Exploring Health and Environmental Costs of Food Workshop Summary (2012) / Chapter Skim
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7 Reflecting on the Path Forward
7 Reflecting on the Path Forward
Pages 83-90
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From page 83... ...
Some participants argued that even though the external cost of diet-related cardiovascular disease may be internalized through health insurance premiums, cardiovascular disease nonetheless imposes a cost to society that exceeds, or is different than, its internalized value. For example, during his presentation, Steven Wing argued that many external costs of the food system are 83
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From page 84... ...
Rather than foregoing the opportunity to increase the size of the social pie, we should go ahead and increase it, and then redistribute it." Not implementing a policy that imposes costs on a subset of the subpopulation while providing benefits that exceed costs overall is, in his opinion, an "extreme position." There are more efficient ways to redistribute well-being than to not implement a policy because it will increase the cost to a subset of the population. In the case of a food policy that increases overall well-being but increases the cost of food to poor people, he said, "It is much better to deal with the poverty directly." Anna Alberini added that, although economists are primarily concerned with the size of the pie, few agencies conduct cost-benefit analyses without also conducting regulatory impact analyses to deal with those distributional issues.
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From page 85... ...
can be factored into a model based on externalities and responding remarks about how lack of access to food is a social issue, not a market issue, and therefore cannot be analyzed within the context of externalities. (See the summary of James Hammitt's presentation on public health effects in Chapter 3 for more thoughts on the challenge of analyzing effects impacted by "real-world" behavior.)
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From page 86... ...
In this respect, a participant remarked one of the goals should be to raise fewer total animals. He said, "The epidemiological evidence is overwhelming that our high meat diet is unhealthy." John Antle identified loss of farmer income as a cost of small-scale animal production.
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From page 87... ...
Rather than considering total costs and how to allocate those costs, he suggested considering marginal changes that would occur if animals were raised in a different way. John Antle opined that if externalities were addressed at the production level (e.g., by taxing or otherwise imposing measures that impact industry decisions about production)
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From page 88... ...
"To some extent," he said, "I have sort of despaired listening to this conversation." John Antle expressed similar concern about the wide range of effects, noting that policies that fail to consider important consequences "really mess things up." Given what she characterized as "squishiness" from a lack of data and problems with analyzing those data, Katherine Smith questioned the intention of tallying up all costs and benefits to derive an estimate of the total "true" cost of food. She suggested evaluating the effect of public policy on one "dimension" or on the trade-offs between a couple of dimensions of the food system, instead of calculating total cost.
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From page 89... ...
In addition to more thoroughly considering potential effects and methodologies for quantifying and valuing those effects, there were many calls for a reconsideration of the intention of a full-scale accounting of the "true" cost of food. Several participants questioned not just the feasibility, but also the applicability, of assembling a list, or matrix, of all potential costs and benefits and trade-offs, and suggested instead a more selective examination of the food system from a policy perspective.
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From page 90... ...
2010. Hidden costs of energy: Unpriced consequences of energy production and use.
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