Personal Energy Use Assessment

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http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/globalfoodmarkets/
Overview

As incomes have risen in many countries during the past few decades, consumers have begun purchasing fewer staples (like rice and wheat) and more high-value food items (such as meat, dairy, pasta, and frozen vegetables). Global sales of high-value products have been growing, with sales increasing by a quarter since 1998. Food suppliers have responded to this expanding consumer demand by importing high-value foods from around the world. Moreover, food manufacturers have invested in processing facilities in many host countries. The choice to import or produce locally depends on the nature of the product, trade and domestic policy issues, and other factors affecting transaction costs. Global food markets have become more competitive and trade in high-value products has slowed as more high-value products are produced locally. More overview...
Features

Processed Food Trade Pressured by Evolving Global Supply Chains reports that many factors affect the choice of locations to produce and sell food products. Patterns of food trade are strongly influenced by the changing nature of competition in the global food industry—from shifting consumer preferences to the growth in multinational food retailers and the ways they manage their global supply chains. Consumer-driven changes are increasingly pushing food suppliers to meet consumer demand and preferences at a local level, even as the food industry becomes more global.

A Revolution in Food Retailing Underway in the Asia-Pacific Region reports that rapid economic growth and urbanization are transforming the retail food sector in the developing economies of the Asia-Pacific region. Expanding modern chain stores are offering consumers lower prices, greater convenience, and higher quality and safer food in increasingly complex, often congested, urban markets. They are also forcing domestic marketing channels and food producers to adapt and modernize.
Recommended Readings

New Directions in Global Food Markets describes how consumer preferences drive changes in global food supply chains, including the growth in private-label sales and expansion of multinational retailers and manufacturers in developing countries. This, in turn, can lead to local processing of some food products rather than an increase in overall food trade.

Market Access for High-Value Foods examines how existing multilateral trade rules may favor trade in raw commodities at the expense of processed products, identifies changes in food trade patterns and shifts in U.S. comparative advantages, and evaluates the impact of uniformly reducing global tariffs as a way of improving market access.

Changing Structure of Global Food Consumption and Trade explores factors underlying shifts in global food consumption patterns and the composition of world agricultural trade. Higher incomes, diet diversification, and increasing demand for higher quality and labor-saving products are among the factors that influence food consumption and trade.

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Recommended Data Products

International Food Consumption Patterns database estimates food budget shares and income and price elasticities, using 1996 data, for 9 major consumption groups and 8 food subgroups across 114 countries. The depth and breadth of these data provide an opportunity to incorporate the elasticities into research on changing food demand patterns.

Foreign Agricultural Trade of the United States (FATUS) provides U.S. agricultural export and import data, volume and value, by country, by commodity, and by calendar year, fiscal year, and month, for varying periods, such as 1935 to the present or 1989 to the present.

Agricultural Market Access Database (AMAD) provides data and information on World Trade Organization (WTO) member countries regarding tariff schedules, tariff bindings, applied tariff rates, import quantities, notifications to the WTO on countries' commitments, and other data useful in analyzing market access issues in agriculture.

The ERS Agricultural Exchange Rate Data Set contains annual and monthly data for exchange rates important to U.S. agriculture. It includes both nominal and real exchange ...