The U.S. food system provides many benefits, not the least of which is a safe, nutritious and consistent food supply. However, the same system also creates significant environmental, public health, and other costs that generally are not recognized and not accounted for in the retail price of food. These include greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, soil erosion, air pollution, and their environmental consequences, the transfer of antibiotic resistance from food animals to human, and other human health outcomes, including foodborne illnesses and chronic disease. Some external costs which are also known as externalities are accounted for in ways that do not involve increasing the price of food. But many are not. They are borne involuntarily by society at large. A better understanding of external costs would help decision makers at all stages of the life cycle to expand the benefits of the U.S. food system even further. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the National Research Council (NRC) with support from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) convened a public workshop on April 23-23, 2012, to explore the external costs of food, methodologies for quantifying those costs, and the limitations of the methodologies. The workshop was intended to be an information-gathering activity only. Given the complexity of the issues and the broad areas of expertise involved, workshop presentations and discussions represent only a small portion of the current knowledge and are by no means comprehensive. The focus was on the environmental and health impacts of food, using externalities as a basis for discussion and animal products as a case study. The intention was not to quantify costs or benefits, but rather to lay the groundwork for doing so. A major goal of the workshop was to identify information sources and methodologies required to recognize and estimate the costs and benefits of environmental and public health consequences associated with the U.S. food system. It was anticipated that the workshop would provide the basis for a follow-up consensus study of the subject and that a central task of the consensus study will be to develop a framework for a full-scale accounting of the environmental and public health effects for all food products of the U.S. food system. Exploring Health and Environmental Costs of Food: Workshop Summary provides the basis for a follow-up planning discussion involving members of the IOM Food and Nutrition Board and the NRC Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources and others to develop the scope and areas of expertise needed for a larger-scale, consensus study of the subject.

The authors go beyond the traditional presentation of economic principles, offering instead a series of applied methods for data collection and analysis. Drawing on extensive experience in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they not only describe specific procedures, but also provide a wealth of illustrative research results. This book will be particularly useful to teaching professionals, development specialists, and applied researchers working in developing countries.

Excerpt from Agricultural Prices This book is written for all those who may be interested in the matter of prices of agricultural products, but more especially for the farmers of the corn belt states, students of agricultural colleges, count agricultural agents, and leaders of farm organizations. Its purpose is to promote a better understanding of the factors which influence prices of farm products and stimulate an intelligent interest in statistical economics. Aside from a rather small number of specialists at the larger terminal markets, few of the people who buy or sell farm products have any very definite ideas concerning the legitimate price-making forces. A better understanding of such forces by farmers generally should in itself gradually bring about prices which will approach more nearly cost of production, and tend to reduce the violent fluctuations above and below the compensatory average. A careful study of the facts herein set forth should aid leaders of farm organizations to avoid costly mistakes which too often result from hasty and ill-considered action. While not written primarily for economists, I trust many of them may find something of practical value in the matter herein. They may, perhaps, feel that at times I have not been as respectful as they would like toward many of the ideas of the classical school, but I have no apologies to offer on this score. In anticipation of possible criticism of my treatment of "cost of production," I shall ask them to remember that I use cost of production as a ratio concept (if need be, a shifting ratio) and not as a cost-accounting concept. I may say, also, that I hold to no particular philosophy of economics unless a very firm belief in the utility of thoro mathematical price studies might be considered as constituting the basis of a philosophy. While the book is frankly written from the farmer's point of view, there is no bias whatsoever to the mathematics used, and it is believed that so far as it may influence opinion and practice, the results will in the long run benefit both farm producer and city consumer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.