Three Essays in Food Security and the U.S. Sugar Program

Chapter one devises an approach to adjust estimates of the number of food insecure for changes in sedentarism over time. Existing methodologies are biased upwards and date back several decades. We build a household model utilizing a Stone-Geary utility function, which rationalizes households shifting their labor decisions towards sedentary activities. Our comparative statics examine the impacts of changes in the productivities of sedentary types, as opposed to my physically demanding types, of activities and also their returns. Our empirical approach is informed by our theoretical model and comparative statics, in which we construct a unique pseudo-panel dataset. Sitting time serves as a proxy for sedentarism, we collect readily available covariates informed by our comparative statics, and econometrically estimate transfer functions that predict changes in sitting time as a function of our covariates over time.Chapter two builds on chapter one, utilizing the approaches and methodology chapter one establishes. The approach is utilized to revise so-called minimum dietary energy requirements (MDERS) for changes in sedentarism over time; these MDERs serve as kcal cutoffs in the two approaches we implement in this chapter to create revised estimates of the number of food insecure. In both models we find large downward revisions in the estimate of the food insecure population for a set of 83 nations included in the annual USDA ERS International Food Security Assessment of 71.3 million, when accounting for sedentarism. We find the estimates of the number of food insecure are highly sensitive to the MDER value used.Chapter three further studies the well investigated topic of the United States Sugar Program. While it is well known that the program benefits producers at the expense of consumers of sugar, the contribution here is to examine on a state-by-state basis the welfare gains and losses. The U.S. Sugar Program is supported by tariff rate quotas (TRQs). The welfare impacts of the removal of these TRQs and also their conversion to an equivalent tariff are also examined. To accomplish these tasks, a state-level computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is utilized, along with state-level trade flows data.Advisors: John Beghin and Edward Balistreri