This document discusses incentives for transforming food systems to address issues like poverty, undernourishment, and overweight populations. It notes that more food production does not automatically lead to less hunger or better nutrition. It identifies some perverse incentives that can lead to unintended outcomes, like higher farm prices reducing food supply or more food production worsening nutrition. The document advocates considering multiple resources, goals, incentives, and drivers of food systems to identify opportunities for transformative change. This includes tailoring interventions to livelihoods, bundling public, private and civic activities, and anchoring solutions in the policy process with enforcement and feedback. The future challenges of mixed strategies, contracts, scaling solutions, and dual-purpose interventions across multiple levels

1. Effective incentives for
Food system transformation
Farewell address prof. dr. Ruerd Ruben

2. Solving puzzles & playing games to understand systems
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3. 0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
25%
30%
35%
40%
45%
50%
1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
%
population
Poverty
(<USD 1.90 a day, 2011 PPP; % of
world population)
Undernourishment
(calories, % of population, world)
Stunting
(% of children under 5, world)
Overweight
(BMI>25, % of population
developing countries)
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Poverty & Food security – global trends
More food production does NOT automatically lead to less hunger
Poverty reduction does NOT directly lead to better nutrition

4. Growing concerns about food security
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5. Urgent action at the interface of policy & research
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6. Why do people stay hungry?
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Urban Bias Policy failures Collective Action Human behaviour

7. Perverse incentives & adverse outcomes (1)
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Higher farm-gate prices but lower food
supply
 missing markets (de Janvry)
 leisure preferences (Chayanov)
More food production but worse
nutrition
 gender roles (Boserup)
 negative price effects (Griffin)

8. Perverse incentives & adverse outcomes (2)
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Off-farm working improves farm-
household dietary diversity
 more efficient farm production
 alternative income streams
 enabling food purchase
Commodity certification may reduce
farmer incomes
 crop specialization (Rijsbergen et al)
 easy copying (Ruben & Fort)
 over-certification (Amsaya)

9. Principles for Impact Assessment
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Comparing:
• Before & after the intervention
• With & without intervention
• Matching & Diff-in-diff
Impact failures may occur due to:
• Focus on partial responses
• Overlooking institutional failures
• Overestimating behavioural response

10. Trade-offs in food systems
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Drivers of Change
Food Systems Components
Outcomes
 Nutrition & health
 Environment &
Resilience
 Employment &
Poverty reduction

11. Searching system solutions
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12. Multiple resources
 competition for scarce resources
 substitution & complementarities
 non-adoption due to labour constraints
Analytical biases (1)
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Multiple goals
 economic growth & equity
 wealth & asset distribution
 differences between male and female
preferences

13. Analytical biases (2)
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Multiple incentives
 complementary inputs
 need for policy mix (land & credit)
 credit supply & risk reduction
Multiple drivers
 technology change & behaviour
 triple burden of malnutrition
 need for policy coherence

14. Envisioning future food systems
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15. (A) Identifying opportunities (entry points)
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1. Focus on hidden middle
 Linking producers & consumers
 Midstream activities
2. Behavioural change
 Trust & risk attitudes
 RCT experiments

16. (B) Designing transformative activities
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3. Tailoring interventions to livelihoods
 Heterogenous responses
 Poverty ≠ malnutrition
 Targeting people or places?
4. Bundling activities
 Public, private & civic actors
 Hardware, orgware & software
 Sequence of intervention matters

17. 5. Anchoring in the policy process
 Showing synergy opportunities
 Identifying SMART incentives
 Focus on Alternative pay-offs
(C) Putting transformative change in practice
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6. Enforcement & feedbacks
 Broad alliances
 Creating spill-overs
 Supporting win-win options

18. Incentives for food system transformation
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Increasing responsiveness
● Resources
● Knowledge
● Trust
● Risk attitudes
● Diet choice
● Cooperation
Enabling food environment
• Ownership rights
• Infrastructure
• Information
• Transparency
• Participation
• Bargaining

19. Future challenges & outlook
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Food &
Nutrition
Governance
& Conflicts
Climate &
resilience
Mobility &
Stability

20.  Mixed strategies: combining market & institutional incentives
 Contracts: combining horizontal cooperation & vertical integration
 Scaling: from individual solutions to collective response
 Dual purpose interventions: food & climate ; poverty & nutrition
 Multi-level approach: individual – family – community/city - country
A food system transformation research agenda
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21. A few words of thanks
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