Centre for Rural Economy

Staff Profile

Dr Diogo Monjardino De Souza Monteiro

Senior Lecturer in Agribusiness

Background

I am an agro-food business economist and I my expertise is on the economics of information, supply chain coordination and food marketing. I have done research on consumer preferences for credence attributes such as origin, food safety and nutrition as well as on vertical coordination of information and quality in food chains.


Most of my projects have been with international collaborators from the Brazil, France, Indonesia, Portugal and the US. Currently, my main lines of research are:

  • Household and food service food waste management (where I collaborate with colleagues from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and the Newcastle City council)
  • Urban farming (with colleagues from the University Gadjah Mada in Indonesia)
  • How alternative communication channels impact farmers behaviour (with the colleagues on the Behaviour and experimental economics Lab at the Newcastle Business School)


I welcome inquiries from potential doctoral students interested on the topics above or any of the following:

  1. How information conveyed through digital technologies and labels affect consumers and business managers choices?
  2. How to coordinate the supply of credence quality attributes (origin, nutrition, sustainability attributes) along the food value chain? How to sustain reputation and trust in food quality attributes?


Recent Grant awards


2023-2024: DEFRA. Behavioural Testing: Testing the impact of a single advice Arm’s Length Body (ALB) visit on agri-environmental scheme applications (CoPI). Total value £47,157.73.

 

2023-2027 CNPq – National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. FIGHTING HUNGER: STRATEGIES AND PUBLIC POLICIES FOR REALIZING THE HUMAN RIGHT TO ADEQUATE FOOD - A TRANSDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO FOOD SYSTEMS WITH THE SUPPORT OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”, approved in Public Notice 58/22. International researcher R$ 2,000,000 (£320,000). International expert and co-investigator.


2022: UKRI Transforming Food Production: Alternative Proteins and CEA desktop research, Consultancy PS21224. Sub-contracted by CHAP. £19,199 + VAT (Principal Investigator, Newcastle lead)


2020: STFC Food Network+ (SFN) Collaborative Scoping Project: Building Smart urban Farming data systems: A Case study in Yogyakarta, £6,492.49 (Co-Investigator, Newcastle University Lead)


Teaching

I teach the following Food business economics and food policy modules at the Undergraduate and Post-Graduate level (please refer to the teaching page for more details).


Teaching leadership roles:

Degree program director of the BSc (Honors) Applied Economics and Business Management Program (between 2009 and 2010), Kent Business School, University of Kent


Degree program director for the Agribusiness Management program (2014-2017) at the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, Newcastle University.


Founder and Degree program director for the BSc (Honors) in Food Business Management and Marketing (2017-2019), School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Newcastle University.


I taught guest lectures in Brazil, Indonesia, Portugal and Sweden. Finally, I served as teaching program evaluator for Universities in Portugal and the UK.


Mentoring and early career development


I am very committed to professional and personal development of early career academics. I mentored several early career academics in the Germany and UK.


I served and Chaired the mentoring committee at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. Recently, I co-founded and co-lead the European Association of Agricultural Economists mentoring program.


Awards and Esteem

  • 2023 Agricultural Economics Society Award for Outstanding contribution to Teaching and Learning.
  • 2020 The European Association of Agricultural Economists Quality of Research Discovery Award for 2019


Selected publications:

  1. Souza Monteiro, D. M., Brockbank, C., and Heron, G. (2020) Drivers of Food Waste in Universities Event Catering. Journal of Food Products Marketing DOI; https://doi.org/10.1080/10454446.2020.1765935
  2. De Grave, R., Rust, N., Watson, A. Reynolds, C. Smiddink, J. and Souza Monteiro, D. M. (2019) Can we monitor transitions to sustainable diets in the UK with current datasets? Global Food Security, Vol. 24: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2019.100344.
  3. Bonroy, O., Garapin, A., Hamilton, S. F. and Souza Monteiro, D. M. (2019) Free-riding on product quality in cooperatives: Lessons from an experiment. American Journal of Agricultural Economics. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ajae/aay025 (Awarded the EAAE Quality of Research Discovery Award for 2019)
  4. Souza-Monteiro, D. M., Hooker N H. (2017) “Comparing UK Food Retailers’ Corporate Responsibility Strategies.” British Food Journal, 119(3): 658 – 675. DOI: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/BFJ-04-2016-015
  5. Balcombe, K., Fraser, I. M Lowe, B. T. and Souza Monteiro, D.M. (2016) “Information Customization and Food Choice.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics. 98 (1): 54-73. DOI: 10.1093/ajae/aav033


Area of Expertise

Food Business economics, food marketing, Consumer research, Food Policy, applied econometrics

Education

PhD, Resource Economics, University of Massachusetts – Amherst, USA

MSc in Resource Economics, University of Massachusetts - Amherst, USA

MSc in Agro-food Marketing, Agronomic Mediterranean Institute of Saragossa, International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (IAMZ-CIHEAM), Spain

BSc in Animal Science, University of Évora, Portugal

Affiliations

Behavioural Economics Northeast Centre (BENC)

Centro de Estudos Transdisciplinares para o Desenvolvimento (CETRAD), Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) Portugal. Since 2010.

Leadership roles

  • Co-founder and co-director of the European Association of Agricultural Economists Early Career Mentoring program.
  • Board member on the Centre for Caribbean and Latin American at Newcastle University


Academic Service

Editorial board member for the Journal of Food Products Marketing, Agriculture and Resource Economics Review and Economia Agro-alimentare.

Managing Editor of the International Food and Agribusiness Management Review (2013-2017)

Co-edited the Special Issue Changing Food Consumption Behaviours published at Psychology and Marketing (vol 28, issue 3).


Research

My main research interest and expertise is in supply chain coordination and how consumers use information to make their decisions. Specifically previous my projects focused on the economics of traceability in food chains, consumer use of digital technologies to access nutrition information, economics of detection of emergent animal diseases and food waste mitigation in the food service. I use survey and experimental on my empirical research.


My research program is in applied food economics and marketing. Currently I am focusing on three main lines of inquiry: 1) Food waste management and mitigation at the food service and household levels? 2) Optimal and effective communication advise for farmers and consumer behavior change.

My Google Scholar page can be consulted here and my ORCID profile in here

Expertise

Economics of food quality and information, Food Marketing, Supply chain coordination, Consumer research on nutrition and diet choices, Food Policy, choice experiments, applied econometrics.


Past projects

1. Fraud in Green markets – In this international collaboration with Professors Steve Hamilton from the California Polytechnic Institute, Alexis Garapin from the University Grenoble Alpes and Dr Olivier Bonroy a senior researcher at INRA -Grenoble Applied Economics Lab, we developed an economic experiment to investigate the effect of market size and alternative monitoring and enforcement rules on the mitigation of fraud in labels with collective reputation (such as organic). This research has been sponsored by INRA and the University Grenoble Alpes.

2. Consumer and Supply Chain Opportunities and Challenges for British Pulses Based Processed Foods. Newcastle University Consultancy project KH162931, funded by IAGRI, Ltd. – GBP 2,000.00 (Principal Investigator)



Teaching

 Undergraduate Teaching


NES3107 Food Business Economics

The goal of this module is to provide students with contemporary knowledge on how markets operate and offer them rationales to make adequate marketing strategy decisions. In line with developments of food markets in the past 30 years, the module will focus on differentiated food markets and will build on industrial economics models of market strategy.


NES3110 Marketing and public policy

The module is a research-led module drawing upon the work of researchers in the Centre for Rural Economy in the School of Natural and Environmental Scientists, where much research is food industry based. After an introduction to public policy and social marketing this module focus on policy solutions to contemporary societal issues such as food security, food waste or sustainable transport. We discuss how different policy instruments and the social marketing framework can be used to address policy issues.


NES2103 : Consumer and Business Economics


This module enables students to understand how economic theory and numerical analysis can be used to aid marketing and management decision-making in businesses. The module builds upon introductory economics and examines applications in business economics at an intermediate level. The course is divided into two sections. The first semester considers consumer and behaviour economics and provides some empirical applications from a marketing perspective. The second considers focus on the economics of business strategy and covers models to understand firm business decisions. It will also provide empirical applications and introduce decision on different market structures. Throughout, concepts and applications are made relevant to real world examples.


Postgraduate Teaching


NES8102 : Principles and current topics in Agro-food economics & Policy


This module introduced students to the basic principles of economics informing consumer, business and markets. The course schedule has two main sections. In the first section students will be introduced to the principles of economics analysis, focusing on consumer demand, supply and markets. Also in this section will have a brief introduction to non-competitive markets, which is the basis for the marketing model. Then in the second part of the course will cover applications of the principles to food marketing decisions. Specifically this section covers the following topics: private and public standards (organic and GAPs), brands and labels, food quality marketing,



Publications