Files
Abstract
Many commentators have speculated that agricultural policies have contributed to increased
obesity rates in the United States, yet such claims are often made without any analysis of the
complex links between real-world farm commodity support programs, prices and consumption of
foods, and caloric intake. This article carefully studies the effects of U.S. agricultural policies on
prices and quantities of ten agricultural commodities and nine food categories in the United
States over time. Using a detailed multimarket model, we simulate the counterfactual removal of
measures of support applied to U.S. agricultural commodities in 1992, 1997, and 2002, and
quantify the effects on U.S. food consumption and caloric intake. To parameterize the
simulations, we calculate three alternative measures of consumer support (the implicit consumer
subsidy from policies that support producers) for the ten agricultural commodities using
information about government expenditures on agricultural commodities from various sources.
Our results indicate that removing subsidies on grains and oilseeds in the three time periods
would have caused caloric consumption to decrease minimally while removal of all agricultural
policies (including barriers against imports of sugar and dairy products) would have caused total
caloric intake to increase. Our results also indicate that the influence of agricultural policies on
caloric intake has diminished over time.