This report provides the latest estimates by USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) on the amount and value of food loss in the United States. These estimates are for more than 200 individual foods using ERS’s Loss-Adjusted Food Availability data. In 2010, an estimated 31 percent or 133...

This study tracks food products introduced from 1989 to 2010 to better understand the adoption of voluntary health- and nutrition-related claims by companies. New food products introduced with health- and nutrition-related claims accounted for 43.1 percent of all new U.S. food product...

Rural Hispanics at a Glance provides the latest information from the 2000 Census and other Federal data sources about Hispanics living in nonmetro counties. This six-page brochure highlights growth and geographic dispersion, demographic characteristics, and the most recent indicators of social...

This study estimates shortrun and longrun elasticities for agricultural inputs, along with elasticities of substitution, using a theoretically consistent restricted profit function and a series of decomposition equations. The model is also disaggregated on the input side, uses a flexible...

In 2008, wheat futures prices spiked and then crashed along with prices for other agricultural and nonagricultural commodities. Market observers offered several theories to explain this common movement, or comovement, in prices, and have proposed policies to address the perceived problem of...

Developing countries, particularly those that depend heavily on a small number of agricultural exports, are vulnerable to domestic and international shocks. These countries often have difficulty achieving sustained economic growth. This analysis uses Malawi, a country that earns most of its...

We estimate the effects of new brands on market competition and consumer welfare in the U.S. processed cheese market. We find that an observed increase in consumer welfare was attributable mainly to an increase in the number of brands in the sample market, while the price effect, which measures...