Note. This original form of this rebuttal was submitted to Science on 3 March 2017 (limited to 300 words as per Science editorial policy) but rejected on 13 March 2017. Herein, we elaborate on our original Science submission in order to more fully address the issue without the length limitations. This rebuttal is followed by the list of the signatories who supported our original submission.

The involvement of public health professionals in food and agricultural policy provides tremendous opportunities for advancing the public's health. It is particularly challenging, however, for professionals to understand and consider the numerous policy drivers that impact the food system, which range from agricultural commodity policies to local food safety ordinances. Confronted with this com...

Market distortions in global trade occur when a govern­ ment creates policies that increase or lower prices of imported and /or exported goods. When prices are distorted, consumers pay either less or more than they would have if the price-altering policies were not in place. In agricultural and food mar­ kets, governments tend to create pricealtering trade policies especially when global agricu...

Since late 2006, biofuel policies have caused high grain/oilseed prices by creating a link between crop and biofuel policies. The value of agricultural trade has increased sharply, mostly because of high prices, not increased trade volume. Biofuel policies have little to do with the agenda of the Doha trade negotiations but have had indirect effects in that production subsidies and import barri...

Agriculture has a key role to play in reducing poverty and hunger in many developing countries. About 75% of the world's poor live in rural areas and most are dependent on agriculture and related activities in the rural economy. For this reason the benefits for developing countries’ farmers have been shown to be substantial if OECD member countries reformed their agricultural policies. The issu...

abstract main objective of this paper is the investigation the effect of support policies of government on income risk of poultry producers in iran for the 1989-2006. ccv index was used to investigate amount of variation that cause each support policies (market price support, support of agricultural inputs, outputs insurance) on income risk variation of producers. the results of this study show...

for Proposal: Although it is well established that dynamically optimal policies should be “closed loop” so that policies take into account changing conditions of a system, it is rare for such optimization to actually be carried out in large-scale simulation models. Computational limitations remain a major barrier to the study of dynamically optimal policies. Since the size of dynamic optimizati...

A.1. MODELLING AGRICULTURAL TRADE POLICIES............................................................................3 A.2. THE ORIGINS OF ATPSM.............................................................................................................3 A.3. ATPSM A DETERMINISTIC COMPARATIVE STATIC PARTIAL EQUILIBRIUM MODEL.....................4 A.4. EVALUABLE AND NON-EVALUABLE TRADE POLICIES...

This article argues that the existing maze of pesticide policies reflects the multidimensionality of side effects of pesticide use that cannot be addressed by uniform policies. Pesticide policies will improve as (a) economic literacy among natural scientists and policymakers increases; (b) economic models of pesticide use and agricultural production in general better incorporate biological cons...