Food Consumption Growth Research Articles

Corn starch nanocomposite films reinforced with nanocellulose

Abstract The need for flexible food packaging has increased substantially in recent years around the world due to the unprecedented growth in food consumption. Due to low cost and ease of processing, petroleum-based synthetic polymer packaging materials are being predominantly used for food packaging these days. To avoid contributing to environmental problems caused by ecological risks, consumers have been searching for alternatives to plastic food packaging due to the fact that plastics cannot be recycled and are not biodegradable. Therefore, bioplastics made from corn starch, which are biodegradable, can be one solution to these issues. The starch’s amylopectin and amylase composition has a significant impact on the polysaccharide’s characteristics. Corn starch (CS) is utilized as a food source for humans and other animals, but it also has many other applications in industry. Corn starch, on the other hand, has a few issues that need to be addressed through some modifications. Although starch-based packaging is expensive, they create less waste overall, which helps in the reduction amount of plastic pollution. A variety of natural and synthetic polymers – including polysaccharide-based materials like Kappaphycus alvarezii seaweed, collagen, alginate, chitosan, zein, cellulose, gelatin, various amino acids and polymeric materials like acrylic acid, polybutylene (PB), polyacrylic acid, polyethylene (PE), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), and polycaprolactone (PCL) – are used as starch modifiers to produce polymers with a starch base that are completely biodegradable. These biopolymers have the potential to replacing petroleum-based polymers in a variety of commercial and industrial settings. Besides, corn starch nanocomposite films reinforced with nanocellulose have been investigated as a potential eco-friendly packaging material. Consequently, the effects of nanocellulose content on the mechanical, thermal, and barrier properties of corn starch-based films will be discussed in this work.

Global inequalities in food consumption, cropland demand and land-use efficiency: A decomposition analysis

The world population is expected to rise to 9.7 billion by 2050 and to ~11 billion by 2100, and securing its healthy nutrition is a key concern. As global fertile land is limited, the question arises whether growth in food consumption associated with increased affluence surmounts increases in land-use efficiency (measured as food supply per cropland area) associated with technological progress. Furthermore, substantial inequalities prevail in the global food system: While overly rich diets represent a serious health issue for many of the world’s most affluent inhabitants and constitute a critical climate-change driver, undernourishment and hunger still threaten a considerable fraction of the world population, mostly in low-income countries. We here analyze trajectories in cropland demand and their main basic drivers food consumption (measured by a food index reflecting the share of animal products in diets) and land-use efficiency, for 123 countries (clustered in four income groups, covering 94% of the world population). We cover the period 1990–2013 and assess if these trajectories are associated with changes in inequality between countries. We find that while all groups of countries converged towards the high level of the per-capita food consumption of high-income countries, differences between income groups remained pronounced. Overall, cropland demand per capita declined over the entire period in all regions except low income countries, resulting in a tendency towards global convergence. However, the trend slowed in the last years. In contrast, land-use efficiency increased in all income groups with a similar trend, hence international inequalites in land-use efficiency remained almost unaltered. Because population and food requirements per capita are expected to grow in all income groups except the richest ones, failure to improve land efficiency sufficiently could lead to a less unequal but at the same time less ecologically sustainable world. Avoiding such outcomes may be possible by reducing the consumption of animal products in the richer countries and raising land-use efficiency in the poorer countries.

Modern Approaches to Storage and Effective Processing of Agricultural Products for Obtaining High Quality Food Products

In the modern world, the problem of providing the population with high-quality food products is reaching a critical point due to the increase in the population of the planet, mediated by an influence on the growth of food consumption; globalization processes, thereby contributing to fundamental changes in the structure and patterns of nutrition i.e., insufficiently effective principles of agricultural raw materials processing, etc. Today, food independence is a strategic component of a countryas security, which is enshrined in a number of regulatory documents, including: the Doctrine of Food Security of the Russian Federation; the Strategy for Scientific and Technological Development of the Russian Federation; the Strategy for Improving the Quality of Food Products in the Russian Federation until 2030; and, others. The stated goals are: updating the priority tasks of group and individual products identification, including on biological and geographical features; unification of evaluation criteria and objective principles for expanding their field; traditional technologies transformation, the potential of which doesnat have the possibility of unlimited replication, etc. It is predicted that the growth of production volumes, processes and consumption systems optimization will be based on the application of a number of basic principles: “lifetime” formation of raw materials composition and properties; development of highly efficient production technologies and deep processing of agricultural products; implementation of algorithms for structuring logistics, storage and processing/disposal of food and waste; increasing energy efficiency of production processes, etc. At the same time, the strategic vectors of technology development are specialized and personalized nutrition, cross-border cooperation, food quality and safety, minimization of negative environmental impact, traceability of the food chain “from field to consumer,” etc. A priori, to achieve all this it will require the introduction of widespread modern technologies, including digital ones, as well as the modernization of traditional and the creation of new methodological and process decisions.

CONSUMPTION VC THE HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SHOCKS: THE CASE OF THAILAND

This paper studies consumption insurance against the health and environmental shocks (HES) in Thailand. The paper estimates the impact of household consumption from the change in the health and environmental shocks on total consumption growth and food consumption growth. The HES are measured by the change in health status when at least one of member within the household treated at the service providers as an inpatient. The inpatient is the health care cost of an individual or household’s decision in seeking medical care that causes and effects of the household’s ability to smooth consumption. This paper uses the data from the Household Social-Economic Panel Survey during 2005 and 2007. The survey collected data on demographic characteristics by the interview from 6,000 households, approximately, from every province, both inside and outside municipal areas in Thailand. The study estimates the change of consumption by using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model. The results show that the members within the household changing as inpatient would reduce around 4 percent on total consumption and 6 percent on food consumption, respectively. These results compared to the consumption insurance in the US that consumption drops around 14 percent when at least one household member gets sick. It implies that Thailand has much better consumption insurance. This case indicates that consumption insurance in Thailand is quite sufficient against HES. For the case of Thailand, the well-insured consumption against HES may lead to decrease the spending in public health insurance.

Does Microfinance Reduce Poverty in Bangladesh? New Evidence from Household Panel Data

The study examines whether loans from microfinance institutions (MFI) reduce poverty in Bangladesh drawing upon the nationally representative household panel with four rounds from 1997 to 2004. The effects of general microfinance loans and loans for productive purposes on income, food consumption and women's Body Mass Index are estimated. Overall effects of MFI loans on income and food consumption were positive and the purpose of the loan is important in predicting which household welfare indicator is improved. Alternative estimation methods confirm a positive impact of MFI loans on food consumption growth, which supports the poverty reducing effects of microfinance in Bangladesh.

Finite difference solutions for heat transfer during drying of cubic papaya particles

Heat transfer is one of the mostly used processes in industry. With the growth of food consumption, it is notorious the use of drying to increase the lifetime of organic products like fruits, especially through dehydration. In this work, the computational performance of a fully explicit and of the Crank-Nicolson implicit finite difference schemes is addressed to solve the heat transfer problem of simulating convective drying of cubic particles of papaya. The numerical results obtained for the temperature profile in the center of the sample are compared with experimental data performed under the following operating conditions: temperature (50, 60 e 70°C), air velocity (2 m/s) and dimensions (1x1x1, 2x2x2 e 3x3x3cm). Comparisons between the two numerical methodologies are presented for a variety of situations. Our experiments have shown that the numerical results are in good agreement with the experimental data.

Is There Persistence in the Impact of Emergency Food Aid? Evidence on Consumption, Food Security, and Assets in Rural Ethiopia

We identify the impact of emergency food aid programs after the 2002 drought in rural Ethiopia on future welfare. Based on a difference‐in‐differences matching estimator, participation in food‐for‐work increases growth in total consumption and food consumption eighteen months after the drought. Separately, receiving free food raises growth in food consumption, but, surprisingly, negatively impacts food security. Food‐for‐work benefited households in the middle and upper tail of the consumption distribution, while the better‐targeted free food program benefited the poorest. Evidence suggests these impacts demonstrate accumulated and persistent effects of food aid received in the first twelve months after the drought.

The Consumption Effects Associated with Filing for Personal Bankruptcy

This article examines the response of food consumption to filing for personal bankruptcy in the spirit of previous work on the benefits of other social‐insurance programs. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that an increase in the financial benefit to filing for bankruptcy increases the growth in food consumption. In addition, we find that filing under chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code provides consumption insurance, while filing under chapter 13 of the bankruptcy code provides no significant consumption benefits.

The Consumption Effects Associated with Filing for Personal Bankruptcy

This article examines the response of food consumption to filing for personal bankruptcy in the spirit of previous work on the benefits of other social-insurance programs. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that an increase in the financial benefit to filing for bankruptcy increases the growth in food consumption. In addition, we find that filing under chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code provides consumption insurance, while filing under chapter 13 of the bankruptcy code provides no significant consumption benefits. Personal bankruptcy in the United States is part of the social-insurance structure provided by the federal and state governments. Other programs in this network include, but are not limited to, Unemployment Insurance (UI), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and food stamps. While these latter three programs are targeted to specific groups, the recently unemployed for UI and low-income households for TANF and food stamps, personal bankruptcy is not. Much like these other programs, though, bankruptcy reduces income uncertainty and reduces wealth uncertainty. Surprisingly little work has been done on the direct benefits to filing for bankruptcy. This is in contrast with the growing literature on the costs of bankruptcy.1 Fay, Hurst, and White (2002) estimate the financial benefit to filing for bankruptcy, which equals the debt forgiven minus any lost assets. This measure is a good predictor of whether the household files for bankruptcy, but it is not clear that the financial benefit is the true measure of the welfare gain from bankruptcy. In fact, the financial benefit is most likely an overestimate of the household's gain in the year it files for bankruptcy. Unlike UI or TANF, bankruptcy provides no increase in money income for that period but rather increases net-of-debt income. This change is felt over the household's lifetime, and filers will most likely smooth this effect over multiple years because households cannot file for bankruptcy again for six years. Further, using the financial benefit makes it difficult to compare results against the

Indonesian agriculture in transition: Projections of alternative futures

This paper presents an integrated grain and livestock sector partial equilibrium supply-demand model and utilizes it to project the Indonesian production, consumption and trade situation for major crop and livestock commodities under alternative trade, pricing, and investment policies. The possible long term implications of the 1997–1998. Indonesian economic crisis are also explored. The alternative simulations confirm the importance of investment in agricultural research, extension, and irrigation for future growth in the crop and livestock sectors. Interventions in input and output prices, on the other hand, can be costly. The projections also provide strong evidence that fertilizer subsidies should be eliminated. Removal of these subsidies will have very little impact on future food production, and transfer of the fiscal savings from elimination of the subsidy into productive investments would have large benefits. The results indicate that the economic crisis could severely slow the process of diversification of Indonesian diets and growth in food consumption if income effects are prolonged into the next century.

World food markets into the 21st century: commodity risk management policies

Recent concerns about future global food production seem poorly based. The rapid phase of growth in food consumption is over for most of the world's population because of increased incomes and, besides, population growth rates continue to slow. Thus, the rate of growth of food production needed in the future is much lower than it has been for the past 40 years. Production and price instability will continue, perhaps with lessened intensity because of reduced government intervention. With private agricultural interests now facing greater exposure to price and production risks, especially in developing countries, there needs to be greater emphasis on financial market instruments for managing these risks.

L'évolution de la demande viande en quantité et en qualité

The development in the demand for meat both in quantity and quality The growth in food consumption with the increase in income is tending to slow down, for the demand to which this consumption corresponds is satisfied at a certain level of income already attained in developed countries. This case of meat consumption which represents more than a third of the expenditure of a family on food. This proportion is still increasing and will reach 38 % in 1975. The adjustment of econometric models linking the evolution of consumption and that of income and prices as they are defined by surveys and the chronological series permitting a classification of meats according to the degree in which they are affected by variations in income or prices, and to establish forecasts meat demand in 1975. The forecast thus obtained expressed in constant currency takes into account the <r quality effect », that is to say the difference observed between the change in quantity consumed and the increase in total quantity (in constant currency). This difference, to a great extent, is due to a change in demand within a single category of meat for the cheapest products, thus increasing the value of the average total price, the prices of each piece remaining constant.