AAE 350 Review questions for the final exam

1. What is an externality in food production?
2. What can be done about an externality in food production?
3. What is the consensus about what climate change will do to global food production?
4. What are ways that governments could respond to climate change to maintain food security?
5. What are some farmer based strategies to build capacity for climate resilience?
6. What is the difference in seeing food security as a moral dictate, versus a fundamental right, versus an optimal economic policy, for how a government might choose different food policies?
7. How would differences in philosophical approaches to food policy affect how a government chose to target a particular intervention?
8. What is the government's role in combatting hunger and malnutrition?
9. What are the costs and benefits of various actors in nutrition interventions (government, private sector companies, philanthropists, NGOs)?
10. How does a nutrition policy targeting matrix work?
11. How might a particular program (Insert program description here) affect targeting for food security or poverty or nutrition security?
12. What is means testing of a food security program? And how well does it work for food security?
13. Why does timing matter to nutrition interventions?
14. What is the SNAP program in the US? How does the SNAP program work?
15. Who is targeted by the SNAP program?
16. How effective is the SNAP program at reaching its goals of targeting food insecure households?
17. Why does the SNAP program allow Takis (snack food)?
18. Why does the government do the SNAP program and not leave it to local Churches and Food Pantries?
19. What's the difference in the food security world of: food availability, food access, and food utilization?
20. What's the difference between food assistance programs and food aid?
21. How important are food aid flows compared to overall world production of food or overall world trade in food?
22. What's the difference between the three types of food aid: Program, Project, and Emergency/humanitarian?
23. What drives the amount of food aid the US give?
24. What are some rules you might use to better determine whether to use food aid or to purchase food locally?
25. Would food aid be useful in a world where people were missing their trade-based entitlement? What about their production entitlement?
26. Under which if any circumstances is food aid an efficient way of distributing food to food insecure parts of the world?
27. A Congressman is saying that it is wrong to buy food abroad to give away in humanitarian emergencies, rather than buy it from US farmers and shipping it on US boats. How might he be right or wrong?
28. Describe the differences between these two changes in price and quantity?

1. In the left-hand graph in #28 what might cause such a change in the supply curve?
2. In the right-hand graph in #28 what might cause such a change in the supply curve?
3. How do differences in the demand elasticity effect how a shift in a supply curve changes price and quantity?
4. Why has the French government subsidized the price of baguettes?
5. How well does a subsidy to baguettes in France target food insecure French households?
6. How can income elasticities help you to better target programs for food insecure households?
7. A complaint about many food aid programs is that they are giving away low quality foods to the poor and that the poor deserve high quality foods that they like. Why might it be optimal to give foods that the poor did not like?
8. What can Engel curves tell us about how giving cash will have an effect on household food security?
9. Which are the common foods in the US that are fortified?
10. What kinds of foods will meet the US or international guidelines for which foods to fortify?
11. What kinds of elasticities are you looking for in foods that you might want to fortify?
12. What causes rickets?
13. Why was rickets called the "English disease" in continental Europe?
14. What were the health outcomes of vitamin D fortification in milk in the US?
15. Which types of people were most effectively targeted by vitamin D fortification in milk?
16. What made vitamin D fortification in milk so successful?
17. What happens to supply and demand when you subsidize the farmgate price of maize, by setting an artificially high price paid to farmers of maize?
18. What happens to the supply and demand of maize if there is a price ceiling for maize that sets an artificially low price for maize and does not provide a subsidized higher price?
19. How do new technologies expand the supply of a food product?
20. How would a new agricultural technology, like green revolution crops, that reduced the costs of inputs in agricultural production or produced more output for the same cost, affect the price of food on the market?
21. How does a subsidy for an input in agricultural production (e.g., fertilizer, seeds) affect the price of food on the market?
22. How would improving roads in rural Africa affect the price of food in African food markets?
23. What is the Malawi fertilizer and seed subsidy program? How does it work?
24. What is the targeting logic of the Malawi subsidy program for fertilizer and seed?
25. Where do new agricultural technologies come from?
26. Why have cereal yields in Africa lagged behind other parts of the world?
27. What are the costs and benefits of the various actors (government sponsored research, private sector, international research centers) in the agricultural R&D realm? When and where might you prefer one over the other?
28. What is the US Land Grant system?
29. Why has there been fewer successful seed varieties adapted to African country's agricultural conditions than in other parts of the world?
30. Why was Alabama a late adopter of hybrid corn seeds?
31. What are four ways you can improve dietary diversity?
32. What are three ways you can improve dietary diversity in Malawi through nutrition sensitive agricultural interventions?
33. What are three ways that Malawians' food consumption is leading to poor nutritional outcomes?
34. What percentage of the local diet in rural Malawi is made up of "staples" (i.e., grains like maize)?
35. What foods eaten regularly in rural Malawi are high in vitamin A?
36. Why do rural Malawians get most of their iron and protein from maize consumption?
37. What are some of problems Malawian rural households face in improving their nutritional intake?
38. Would a fortification program be effective in rural Malawi at targeting the lack of dietary diversity?
39. What is the role of cultural norms in the low level of dietary diversity in Malawi?
40. How would the following programs do at targeting dietary diversity in Malawi?
    1. Adding groundnuts/peanuts to the fertilizer & seed subsidy?
    2. Building a mango drying plant in the capitol, Lilongwe?
    3. Encouraging small solar mango driers for all Malawian households?
    4. An information campaign for eating more leafy greens?
41. Would golden rice (a rice variety with enhanced vitamin A in it) be a useful tool in creating dietary diversity in Malawi?

Figure for Q28