PhD project title and outline, including interdisciplinary dimension :
Agricultural Policy and Public Health: Integrative Frameworks to Explore Food Security

The project will focus on the interactions between (1) policies concerned with productivity and food supply (such as Common Agricultural Policy type support systems), (2) distributional consequences of those policies and wider socio-economic conditions (such as the availability and affordability of certain foods to different population groups post-Brexit), (3) subsequent shifts in nutritional patterns (e.g. restricted access to non-starchy vegetables due to changes in trade patterns contributing to ‘nutrition poverty’), and, (4) expected changes to health outcomes within and between groups and related resource implications.  A key objective of the project will be to articulate a comprehensive theory of food security that connects public investment in both the food production and health systems. This will be accomplished by drawing on several disciplines including agricultural economics, human nutrition, and epidemiology.  The analytical framework will be tested empirically by means of integrative and complementary applications of mathematical (such as non-linear programming / computable general equilibrium), and statistical (such as logistic/latent variable regression) analyses combining agricultural, economic, diet, and health data. A key deliverable from the project will be a policy evaluation tool that applies the theoretical and methodological developments to a case study. A compelling case to examine would be to anticipate the main mechanisms through which alternative approaches to supporting agricultural production in the Brexit era impact vulnerable populations, particularly in terms of diet-related health outcomes. 

Primary supervisor: Dr Vikki O’Neill (Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences)
Secondary supervisor: Professor Jayne Woodside (Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences)
External Partner/Organisation: Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute