Economic framework to assess the impact of banning pesticides, with application to sulfuryl fluoride for drywood termites (Blattodea: Kalotermitidae) in California.

Sulfuryl fluoride (SF) is a fumigant used to eliminate drywood termites (DWT: Kalotermitidae; Froggatt) and other structural pests. Because of its global warming potential, it has been suggested that SF be restricted as a greenhouse gas (GHG). We present an economic model to assess the net social cost of restricting SF. We consider 3 approaches to address DWT control- no treatment, allowing SF fumigation and localized treatments, and only local treatment. Each approach generates private and public benefits and costs. We estimate that the annual damage and home equity loss by DWT in California is US$4.5-16.8 billion without treatment. If fumigation is used on 20% of the houses and local treatments on the others, the combined social cost of treatment, damage, and GHG emissions are between US$1-US$2 billion annually. The annual cost of local treatments only would be between US$3.2 and US$4.9 billion. If the application of SF is severely restricted or banned, the social costs will increase between US$1.43 and US$4.31 billion annually. The implied cost per ton of CO2 eliminated is between US$624 and US$1,465, much above the price range of CO2 in other applications. The restriction/ban has significant equity and environmental effects, impacting low-income individuals living in rented properties and replacing damaged wood in housing will increase GHG emissions. We further recommend the continued use of SF until a comparable whole-structure alternative is developed that fits the parameters of our model.

Effects of season, depth and pre-cultivation fertilizing on Ulva growth dynamics offshore the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Offshore macroalgae production could provide an alternative source of biomass for food, materials and energy. However, the offshore environment in general, specifically the Eastern Mediterranean Sea (EMS) offshore, is a high energy and low nutrients environment, thus challenging for macroalgae farming. In this study, we experimentally investigated the impact of season, depth, and pre-cultivation fertilization duration on the growth rates and chemical composition of offshore Ulva biomass, and developed a predictive model tailored to offshore conditions, capable of estimating both biomass growth rate and nitrogen content. Specifically, we measured Ulva biomass growth rate and internal nitrogen in the nitrogen-poor EMS a few kilometers offshore the Israeli coast at various depths and on-shore pre-cultivation fertilization schedules. Based on these data, we constructed a predictive cultivation model of Ulva offshore growth, which allows for the optimization of fertilization requirements for offshore cultivation. This study provides new insights on the effects of seasonality, depth, and pre-cultivation fertilization duration on growth rates and chemical composition of offshore Ulva sp. biomass production.

From the laboratory to the consumer: Innovation, supply chain, and adoption with applications to natural resources.

We analyze the transition from innovative ideas to final marketed products. This transition occurs through two synergetic supply chains for innovation and products. Basic concepts are developed, tested, upscaled, and introduced to commercial use in the innovation supply chain. Then, the products are produced and delivered to the consumer through the product supply chain. We argue that product markets trace their birth to product innovations. These markets tend to start as noncompetitive, which rewards innovators. Credit access and risk determine the reliance on contracting and product diffusion over space and time. The innovation and product supply chains are encouraged and facilitated by public policies, such as support for research and education, intellectual property rights protection, low barriers to trade, science-based regulation, and well-functioning capital markets. We argue for multidisciplinary research incorporating knowledge from economics, business, and engineering to better understand the evolution of innovative companies and supply chains. This understanding will help the development of policies to address challenges of climate change and food security among others.

The political economy of COVID-19.

We assess the economic and health costs of COVID and policy responses to COVID. Based on initial estimates of health and economic costs, social distancing policies were justified, but these estimates now seem too high because of learning by doing. Significant differences in mortality rates across US states and countries can be explained by population density, climate, exposure, and policy. Regions that were able to contain the disease early have seen fewer deaths and lower economic losses. Some developing countries initially imposed drastic, costly measures, perhaps motivated by political economy. We also find that there has been underinvestment in prevention and mitigation that could have reduced the cost of adaptation and suggest that there is a lesson for climate change policies.

The impact of policy timing on the spread of COVID-19.

We model COVID-19 data for 89 nations and US states with a recently developed formalism that describes mathematically any pattern of growth with the minimum number of parameters. The results show that the disease has a typical duration of 18 days, with a significant increase in fatality when it lasts longer than about 4 months. Searching for correlations between "flattening of the curve" and preventive public policies, we find strong statistical evidence for the impact of the first implemented policy on decreasing the pandemic growth rate; a delay of one week in implementation nearly triples the size of the infected population, on average. Without any government action, the initial outburst still slows down after 36 days, possibly thanks to changes in public behavior in response to the pandemic toll. Stay-at-home (lockdown) was not the first policy of any sample member, and we could not find statistically meaningful evidence for its added impact, similar to a recent study that employed an entirely different approach. However, lockdown was mostly imposed only shortly before the exponential rise was arrested by other measures, too late for a meaningful impact. A third of the sample members that did implement lockdown imposed it only after the outburst had already started to slow down. The possibility remains that lockdown might have significantly shortened the initial exponential rise had it been employed as first resort rather than last.

"Pivoting" by food industry firms to cope with COVID-19 in developing regions: E-commerce and "copivoting" delivery intermediaries.

Coronavirus disease 2019 and related lockdown policies in 2020 shocked food industry firms' supply chains in developing regions. Firms "pivoted" to e-commerce to reach consumers and e-procurement to reach processors and farmers. "Delivery intermediaries" copivoted with food firms to help them deliver and procure. This was crucial to the ability of the food firms to pivot. The pandemic was a "crucible" that induced this set of fast-tracking innovations, accelerating the diffusion of e-commerce and delivery intermediaries, and enabling food industry firms to redesign, at least temporarily, and perhaps for the long term, their supply chains to be more resilient, and to weather the pandemic, supply consumers, and contribute to food security. We present a theoretical model to explain these firm strategies, and then apply the framework to classify firms' practical strategies. We focus on cases in Asia and Latin America. Enabling policy and infrastructural conditions allowed firms to pivot and copivot fluidly.

Europe's Farm to Fork Strategy and Its Commitment to Biotechnology and Organic Farming: Conflicting or Complementary Goals?

The European Commission's Farm to Fork (F2F) strategy, under the European Green Deal, acknowledges that innovative techniques, including biotechnology, may play a role in increasing sustainability. At the same time, organic farming will be promoted, and at least 25% of the EU's agricultural land shall be under organic farming by 2030. How can both biotechnology and organic farming be developed and promoted simultaneously to contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? We illustrate that achieving the SDGs benefits from the inclusion of recent innovations in biotechnology in organic farming. This requires a change in the law. Otherwise, the planned increase of organic production in the F2F strategy may result in less sustainable, not more sustainable, food systems.

Compound natural and human disasters: Managing drought and COVID-19 to sustain global agriculture and food sectors.

Individually, both droughts and pandemics cause disruptions to global food supply chains. The 21st century has seen the frequent occurrence of both natural and human disasters, including droughts and pandemics. Together their impacts can be compounded, leading to severe economic stress and malnutrition, particularly in developing countries. Understanding how droughts and pandemics interact, and identifying appropriate policies to address them together and separately, is important for maintaining a robust global food supply. Herein we assess the impacts of each of these disasters in the context of food and agriculture, and then discuss their compounded effect. We discuss the implications for policy, and suggest opportunities for future research.

Genetic Engineering of Livestock: The Opportunity Cost of Regulatory Delay.

Genetically engineered (GE) livestock were first reported in 1985, and yet only a single GE food animal, the fast-growing AquAdvantage salmon, has been commercialized. There are myriad interconnected reasons for the slow progress in this once-promising field, including technical issues, the structure of livestock industries, lack of public research funding and investment, regulatory obstacles, and concern about public opinion. This review focuses on GE livestock that have been produced and documents the difficulties that researchers and developers have encountered en route. Additionally, the costs associated with delayed commercialization of GE livestock were modeled using three case studies: GE mastitis-resistant dairy cattle, genome-edited porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus-resistant pigs, and the AquAdvantage salmon. Delays of 5 or 10 years in the commercialization of GE livestock beyond the normative 10-year GE product evaluation period were associated with billions of dollars in opportunity costs and reduced global food security.

The global value of water in agriculture.

Major environmental functions and human needs critically depend on water. In regions of the world affected by water scarcity economic activities can be constrained by water availability, leading to competition both among sectors and between human uses and environmental needs. While the commodification of water remains a contentious political issue, the valuation of this natural resource is sometime viewed as a strategy to avoid water waste. Likewise, water markets have been invoked as a mechanism to allocate water to economically most efficient uses. The value of water, however, remains difficult to estimate because water markets and market prices exist only in few regions of the world. Despite numerous attempts at estimating the value of water in the absence of markets (i.e., the "shadow price"), a global spatially explicit assessment of the value of water in agriculture is still missing. Here we propose a data-parsimonious biophysical framework to determine the value generated by water in irrigated agriculture and highlight its global spatiotemporal patterns. We find that in much of the world the actual crop distribution does not maximize agricultural water value.

Countries influence the trade-off between crop yields and nitrogen pollution.

National institutions and policies could provide powerful levers to steer the global food system towards higher agricultural production and lower environmental impact. However, causal evidence of countries' influence is scarce. Using global geospatial datasets and a regression discontinuity design, we provide causal quantifications of the way crop yield gaps, nitrogen pollution and nitrogen pollution per crop yield are influenced by country-level factors, such as institutions and policies. We find that countries influence nitrogen pollution much more than crop yields and there is only a small trade-off between reducing nitrogen pollution and increasing yields. Overall, countries that cause 35% less nitrogen pollution than their neighbours only show a 1% larger yield gap (the difference between attainable and attained yields). Explanations of which countries cause the most pollution relative to their crop yields include economic development, population size, institutional quality and foreign financial flows to land resources, as well as countries' overall agricultural intensity and share in the economy. Our findings suggest that many national governments have an impressive capacity to reduce global nitrogen pollution without having to sacrifice much agricultural production.

The Economics of Regulating New Plant Breeding Technologies - Implications for the Bioeconomy Illustrated by a Survey Among Dutch Plant Breeders.

New plant breeding technologies (NPBTs) are increasingly used for developing new plants with novel traits. The science tells us that those plants in general are as safe as than those once developed using "conventional" plant breeding methods. The knowledge about the induced changes and properties of the new plants by using NPBTs is more precise. This should lead to the conclusion that plants developed using NPBTs should not be regulated differently than those developed using "conventional" plant breeding methods. This contribution discusses the economics of regulating new plant breeding technologies. We first develop the theoretical model and elaborate on the different regulatory approaches being used and compare their advantages and disadvantages. Then we provide a perspectives on EU regulation around mutagenesis-based New Plant Breeding Techniques (NPBT), formed by new insights from a survey among Dutch plant breeding companies. The survey measures the attitude of breeding companies towards the ruling of the EU Court of Justice that subjected the use of CRISPR-Cas in the development of new plant varieties under the general EU regulations around GMOs. The results show that plant breeders experience a financial barrier because of the ruling, with perceived negative impact on competitiveness and investments in CRISPR-Cas as a result. The degree of negative impact differs however significantly among seed-sectors and company sizes. One of the most striking results was the relative optimism of companies in the sector about more lenient legislation in the next five years, despite the stated negative effects.

Assessment of acoustic pulse therapy (APT), a non-antibiotic treatment for dairy cows with clinical and subclinical mastitis.

Clinical and subclinical mastitis affects 30% of cows and is regarded as the most significant economic burden on the dairy farm reducing milk yield and quality and increasing culling rate. A proprietary Acoustic Pulse Therapy (APT) device was developed specifically for treating dairy cows. The APT device was designed to produce deep penetrating acoustic pulses that are distributed over a large treated area at a therapeutic level. This paper presents findings from a clinical assessment of this technology for the treatment of dairy cows with subclinical and clinical mastitis. In subclinical mastitis, a group of 116 cows from 3 herds were identified with subclinical intramammary infection and enrolled in the study; 78 cows were assigned to the treatment group and 38 cows to the control group. Significant differences (P<0.001) were found where 70.5% of the cows in the treatment group returned to normal milk production, compared with only 18.4% of the control group. Daily milk yields of the treated cows increased significantly (P<0.05) and the percentage of cows with log somatic cell count under 5.6 cells/mL was significantly higher (P<0.001). Milk of the infected quarters appeared normal with lactose greater than 4.8%, but this difference was not significant. Of the treated cows with identified bacteria, 52.6% of the quarters were cured, while in the control group only 25.0% (P<0.001). Specifically, all cows identified with Escherichia coli in the treatment group were cured, with 66.6% cured with no intervention in the control. Spontaneous cure of glands infected with coagulase negative staphylococci (CNS) and Streptococci was low while treatment successfully increased the cure of CNS from 13.3% to 53.8% and that of Streptococci from 18.2% to 36.4%. Of the 4 cows identified with Staphylococcus aureus, 3 were cured. The clinical mastitis study group included 29 infected cows that were submitted either to a gold standard antibiotic treatment subgroup of 16 cows (n = 16) or to an APT treatment subgroup of 13 cows (n = 13). A cure of 18.7% was shown for the antibiotic treatment, of which logSCC returned to <5.6 cell/mL and 56.2% were culled. A cure of 76.9% was shown for the APT treatment with only one cow culled (7.7%).

A global approach to assess the economic benefits of increased consumption of sugar-free chewing gum.

PURPOSE: To analyze the influence of increasing the average consumption of sugar-free gum (SFG) in 25 industrialized countries on dental expenditures due to caries by the national health care systems. It was assumed that large cost savings were possible, because the regular consumption of SFG significantly reduces the relative risk of caries and therefore, improves dental health, which reduces expenditures on dental treatments. METHODS: A budget impact analysis (BIA) was performed to model the decrease in the relative risk of caries and the subsequent cost savings for dental care. Annual consumption of SFG, dental expenditures due to caries, chewing frequencies by age groups and the relative risk reduction for caries due to the consumption of SFG were identified and used as model parameters. Three different scenarios for the increase in the number of SFG were calculated. Besides overall results for all countries together, analyses were conducted for countries grouped by regions and the Human Development Index (HDI). RESULTS: For the entity of all 25 analyzed countries together, possible annual cost savings range from US$805.77 M in the scenario with the lowest increase of SFG consumption up to US$18,248 billion in the scenario with the biggest increase of SFG consumption. Europe and the USA show potential cost savings of US$1,061 billion and US$2,071 billion per year, respectively, if all chewers increase their consumption of SFG by 1 piece per day. The analysis showed the potential cost savings in dental expenditures due to caries that can be achieved by only slightly increasing the consumption of SFG. The regular consumption of SFG cannot replace good dental hygiene like tooth brushing, but can have a significant impact on dental health, which can lead to increased cost savings for health care systems worldwide. CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE: Based on the fact that a regular consumption of sugar-free chewing gum has the beneficial effect of reducing caries prevalence, an increased consumption may not only lead to improved dental health but significant cost savings in expenditures for dental treatment worldwide.

Foregone benefits of important food crop improvements in Sub-Saharan Africa.

A number of new crops have been developed that address important traits of particular relevance for smallholder farmers in Africa. Scientists, policy makers, and other stakeholders have raised concerns that the approval process for these new crops causes delays that are often scientifically unjustified. This article develops a real option model for the optimal regulation of a risky technology that enhances economic welfare and reduces malnutrition. We consider gradual adoption of the technology and show that delaying approval reduces uncertainty about perceived risks of the technology. Optimal conditions for approval incorporate parameters of the stochastic processes governing the dynamics of risk. The model is applied to three cases of improved crops, which either are, or are expected to be, delayed by the regulatory process. The benefits and costs of the crops are presented in a partial equilibrium that considers changes in adoption over time and the foregone benefits caused by a delay in approval under irreversibility and uncertainty. We derive the equilibrium conditions where the net-benefits of the technology equal the costs that would justify a delay. The sooner information about the safety of the technology arrive, the lower the costs for justifying a delay need to be i.e. it pays more to delay. The costs of a delay can be substantial: e.g. a one year delay in approval of the pod-borer resistant cowpea in Nigeria will cost the country about 33 million USD to 46 million USD and between 100 and 3,000 lives.

Development of an Activated Carbon-Based Electrode for the Capture and Rapid Electrolytic Reductive Debromination of Methyl Bromide from Postharvest Fumigations.

Due to concerns surrounding its ozone depletion potential, there is a need for technologies to capture and destroy methyl bromide (CH3Br) emissions from postharvest fumigations applied to control agricultural pests. Previously, we described a system in which CH3Br fumes vented from fumigation chambers could be captured by granular activated carbon (GAC). The GAC was converted to a cathode by submergence in a high ionic strength solution and connection to the electrical grid, resulting in reductive debromination of the sorbed CH3Br. The GAC bed was drained and dried for reuse to capture and destroy CH3Br fumes from the next fumigation. However, the loose GAC particles and slow kinetics of this primitive electrode necessitated improvements. Here, we report the development of a cathode containing a thin layer of small GAC particles coating carbon cloth as a current distributor. Combining the high sorption potential of GAC for CH3Br with the conductivity of the carbon cloth current distributor, the cathode significantly lowered the total cell resistance and achieved 96% reductive debromination of CH3Br sorbed at 30% by weight to the GAC within 15 h at -1 V applied potential vs standard hydrogen electrode, a time scale and efficiency suitable for postharvest fumigations. The cathode exhibited stable performance over 50 CH3Br capture and destruction cycles. Initial cost estimates indicate that this technique could treat CH3Br fumes at ∼$5/kg, roughly one-third of the cost of current alternatives.

Continents divided: Understanding differences between Europe and North America in acceptance of GM crops.

The differences between GM policies in the US and Europe have several causes. GM technology holds a home court advantage in the US and European chemical companies did not support its introduction. The technology did not seem to provide benefits to consumers, and the crops it applied to were not so significant in Europe. The technology was introduced during a time when the political influence of green parties in Europe was especially significant, and European trust of government capacity to enter food security issues was at its lowest.