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Memo to the White House Conference

September 8, 2022

Will McIntee
Associate Director
Office of Public Engagement
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. McIntee:

The Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA), the leading professional association for agricultural and applied economists, welcomes the White House’s initiative to host a conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. The AAEA was established in 1910 and currently has over 2,500 members who work in academic or government institutions, a wide variety of not-for-profit organizations, as well as in agricultural, food, and environment-related industries. Many AAEA members engage in research, teaching, and outreach and are called upon to help inform policy development and implementation concerning food, health, and nutrition issues. By way of example, AAEA members have performed and continue to perform rigorous research and policy evaluation concerning food security, food assistance programs, food access, food prices and affordability, food and health outcomes, and factors that facilitate or constrain nutritious food choices, including studies related to food labels, health claims, nutrition education, as well as use of behavioral economics tools such as healthy food nudges.  

There is an ongoing need to modernize policy priorities and actions to help end persistent and emerging hunger, improve nutrition and physical activity, and reduce health disparities within the U.S. population. The importance of evidence-based policymaking and the pivotal role of rigorous applied research in evaluating the efficacy and effectiveness of existing and newly proposed programs is vital to designing effective policies. Agricultural and applied economists possess the institutional knowledge and toolsets necessary to conduct such analyses and provide an unbiased assessment of policy performance. Further, the AAEA has identified among its Grand Challenges the need to ensure that all people have safe, affordable, accessible, and nutritious food for a healthy and active life. This focus is well-aligned with the pillars of the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. This document provides recommendations to facilitate reaching the goals of the White House Conference. 

The AAEA commends the direction of the current administration to maintain evidence-based policymaking, which requires, among others, continued investment in collecting high-quality data (e.g., longitudinal surveys and lab/field experiments) that can be used as a key input in the development and evaluation of public programs to address hunger, nutrition, and health problems. The collection and availability of such data are also a direct input into activities to support the White House Conference Pillar 5 - Enhance nutrition and food security research.  

The need for high-quality data and research is also central to developing and objectively evaluating the initiatives toward the other White House Conference Pillars: namely Pillar 1 (Improve food access and affordability), Pillar 2 (Integrate nutrition and health), and Pillar 3 (Empower all consumers to make and have access to healthy choices). These Pillars align closely with some of the USDA’s strategic objectives for FY 2022-2026. Measuring progress toward the goals ultimately established by the Conference will require validated metrics longitudinally available and explicitly linked to the outcome they intend to measure. To this end, specific considerations include the alignment with the following USDA strategic objectives:

Increase Food Security through Assistance and Access to Nutritious and Affordable Food. 
The most important tool to monitor progress towards this objective is the Food Security Supplement, which the USDA has fielded as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS-FSS) since 1995. The food security metrics derived from the CPS-FSS questionnaire have been included in numerous local, state, national and international surveys and have been validated by, among others, the National Academies of Science. It is well known that the CPS-FSS captures disparities in food insecurity prevalence and food hardships among different sub-groups of the population, including minorities and low-income households. Peer-reviewed research disseminated by AAEA members has studied how federal food assistance programs, such as SNAP, WIC, and school food programs, reduce instances of food hardship while increasing the nutritional quality of food consumption, with effects strongest for disadvantaged populations.

Encourage Healthy Dietary Choices through Data-Driven, Flexible, Customer-Focused Approaches
Agricultural and applied economists have a decades-long history of developing methods and studying consumer demand for agricultural and food products. In recent years, AAEA members have applied their toolbox to primary (including experimental) and secondary (sales/purchase/acquisition) data to study factors affecting the relative consumption of unhealthy vis-à-vis healthier food options (for example food labeling, health and nutrition claims, relative prices). Measures such as elasticities (income, own-price, cross-price, substitution, and others) and willingness to pay are unequivocally and universally understood among applied economists to characterize consumers’ food choices. Further, in the context of food access, applied economists within the AAEA membership have examined programs and policies designed to facilitate and inform the demand for healthy foods. Even though policies aiming to change relative prices or to improve the affordability of nutritious food tend to have larger effects on the nutritional quality of food consumed, ensuring a consistent supply of healthful foods is also crucial. Thus, measuring market access opportunities through appropriate concepts and metrics (barriers to entry, transaction costs) is also necessary.  

In addition, applied economics research can help identify and disentangle the long-term consumer impacts of food, health, and nutrition policies and evaluate their success. The extensive research undertaken by AAEA members on issues related to hunger, nutrition, and health has included the evaluation of food assistance programs, nutritional education programs, and the examination of promoting healthy food choices via the WIC programs, school meal programs, and programs familiarizing children with agriculture (Farm to School programs). With the appropriate data, the tools of applied economics could also evaluate if and how child nutrition programs affect current and later life healthful food choices. Such insights are of first-order importance in developing policy priorities and policy implementation. 

Based on the above, the AAEA recommends the following actions: 
⦁    Food insecurity: Strengthen and promote applied research on food insecurity, those factors affecting it, and the role of food assistance programs in mitigating it. Promote research focusing on food security among disadvantaged populations, especially regarding the nutritional quality of food consumption. 
⦁    Food prices: Promote the economic analysis of how prices of foods and other goods and services (and consumers’ responsiveness to them) affect consumers, in particularly underserved households, and their decisions to acquire nutritious food baskets, especially as it relates to federal food assistance programs.
⦁    Food access and affordability: Increase support for rigorous quantitative research to test the effectiveness of current and proposed mechanisms to facilitate and encourage access to nutritious food. Policy tools falling under this umbrella include tools to reduce consumer costs to access healthy foods, ensure the supply of healthy food options across all settings (including feeding programs), and facilitate the procurement of fruits and vegetables in schools. 
⦁    Nutritional education and information: Allocate adequate funds to evaluate and assess the effectiveness of existing and proposed tools to inform and enable healthier consumer food choices, such as early childhood nutrition education programs, agricultural literacy programs, and sensible and coherent food labeling. 
⦁    Data: Continue to support the collection of data needed to generate validated and longitudinal measures related to food access and insecurity, nutrition, and health. In addition, insightful and policy-relevant future research would greatly benefit from improved data harmonization across federal, state, and local agencies and data sharing with the research community. 


Sincerely,
 
Norbert Wilson
President AAEA