven Lord, University of Oxford, and I research the economics of the food system. One of my favorite quotes is from Joseph Stiglitz, which is a Nobel Prize winning economist. And he said, you know, the climate emergency, the war, if it's done correctly, it could be good for the economy. So we're really just asking the same question about the food system, that would it be good for the economy? And what does it mean to correctly wage that war, because you can have more costs, then you have benefits from doing this the wrong way. But if you do it the right way, then you can maintain a cost effective way of changing the system. And so you're maximizing your value of your benefits from achieving them at low cost.

Matthew 

So Steven, the Food System Economic Commission you were involved in modeled the economic benefits of a global food system transformation to 2050. There you worked with quite a large model and a lot of different variables. Can you maybe walk through how changing food production has these economic benefits? 

Steven Lord

So this was done as part of a large modeling collaboration with modelers at the Potsdam Institute. They have an economic model, when you make changes in consumption and production, and it's a land use model. So it can say, if it's valuable for farmers, they'll grow these crops, or they'll change to forestry, they sort of make economic decisions based upon their land use when you do something like put a dietary change scenario in your change in demand. So that filters back to production to meet that demand. So you get changes in land use, you get changes in the amount of greenhouse gas you're producing, the nitrogen that you're using. And so, what happens is, you are changing the amount of these byproducts that are being produced by the food system each year that will then have these later consequences. So the mechanisms of when you reduce greenhouse gas emissions or you reduce nitrogen emissions, or you do not you avoid deforestation, or you are reducing the amount of land you need for agriculture. So some of that land comes back online for natural systems. When you do that, then you are changing your impact upon natural and human capital in the future, those two capitals basically underpin the value in your economy. Even when you have a very service-based economy, you still have to eat in order to provide those services, it’s still making money and providing value in the economy, it still has a natural and human capital base.

I think it's very important because it's a real inertia point for transforming the food system. But the very important thing is transfers, transfers from there's the polluter pays principle that says, Okay, I did the pollution, I got some benefit that I shouldn't have by polluting too much. And therefore I have to, you know, pay for the consequences. But in this situation, the producers, the farmers are the main polluters, they are producing most of the greenhouse gases of the system, nearly all the nitrogen of the system, doing the land clearing, but they've been in an uncorrected system for 40, 50 years. And so, I was talking before about dynamics, they've ended up locked into a market that has been uncorrected for a long time. And so it's very marginal, to try and put the burden on them to say, well, you know, you’re, locked into a system now you have to bear the costs of changing at all. So I think it's very important to think about, how do I transfer from those that are receiving these benefits in the future, to those that have to bear the costs to make the change in order for me to receive those benefits. So the future peoples will benefit from the changes we make now. So there is actually a strong argument that farmers should be paid to make the right and cost effective changes. And there should be things like treasury bonds to transfer money from the future beneficiaries, to those that have to bear the burden of the changes.

Matthew 

If we can crack that and convince a bunch of decision-makers to move us in that direction, I think we're off to a really good start. Stephen Lord, researcher at the University of Oxford. Thanks for speaking with us.

Steven Lord 

Thank you.

Matthew 

Moving next from the macro to the micro. The global picture to a specific region. We look at what shapes what and how people eat across rural communities in South Asia.

Purnima Menon 

One of the big challenges in the region is, of course, the affordability of healthy diets. That requires actions that go well beyond telling people what they should be eating, or even helping them develop the motivation and the skills to eat healthier food, because if it's unaffordable, and therefore not accessible to families and individuals, then we need to come in with, you know, with other types of supportive interventions and and policies and programs. 

My name is Purnima Menon, and I’m Senior Director for Food and Nutritional policy at the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Matthew  

We are at the Global Food Security Conference, and we're hearing a lot about global data, and what are the yield gaps around the world, and all the different food security challenges, but I want to focus on not the macro lens, but the micro lens really get to the kind of on the ground reality, what shapes what people eat. 

Purnima Menon  

The last many years that many of us have been working on nutrition, we've recognized the centrality of the quality of people's diets in terms of shaping not just one or two, but a multitude of nutrition and health outcomes, both in the short term and in the long term. That's really brought us to this point of saying, Well, what do we know about what people eat? You know, how can we understand that better? How can we understand that in a, in a way that also helps to identify entry points for the kinds of transformations that we need to see. I mean the food industry certainly knows a lot about, you know, who we are and how we eat and what shapes our preferences. But from a public policy perspective, there just isn't as much data on that, especially in low and middle income countries.

Matthew  

You and your organisation have been conducting on the ground interviews across regions in South Asia. And that work will continue in other parts of the world as well. What did you learn from this experience? What, what are we missing by not exploring kind of the depth of the rich lives of people and how they're finding food and the food choices that they're making?

Purnima Menon 

Taking an intergenerational perspective, so we tried to understand what was going on in terms of what young people were eating, what you know, what their families were, were eating, what food environments look like in general, and you know what was unsurprising in some ways is that food cultures are still quite family oriented in these parts of the world. And so adolescents and young people are certainly eating a lot of food that is cooked at home. But the diets are still fairly limited. They're especially limited in fruits and vegetables, they’re limited in sources of protein. And luckily, we don't find, you know, huge levels of consumption, for example of purchased snacks and other things. Now, what's interesting in terms of what we're learning about how people perceive and how they think about, you know, different foods that come onto their plates is that it's quite nuanced. You know, it isn't just one thing, depending on, you know, people feel differently about the different attributes of different types of foods. And again, that tells you, if you're someone who's going to be designing behaviour change programs, or thinking about how to integrate nutrition curriculum into schools or in other places. This is the kind of evidence that gives you again, entry points that are locally relevant, and yet science and data based, to take things forward. And so that's, that's what we're excited about. The other thing that we've learned is, in some of our analysis, work, we've been joking that around one thing we find no inequity, and that's in the access to ultra processed foods, you know, there is no inequity there, whether you're rich or poor, you have widespread access to those foods, and they're often at price points that people can afford. But I think in South Asia, it's still at a point where the consumption of many of those foods is not as widespread yet, especially in these rural communities. So again, there's some room for hope and some room for, for some work to stem, a trend that has, I think, otherwise been really devastating in many other parts of the world. 

The last piece that I want to point to, in terms of what we've been learning is just, you know, the critical need to pay attention to the intra household gender dynamics around what happens with food, you know, for a long time in the context of gender dynamics, we've done quite a lot of work on getting women into economically productive work that earns them incomes, and you know gives them the sort of additional economic wherewithal, if you will, but what we're seeing is that all of that has happened, and it's continuing to happen, you're not so women are quite involved in agriculture, they're involved in other aspects of the food system. But when it actually comes to putting healthy meals on or any meals on the plates of these families, they're carrying that load all by themselves. They're carrying entire domestic workloads and care loads by themselves. And we're able to see that in our data. And so when I think about, you know, food systems, transformations, and the kinds of things that need to happen, I think it's also important that we think about the societal transformations that need to happen to bring families together around healthy meals.

Matthew 

You've identified these separate challenges of widespread equitable access to ultra processed foods, inequities in the ability to afford healthy foods, and the different gender dynamics that happen at the household level and the societal level. And perhaps one thing that connects to all of them is the political economy of food. Maybe you could talk a little about what sort of interventions or solutions you'd like to propose to, to address some of these challenges.

Purnima Menon 

We had a great conversation about possible magic bullets the other day. So I think like, nutrition-linked, gender-transformative social protection types of programs can be very effective in these settings, because what they can do is put resources in terms of information, and in terms of say cash, or vouchers or other things in the hands of women. From a political economy perspective, you know, I think you have to move straight to what are the the laws, the regulations, and that landscape of solutions in the policy arena, in countries and in South Asia, certainly, governments are sort of walking their way towards a suite of solutions in the in the policy landscape, you know, there's some work on sort of taxes, much less work on marketing regulations. So quite a lot of, you know, thinking to be done there on that side of the political economy, that the tricky part is, you know, the food industry is also a huge generator of employment and incomes and things like that. So there's quite a lot to sort out over there. We still need to test in different ways. But we're quite excited about the deep learning that's happening now and how it can help to shape the solutions that we work on testing and supporting governments around in the future.

Matthew 

In our final selection, we speak with an economic and environmental historian who analyzed why people on average pay more for their food across Africa than they do in Southeast Asia.

Ewout Frankema 

I am struck by deep global inequalities, and that is something actually that I already as a child knew I wanted to learn more about why that is. You can understand these global inequalities better, if you understand sort of the long run, the history historical development. So that is how I ended up  in this business. 

My name is Ewout Frankema, I'm a professor of economic and environmental history at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. And I'm working currently on a comparative long term development of agriculture in Africa and in Asia.

Matthew 

You really analyse the cost of food and the price of food, what was important about this indicator?

Ewout Frankema

Prices matter to people, right? What you pay for your food, which is something you have to consume in order, at least, to stay alive, you cannot spend on the education of your children, or on health care that you may need as well. So part of food security is that food is affordable to people. And one of the patterns that is borne out by a lot of data is that many food items tend to be relatively expensive in Sub Saharan Africa. Also, if you compare that to regions that some 50 years ago, would be at the same ballpark level of income per capita, low income countries. And that raises, of course, a puzzle. So why is that? And can we disentangle the puzzle. Now history will try to approach that problem from a long run perspective to see whether there are any junctures in patterns where food prices are really going up. And that's what we are ultimately trying to identify.

Matthew  

And so on this relative price difference, I mean, there's the classic kind of McDonald's index, like, if I'm paying $1, for a hamburger in the United States, relative to what my income is.

Ewout Frankema 

And then I would, I would rather not talk about a hamburger, but just about a bag of maize meal, for instance. In the average Sub Saharan African country, you may pay up to 80% of the price that an American consumer is paying. Now everybody knows that the income levels in Africa are of course not 80% of those of the average American consumers. So there you can already get a measure of how expensive food actually is. 

Matthew  

What is the mainstream narrative for why people are paying a higher percentage of their income on food in Sub Saharan Africa? I'd like you to speak to what that is first, and then we'll go into what your research found afterwards. 

Ewout Frankema 

I think the main narrative is that the productivity of agriculture in Africa is lagging behind. A simple way of expressing this is that Africa is not producing enough food, we're also talking about staple crops like maize,  or wheat, for instance, or rice in order to feed its population. This means that about 20% of those cereals have to come from abroad. Now that that is in itself, not a problem if other regions like for instance, North America or Central Europe can produce these foods very cheaply, then you can start importing this. But then you still need to have a marketing system that distributes these imported foodstuffs, bags of meal, further into the country. Now, if the costs of that marketing system are relatively high, and you're living in a city far from the coast, then it still may mean that you have to pay quite a lot for obtaining this kilogram of flour.

Matthew 

You've conducted quite a big research project. You've looked at archival data to gather what the actual cost of these foods were across the last 150 years. What did you find?

Ewout Frankema  

What we found, and that was something that we did not expect, is that that narrative of lagging productivity, that is mainly applicable to the final quarter of the 20th century. That that does not explain the first juncture in food prices. So before the Second World War, maize prices in Africa on average 50% of what you would find in more developed regions of the world, including the United States, but straight after the Second World War, or already during the Second World War, we see that those prices are going up. And that cannot be explained by lagging productivity. There's something else going on. Africa at that time is not importing any food, they don't need to because they are self sufficient in their food production systems. So that raises then the question if it's not the productivity issue, which it may be today, back in the day, that could not have been the explanation, what is then going on? And that is the question that we're coping with at the moment.

Matthew  

You haven't exited this project, you're still in the middle of it. But what is your current hypotheses for this differentiated cost of food?

Ewout Frankema 

Well for that is it always helps to look at how other regions have sort of integrated their agricultural economies into this worldwide web, so a globalising economy so to speak, since the 1850s, and it turns out that the comparison with Southeast Asia is very helpful in this regard. So there we are able to show that in Southeast Asia, right at the start of 1850, international trade starts to grow. And it's expanding very rapidly around one commodity, and that is rice. And it is being shipped from surplus areas, particularly in Thailand and Burma, to other parts of Eastern Asia, Southeast Asia, Southern Asia, and part of that rise is also going to Europe. And with that trade, a marketing system emerges that is actually quite efficient. There are mills, there are middlemen who are transporting the rice from the farm to the mills, and then to the warehouses on the coast. And these middlemen are also providing credit to farmers. So there's a whole infrastructure, financial infrastructure, physical infrastructure, a marketing infrastructure that emerges, bottom up, not state controls, grows organically. And that grows for almost a century. And that is the type of development of which I have argued, did not exist, or at least not if it existed in the same way, as in Sub Saharan Africa. So what happens straight after the Second World War, is that policymakers, by then colonial officials mostly, try to catch up and they try to impose a marketing system in very relatively short timeframe. And the policies that were adopted in those decades between the 1940s and the 1980s, were well intended, perhaps, but they had unintended consequences, they produced inefficient marketing channels, they rose the price of food rather than lower the price of food. It came with a lot of structural inefficiencies, like transport monopolies, licensed traders, also prohibitions between interdistrict trades, so there was a lot of centralization and ultimately, but that is, of course, the advantage of a historian. In retrospect, you can say those policies have not delivered and so it is a warning that state craft can do many good things, but it can also in a way lead to consequences that were unanticipated.

Matthew

A quick reflection to close out: Was this what you expected when you saw an episode exploring the economics of food systems? Perhaps you anticipated a focus on production costs, profitability, and market efficiencies. While those aspects are important and were discussed, food systems economics spans a much broader range of topics. We delved into gender roles and the care economy, the accessibility of healthy foods, and, as Purnima Menon highlighted, "equitable access to ultra-processed foods." We also explored the formation of food prices, environmental accounting and reporting, infrastructure, greenhouse gas emissions, and globalisation. So for me, one unexpected takeaway of this episode is to be more open-minded to how different disciplines and stakeholders approach and advance food systems solutions.

A big thanks to all the guests you heard in this episode. We’ll link to their reports and articles in our show notes and on our webpage - tabledebates.org/podcast. 

And thanks to you for listening. A fantastic way to show your appreciation for the podcast is to rate and review us wherever you listen. This really helps others find the show. 

Final thanks to the conference organisers. KU Leuven, Wageningen University, Elsevier and TABLE. TABLE is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Wageningen University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, University of the Andes, National Autonomous University of Mexico and Cornell University. 

The best way to stay up to date with all the work going on at TABLE is to subscribe to our newsletter Fodder at tabledebates.org. This episode was produced and edited by me: Matthew Kessler, music by Blue Dot sessions. Thanks for listening and speak soon.