Introduction

This chapter explains how and why economics is useful for studying agriculture and food systems. All human populations have profound similarities in our nutritional needs, but people everywhere live under vastly different conditions. The economics of agriculture, food and nutrition offers powerful insights into how and why people respond to their unique circumstances in different ways. Economics offers a toolkit of methods and data developed over centuries of studying how people escaped hunger and undernutrition, and now need to address climate change, the global rise of diet-related diseases and other obstacles to further progress. This book is intended to be a core text for students in courses taking an economics perspective on food policy, agricultural development, food systems, or nutrition and health. No previous training is needed beyond secondary school algebra and geometry. Some students will come at this topic from the humanities and social sciences, while others will have studied agriculture or the health sciences, but everyone can use economics to understand how individual decisions and societal interactions drive the outcomes we observe, and how evidence-based policies and interventions can best improve agriculture, food and health.