Measuring the Sustainability of the UK Food Chain

Andrew Peter Barnes and Alistair McVittie

No 46003, Working Papers from Scotland's Rural College (formerly Scottish Agricultural College), Land Economy & Environment Research Group

Abstract: Recent policy interest has been directed at the sustainability of food industries, in particular the post-farm gate food chain. This comprises of manufacturing, wholesaling, retailing and catering. In order to measure sustainability Byerlee and Murgai (2001) have argued that productivity measures, alongside key indicators of resource quality trends, should be used to indicate sustainable growth. This paper adopts this approach by presenting Fisher indexes of both Total Factor Productivity (TFP) index and for prominent externalities emerging from the food chain over the period 1998 to 2002. TFP shows an average annual growth rate of –0.52% per annum. Input growth, in particular intermediate purchases, has outstripped output growth over the entirety of this period. In addition, major externalities of environmental and social costs have increased over this period. Consequently, both sets of indicators give a somewhat bleak assessment of the sustainability of the UK food chain.

Keywords: Agribusiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2006-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/46003/files/Work18Barnes.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:srlewp:46003

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.46003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Scotland's Rural College (formerly Scottish Agricultural College), Land Economy & Environment Research Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().