Food Safety and Human Nutrition

In this module your main task is to plan and carry out a set of activities with selected households in the community to help them gain a good understanding of their current and possible future use of natural resources in their area.

The objective of this research was to identify the institutions and their relative influence associated with surveillance and control of HPAI in Ghana, the flow of information for disease reporting among institutions, and the institutional responses to disease occurrence. The questions were: Who is involved? How do they communicate about suspected outbreaks? How do they respond to confirmed outbreaks? How influential are they in terms of impacting on information flow and response? What are the remaining bottlenecks?

Zambia has experienced strong economic performance since 1999. However, agriculture has not performed as well as the rest of the economy, and although the incidence of poverty has declined, it still remains high. The Zambian government, within the framework of the Fifth National Development Plan (FNDP), is in the process of implementing the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which provides an integrated framework of development priorities aimed at restoring agricultural growth, rural development and food security. This paper analyzes the agricultural growth and investment options that can support the development of a comprehensive rural development component under Zambia?s FNDP, in alignment with the principles and objectives of the CAADP, which include the achievement of six percent agricultural growth and allocation of at least ten percent of budgetary resources to the sector.

Computable general equilibrium (CGE) model results indicate that it is possible for Zambia to reach the CAADP target of six percent agricultural growth, but this will require additional growth in all crops and sub-sectors. Zambia cannot rely on only maize or higher-value export crops to achieve this growth target; broader-based agricultural growth, including increases in fisheries and livestock, will be important. So, too, is meeting the Maputo declaration of spending at least ten percent of the government?s total budget on agriculture. In order to meet the CAADP target, the Government of Zambia must increase its spending on agriculture in real value terms by about 17?27 percent per year between 2006 and 2015, and spend about 8?18 percent of its total expenditure on the sector by 2015.

Although agriculture has strong linkages to the rest of the economy and its growth will result in substantial overall growth in the economy and the household incomes of rural and urban populations, achieving the CAADP target of six percent agricultural growth will not be sufficient to meet the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG1) of halving poverty by 2015. To achieve this more ambitious target, both agricultural and non-agricultural sectors would need an average annual growth rate of around ten percent per year. These growth requirements are substantial, as are the associated resource requirements. Thus, while the MDG1 target appears to be beyond reach for Zambia, achieving the CAADP target should remain a priority, as its more reasonable growth and expenditure scenarios will still substantially reduce the number of poor people living below the poverty line by 2015, and significantly improve the well-being of both rural and urban households.

Risk classification of livestock farms can help stakeholders design and implement risk management measures according to the possessed risk. Our goal is to examine how differently pig farms may contribute to the societal costs of an animal disease outbreak, how valuable this information is to different stakeholders, and how it can be used to target risk management measures. We show that the costs of an outbreak starting from a certain farm can be quantified for the entire sector using bio-economic models. In further studies, this quantified risk can be differentiated so that farms and slaughterhouses internalise the full cost of risk in production decisions and inhibit animal densities, animal contact structures or other characteristics which pose a threat to the sector. Potential benefits due to risk classification could be received by society and producers, and in the long run also by consumers.

Household-level Canadian meat purchases from 2002-2008, household-level egg purchases from 2002-2005 and Food Opinion Survey in 2008 were used to understand how consumers who have different concerns about nutrition react to BSE events and how beef consumption after BSE discoveries were shaped by consumers concerns of food safety and their trust of government and the industry decision makers. Three measures of beef purchased were used to explore consumers? reaction. A random effects logit model was applied to test whether any beef purchased during a given month. Consumption in terms of unit purchases was measured with a random effects Negative Binomial model and consumption in terms of beef expenditure was measured with a standard random effects model. Consumer behaviors in Alberta differed from Ontario. Consumer reactions to BSE in Alberta were stronger than Ontario. Overall, the more risk consumers attached to BSE, the less beef they purchased in both provinces. Random effects in the three models controlled for unobserved but persistent aspects of households and changed the sign of estimated effects of demographic variables.