Food Consumption in China


Book Description

Recent decades have seen China�s domestic consumption in sectors such as food, housing, health care, education and travel greatly increase. This important book assesses China�s current food consumption trends and the outlook for its future needs of suc




Post-harvest losses in rural-urban value chains: Evidence from Ethiopia


Book Description

We study post-harvest losses (PHL) in important and rapidly growing rural-urban value chains in Ethiopia. We analyze self-reported PHL from different value chain agents – farmers, wholesale traders, processors, and retailers – based on unique large-scale data sets for two major commercial commodities, the storable staple teff and the perishable liquid milk. PHL in the most prevalent value chain pathways for teff and milk amount to between 2.2 and 3.3 percent and 2.1 and 4.3 percent of total produced quantities, respectively. We complement these findings with primary data from urban food retailers for more than 4,000 commodities. Estimates of PHL from this research overall are found to be significantly lower than is commonly assumed. We further find that the emerging modern retail sector in Ethiopia is characterized by half the level of PHL than are observed in the traditional retail sector. This is likely due to more stringent quality requirements at procurement, sales of more packaged – and therefore better protected – commodities, and better refrigeration, storage, and sales facilities. The further expected expansion of modern retail in these settings should likely lead to a lowering of PHL in food value chains, at least at the retail level.




Food data collection in Household Consumption and Expenditure Surveys. Guidelines for low and middle income countries


Book Description

The measurement of food consumption and expenditure is a fundamental component of any analysis of poverty and food security, and hence the importance and timeliness of devoting attention to the topic cannot be overemphasized as the international development community confronts the challenges of monitoring progress in implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In 2014, the International Household Survey Network published a desk review of the reliability and relevance of survey questions as included in 100 household surveys from low- and middle-income countries. The report was presented in March 2014 at the forty-fifth session of the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC), in a seminar organized by the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Food Security, Agricultural and Rural Statistics (IAEG-AG). The assessment painted a bleak picture in terms of heterogeneity in survey design and overall relevance and reliability of the data being collected. On the positive side, it pointed to many areas in which even marginal changes to survey and questionnaire design could lead to a significant increase in reliability and consequently, great improvements in measurement accuracy. The report, which sparked a lot of interest from development partners and UNSC member countries, prompted IAEG-AG to pursue this area of work with the ultimate objective of developing, validating, and promoting scalable standards for the measurement of food consumption in household surveys. The work started with an expert workshop that took place in Rome in November 2014. Successive versions of the guidelines were drafted and discussed at various IAEG-AG meetings, and in another expert workshop organized in November 2016 in Rome. The guidelines were put together by a joint FAO-World Bank team, with inputs and comments received from representatives of national statistical offices, international organizations, survey practitioners, academics, and experts in different disciplines (statistics, economics, nutrition, food security, and analysis). A list of the main contributors is included in the acknowledgment section. In December 2017 a draft of the guidelines was circulated to 148 National Statistical Offices from low- to high-income countries for comments. The document was revised following that consultation and submitted to UNSC, which endorsed it at its forty-ninth session in March 2018 (under item 3(j) of the agenda, agricultural and rural statistics. The version presented here reflects what was endorsed by the Commission, edited for language. The process received support from the Global Strategy for Agricultural and Rural Statistics. The document is intended to be a reference document for National Statistical Offices, survey practitioners, and national and international agencies designing household surveys that involve the collection of food consumption and expenditure data.







Food Wastage Footprint


Book Description

"This study provides a worldwide account of the environmental footprint of food wastage along the food supply chain, focusing on impacts on climate, water, land and biodiversity, as well as economic quantification based on producer prices ..."--Introduction.




Extending Health Insurance to the Rural Population


Book Description

Abstract: In 2003, after over 20 years of minimal health insurance coverage in rural areas, China launched a heavily subsidized voluntary health insurance program for rural residents. The authors use program and household survey data, as well as health facility census data, to analyze factors affecting enrollment into the program and to estimate its impact on households and health facilities. They obtain estimates by combining differences-in-differences with matching methods. The authors find some evidence of lower enrollment rates among poor households, holding other factors constant, and higher enrollment rates among households with chronically sick members. The household and facility data point to the scheme significantly increasing both outpatient and inpatient utilization (by 20-30 percent), but they find no impact on utilization in the poorest decile. For the sample as a whole, the authors find no statistically significant effects on average out-of-pocket spending, but they do find some-albeit weak-evidence of increased catastrophic health spending. For the poorest decile, by contrast, they find that the scheme increased average out-of-pocket spending but reduced the incidence of catastrophic health spending. They find evidence that the program has increased ownership of expensive equipment among central township health centers but had no impact on cost per case.




Sustainable Development of Rural Household Economy


Book Description

This book focuses on the transition of hundreds of rural households in ten villages in Zhejiang from 1986 to 2002, based on the theme of rural household sustainable development. Drawing on a large amount of first-hand data collected from fixed observation sites for 17 consecutive years, this book has depicted the changes in household behaviour in rural Zhejiang, and analysed the origins of such changes. The contents of the book contain examinations at household and village level. Chapters One to Seven describe the changes in rural behaviour at the household level from different aspects, such as land transfer, saving and borrowing, and rural tax burden. Chapters Eight to Ten analyse the transition concerning household behaviour based on the village level data. This book will help readers with a better understanding of rural China from the micro perspective of household behaviour. This book won the Monograph Award (ranked 1st out of 6 winners in total) in the Third China Rural Development Research Award (2008). It was also awarded theSecond Class Excellent Research Achievement in Humanities and Social Sciences by the Ministry of Education (2009). With the help of rich and detailed first-hand data collected from fixed observation sites in ten villages in Zhejiang for 17 consecutive years, this book gives a panoramic analysis of Chinese rural society in transition from the viewpoint of rural household behaviour. It starts the examination from individual rural households, before develops the investigation to the whole villages, so that the study could be carried out in a coherent, reliable and systematic way. Viewing the countryside from its micro perspective under the national political economy framework, the book steps out of the traditional way of inspecting exclusively the rural households and therefore is able to generalise its conclusion at a macro level. The award selection panel in 2008 believed it a unique monography for understanding the macro transition of the Chinese “agriculture, countryside and peasant (三农)” issues from the micro aspect of household behaviour.




Fuzzy Cognitive Maps


Book Description

This important edited volume is the first such book ever published on fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs). Professor Michael Glykas has done an exceptional job in bringing together and editing its seventeen chapters. The volume appears nearly a quarter century after my original article “Fuzzy Cognitive Maps” appeared in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies in 1986. The volume accordingly reflects many years of research effort in the development of FCM theory and applications—and portends many more decades of FCM research and applications to come. FCMs are fuzzy feedback models of causality. They combine aspects of fuzzy logic, neural networks, semantic networks, expert systems, and nonlinear dynamical systems. That rich structure endows FCMs with their own complexity and lets them apply to a wide range of problems in engineering and in the soft and hard sciences. Their partial edge connections allow a user to directly represent causality as a matter of degree and to learn new edge strengths from training data. Their directed graph structure allows forward or what-if inferencing. FCM cycles or feedback paths allow for complex nonlinear dynamics. Control of FCM nonlinear dynamics can in many cases let the user encode and decode concept patterns as fixed-point attractors or limit cycles or perhaps as more exotic dynamical equilibria. These global equilibrium patterns are often “hidden” in the nonlinear dynamics. The user will not likely see these global patterns by simply inspecting the local causal edges or nodes of large FCMs.




Food Security and Social Protection for the Rural Poor in China


Book Description

Economic growth and its relevant subjects have been given the first priority in the research agenda since China initiated economic reforms in 1978, while the topics of social protection and gender equality have been largely left at the periphery for a long period. This book is a collection of evidence-based studies conducted mainly in poor areas of rural China during the recent two decades. Based on individual interviews and sample data analyses, this book emphasizes the importance of cooperative organizations to poverty reduction, and puts forward that gender equality is closely related with sustainable development. In addition, it addresses the issues of food security and elimination of social exclusion - the key to bridging economic divide. It also studies social protection, including basic health protection system, nutrition and healthcare for children, old age security for landless farmers and rural migrant workers. By providing first-hand accounts of different vulnerable groups, such as the poor, women, migrant workers, ethnic minorities and small farmers, this book offers valuable insights into studies of contemporary Chinese society and economy.




China's Grain Economy


Book Description

This book was originally pubished in 2000. China is the largest developing country in the world and is still heavily based on agriculture. Currently, about 70 per cent of China's total of more than one bilion people live in rural areas, and about half of the total national labour force is involved in agricultural activities. It is clear that agriculture is the foundation for the development of the Chinese national economy. Within agriculture, the grain economy is the most important sector: indeed it has been recognised as a treasure in managing the country by all past Chinese dynasties. Ensuring enough grain supply to meet the demands of such a huge population seems to be a long-term goal for the Chinese government and this book explores whether China will be able to produce enough grain to keep pace with its population increases.