Exploring Health And Environmental Costs of Food
This paper describes the proceedings from a workshop on the true costs of food and summarizes dozens of presentations from scholars and experts on related topics. The presentations cover a wide range of health, social, environmental costs that are inherent in modern agriculture but not reflected in food prices. The authors also discuss the concept of “externalities” in general and debate whether or not they are the best way to frame the problem.
[Abstract excerpted from the report’s introduction]
“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 (Gonzalez et al., 2011); soil erosion, air pollution, and other environmental consequences (Heller and Keoleian, 2003; Wolf et al., 2011); the transfer of antibiotic resistance from food animals to humans (Hayes et al., 2011); and other human health outcomes, including foodborne illnesses and chronic disease (Heller and Keoleian, 2003). Some of these external costs (i.e., external to the food system), which are also known as externalities, are accounted for (“internalized”) in ways that do not involve increasing the price of food (see Box 1-1). But many are not. They are borne involuntarily by society at large (Tegtmeier and Duffy, 2004). 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 National Research Council (NRC), with support from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), convened a public workshop on April 23-24, 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 (i.e., specifically beef, poultry, pork, and dairy). The intention was not to quantify costs or benefits, 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 (see Box 1-2). 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.
Nor was the intention to make any recommendations or suggest policies. Rather, again, it was to lay the groundwork for future efforts. According to Anne Haddix, senior policy advisor at CDC’s National Center for Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the hope is that a framework can be built that will help to identify novel strategies for dealing with food system-related public health problems, such as obesity, in ways that are not only healthful, but also environmentally sound and economically productive. Currently, no framework is available for analyzing in a comprehensive and systematic way how the food system impacts public health. Although the CDC’s initial intention was to focus on public health, Haddix described the food system as being so complex and interactive that it is impossible to separate the health consequences of the food system from environmental, economic, social justice, and other consequences. Thus, the workshop planning committee invited a diverse group of experts and stakeholders to participate in the discussion, including economists, farmers, environmental and agricultural scientists, and public health experts. Their expertise spanned the entire course of the food life cycle.
Given the diversity of perspectives, numerous challenges and complexities regarding the types of information sources and methodologies available to measure the health and environmental costs and benefits associated with the U.S. food system were identified over the course of the workshop. Some participants questioned the rationale for conducting a full-scale accounting of the costs of food and whether another approach might be more feasible. They also stressed that all costs are relative because all food and agricultural systems are dependent on the natural environment; therefore, such an exercise would need to undertake comparisons of alternative food system activities or practices. The heterogeneity of landscapes and management practices among sites only complicates this endeavor, as emphasized by many workshop participants. Participants also expressed varying opinions about the limitations of framing the analysis in terms of externalities. Several other issues were noted, including the broad range of external costs and benefits that were not included in the focus of the workshop; the lack of sufficient data; the importance of considering all stages of the food life cycle; the risks associated with simplifying assumptions about the effects; the inability of models to capture the heterogeneity among food production methods; the variability in the degree of certainty around the magnitude of some effects; and the numerous unanswered questions about the methodologies discussed for quantifying health, environmental, and other effects. Many of these overarching issues are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 7.
By bringing together a wide range of experts, however, the workshop was able to forge connections across subjects that typically are discussed as though they are distinct from one another. The diversity of perspectives and experiences represented among the participants allowed for this workshop to become an important first step in illuminating the range of expertise, methodologies, and information sources that would need to be included in future explorations of the topic.”
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