This paper reviews available cross-disciplinary evidence on how culture affects food security. We discuss the impact of culture on all four dimensions (availability, access and choice, utilization, and stability). Although there is large heterogeneity in the size and breadth of available evidence, with research often biased toward high-come countries, it is clear that how and why we obtain, process, prepare, and eat food is influenced by culture in various ways. In addition, gender, family, and decision-making power play a critical role in the impact of culture. The dynamics of culture as well as the magnitude and relative importance of cultural effects in the context of food security are still poorly understood. Nevertheless, there remains ample scope for improving food security policy by taking culture better into account.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe study the co-existence of two community-based institutions for fisheries management in Benin: a traditional institution embedded in the Voodoo religion and a recent secular institution in the form of fishing committees. Using household survey data on fishing activities, we find that rules of both institutions have a statistically significant but small impact on the use of unsustainable fishing gear. We further find that Voodoo fishers who break the traditional Voodoo-based rule follow the fishing committee rule to the same extent as other fishers. This finding is consistent with a possible transition from the traditional Voodoo-based institution to the secular fishing committee institution. More research is needed to fully assess the effectiveness of, and interactions between, the two institutions.* Corresponding author: Elena Briones Alonso (elena.brionesalonso@kuleuven.be). We are grateful for valuable comments from

This paper reviews available cross-disciplinary evidence on how culture affects food security. We discuss the impact of culture on all four dimensions (availability, access and choice, utilization, and stability). Although there is large heterogeneity in the size and breadth of available evidence, with research often biased toward high-come countries, it is clear that how and why we obtain, process, prepare, and eat food is influenced by culture in various ways. In addition, gender, family, and decision-making power play a critical role in the impact of culture. The dynamics of culture as well as the magnitude and relative importance of cultural effects in the context of food security are still poorly understood. Nevertheless, there remains ample scope for improving food security policy by taking culture better into account.

We develop an extended Nominal Rate of Assistance (NRA) methodology to disentangle the welfare impacts of policies for various interest groups along the value chain (to disaggregate effects within the "producer" and "consumer" umbrellas). We apply our value chain NRA methodology to the case of Pakistan's price and trade policy. We analyse the welfare implications for various agents in the wheat-flour value chain from 2000 to 2013, a period characterized by major global price volatility and by regular adjustments of domestic policies. We find that the wheat price policy has generally benefitted flour consumers and wheat traders at the expense of wheat farmers and to a lesser extent flour millers. Our findings illustrate that the welfare implications of policies can be quite different within the "producer" and "consumer" umbrellas, which has potentially important implications for economic and political economy analyses and for the design of policies that aim to target the poorest groups along value chains.We thank Paul Dorosh for the provision of data and for many invaluable comments. Bekzod Shamsiev and Garry Christensen also contributed many helpful comments. The research received financial support from the KU Leuven (Methusalem), the World Bank and the European Commission (FoodSecure Project). The authors are solely responsible for the views expressed in this paper.Corresponding author: Elena Briones Alonso at elena.brionesalonso@kuleuven.be. IntroductionBoth economic policy and political economy models often consider "producers", "consumers", and "taxpayers" as the main agents in the economy to study the welfare impacts of policies, their incentive effects, and rent (re-)distribution. It is well known that the "real economy" is much more complicated and that many more agents are affected -and also play a role in lobbying governments to introduce or remove certain policies. In agricultural and food policies "other agents" include input suppliers (such as land owners, seed and agro-chemical companies, and rural banks) on the upstream side of the value chain and traders, food processors and retail companies on the downstream side of the value chain. These agents may be differently affected by policies, depending on the nature of the policy (e.g. whether the policy is targeted to the (raw) agricultural commodity (such as price support for grain) or to a processed commodity (such as import tariffs on bread or cheese). 1 As a consequence, these different agents have sometimes joined forces ("political coalitions") with farmers or with final consumers to influence policy makers in setting public policies.One of the reasons for simple producer-consumer models is of course its didactic use in theory, i.e. to avoid unnecessary complications in economic models to derive policy effects and identify equilibria. Another reason is empirical: the absence of detailed empirical information on policy impacts on various agents. A major contribution to empirical agricultural and food policy analysis in recent years is the...

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe study the co-existence of two community-based institutions for fisheries management in Benin: a traditional institution embedded in the Voodoo religion and a recent secular institution in the form of fishing committees. Using household survey data on fishing activities, we find that rules of both institutions have a statistically significant but small impact on the use of unsustainable fishing gear. We further find that Voodoo fishers who break the traditional Voodoo-based rule follow the fishing committee rule to the same extent as other fishers. This finding is consistent with a possible transition from the traditional Voodoo-based institution to the secular fishing committee institution. More research is needed to fully assess the effectiveness of, and interactions between, the two institutions.* Corresponding author: Elena Briones Alonso (elena.brionesalonso@kuleuven.be). We are grateful for valuable comments from