Asian Fruit Market - © hungerhunger blogspot.com

A Government Subsidy To Enable Healthier Eating?

I’ve long complained that healthy diets are all well and good, except that the average consumer can’t afford to buy the foods they need – or as much of them as they need – to make the biggest positive difference. I’m talking about fresh fruits and veggies, which present a real conundrum…

Produce Aisle - © trinitybythecove.comA supermarket produce aisle: High fixed cost to retail ‘perishables’
just add to the price increases from other causes.

The famous Mediterranean Diet, the recently touted Nordic diet, and the official eating guides of all the major western countries all agree: we should fill at least half our plates with fresh fruits and veggies to ensure peak health and wellness.

But there are many ‘reasons’ folks don’t follow the recommendations.

A multiple-whammy

The first and foremost reason folks don’t eat enough fresh fruits and veggies is, they don’t particularly like them. Especially kids, as most parents will attest. But there are ways to promote the good stuff to folks, as replacements for processed, packaged, over-sugared and over-salted foods.

The second most impactful reason folks don’t enough fresh produce is, it’s just too damned expensive. And prices are still rising as the supply chain issues caused by the COVID situation, global warming’s impact on crops and yields, and rising cost for fertilizer and fuel all conspire to push fresh produce out of the average person’s reach.

Third, there’s a wastage problem haunting fresh fruits and veggies that is still growing out of control, and much of that waste is needless – the result of culling produce even before it leaves the farm gate, to ensure it meets appearance and size standards imposed by the wholesalers and retailers.

What to do?

A team of researchers from the University of Warwick (UK) have suggested a controversial cure (or at least, a treatment) for high produce prices. Let me hasten, here, to disclose that they’re economists, not physicians, nutritionists or biologists. And the cure is entirely political. But it just might work.

What they did

The team set out to quantify what they called distortions in the price of fruit and vegetables due to ‘market imperfections’, and their impact on our diets.

What they found

Aside from the obvious, well-known causes behind high produce prices, the team noted that, “The shelf price of a product incorporates fixed costs associated with its manufacture and distribution. Fruit and vegetables have particularly high fixed costs as they are perishable products which requires them to be restocked more frequently. This drives up the price of fresh produce compared to other, unhealthier, foods, which are sold close to their [factory gate] cost.”

“There is something wrong with the market, which is that there’s a high fixed cost in the provision of fruits and vegetables. The effect of that is that the prices are too high, and consumption too low,” observes Dr. Thijs van Rens. “What is worse: the effect is stronger when demand is low. And demand happens to be low where people are poor. So this market failure not only makes us all unhealthier, but it increases health inequality as well.”

The takeway

The economists present some pretty persuasive numbers to support the imposition of a government subsidy of 25 percent for the purchase of fresh fruits and veggies, so everyone can afford them.

The cost of such a move is estimated as £2.5 billion per year. Sounds like a lot, but the savings to the healthcare system far outweigh that cost, the study report pointas out: “The NHS [National Health System] is estimated to have spent £6.1 billion on overweight and obesity-related ill-health in 2014/15 and will potentially spend £9.7 billion a year by 2050, while the overall cost of obesity to wider society is estimated at £27 billion.” That last number takes into account the cost of treating related diseases and conditions including, prominently, heart disease and type two diabetes.

“There is no debate that fruit and vegetable consumption would increase if you subsidize it. The main contribution of our research is to show that the market is already so distorted that this subsidy would benefit every single consumer in the economy,” van Rens asserts. “Taxing and subsidizing to tackle obesity has been politically infeasible for some time but shouldn’t be any longer. Obesity is a massive public health problem and we’re not going to solve it with tweaks. We need to bring out the big guns: subsidies and taxes. A subsidy is in some ways the most market-based, least invasive intervention you can think of. Anything less than that is just giving friendly advice and will not get us where we need to be.”

My take

I agree with van Rens entirely. Time to get out the big guns. But I also want someone to address the problem of folks who don’t like fruits and veggies. We’ve seen fairly recent studies that suggest it’s relatively easy to get kids into the produces habit if you start them on a good variety of fruits and veggies early on, so the little ‘uns will consider them a part of their diet for life. But how do you convince grown-ups – probably addicted to processed, packaged foods that are overdosed with sugar, salt and fat – to change their ways?

~ Maggie J.