Demand Constraints and New Demands: Regulations, Markets and Institutions Efficiency

Economic efficiency is a key issue for economic research and for policy design, and certainly for food security challenges. In the food system dynamics the understanding of changes and trends is crucial to improve our capacity in dealing with sustainable development and quality of life objectives. The links with food consumption behavior, mainly in less developed countries are main drivers to understand changes in the food system. Food system efficiency evaluation is necessary, in regard to production/consumption efficiency, market and government/governance – regulations and institutional efficiency, and efforts should be made to improve our capacity to deal with those methodological needs. In many situations, in the real world, data and measurements are difficult or even impossible in numeric/quantitative terms. Frequently, qualitative evaluation is the only way to proceed, but measurements and numeric references are still important, mainly when changes over time is the focal aspect of the research about real world conditions and respective changes. The actual paper follows a structural food system model (WFSE – World Food Security Equation) to show the important role of Markets and Institutions “vis a vis” regulation practices directed to improve economic efficiency subject to demand behavior in a country case study. Cape Verde is a very challenging country in regard to “food security status,” with great success in global/macro terms in the last 10 years, where now the main problems are clearly at local level. The present research tries to highlight the global achievements and explores local assessment efforts on food consumption conditions. A specific region is studied, the island of Santo Antão, in a very important production region. Two different communities are analyzed, and three different production systems are considered to better understand the local dynamics and possible interactions among those factors and food consumption habits. The results deserve deeper discussions and further research, with evidences that food habits are very strong factors to be considered, sometimes “over passing” clearly the expectations in regard to income, and also in regard to direct influences between production systems and consumption. Several other studies were compared, providing a good overview about results obtained in several other regions, showing that food consumption at local level is also in reasonable good conditions, which means that solutions for improvements are complex and very dependent on social systems, somehow with a similar position with the problems of the industrialized economies.