NYTimes Biotech and Food Crisis Debate – Unanswered Questions
Wed, Oct 28, 2009
- posted by Joshua
The New York Times is currently hosting an excellent debate entitled Can Biotech Food Cure Hunger? Contributors include Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, Per Pinstrup-Andersen of Cornell, and Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya. Yet there are serious meta-questions about how we even approach this controversy that remain unanswered.
The Times debate is certainly timely. The world food crisis last year, riots around the developing world, growing food sustainability consciousness, a sudden “awakening” by multi-laterals and governments that the rural sector matters for development, the UN’s announcement that food demand will double in the next twenty years, and the UN’s subsequent announcement that climate change will simultaneously reduce yields by 25%, have brought the debates over yields, sustainability, and technology to a sudden head. The Times also prepped us with a cover story a week ago: Experts Worry as Population and Hunger Grow.
The debate helps answer some questions. But here are some questions that remain:
Globally, we produce 2,700 calories per person per day – an overabundance. This is first and foremost a distribution problem. Why is this fact avoided rather than serving as the starting point for debate? The issue is perhaps side-stepped by saying that there are regional production shortages and we have an inability to get food where it’s needed. This is partially true, but if it were fullyso, then this would not be a “world food crisis”, but rather just a “rural sub-saharan Africa food crisis”, for example. We do have a globalized and deeply penetrating food supply, otherwise there would not have been riots around the developing world when global commodity prices spiked in 2008.
Secondly, why is the debate always cast as industrial/biotech vs. sustainability, as opposed to a feed vs. food problem? If we discovered a lightbulb that increased energy efficiency by 5-10x, we would spend $1 billion promoting it rather than $22 billion (the amount governments pledged since July for ag assistance and technological development) re-wiring everyone’s houses. This is directly parallel to meat consumption, which, after oil prices, is the main driver for increasing food prices, and which results in a 5-10x efficiency loss in nutritional yields per acre. Why not educate the meat-rich countries to shave some lard off their belts, save a trillion dollars in health care costs, and stave off disaster for the world’s poor? Are we incapable of even discussing solutions that involve belt-tightening, rather than high-science, high-profits, big government, and extreme trade-offs for the poor?
Third, where’s the talk of population control? As per Norman Borlaug’s fears and predictions, the gains of the first Green Revolution were erased by exploding populations in the developing world. We were left with more food, but also more carbon and dead soils, and now the same number of hungry people (one billion) as before. Why would we simply march into the slaughter of funding another green revolution without a directly parallel push for population control (the prime correlates for achieving this being female literacy and availability of contraceptives)? Why do we simply take it as a given that the world’s population is going to grow to 9 billion, while we refuse to accept limits to our ecological capacity to produce food?
Fourth, and this is not really question: Let’s not forget that the majority of the world’s poor are food producers. They should benefit from high food prices! What they often really need are market linkages, access to basic agricultural capital structures, reduction of the power of the middleman through market information and/or infrastructure, and fair trading terms so they can actually sell to their own urban-folks and each other like they used to – rather than competing with subsidized American and EU corn, rice, and milk dumped on their markets. This is not to say that these solutions (except cutting subsidies of course) won’t be promoted in new development spending; but they need to be front and center.
Fifth, does anyone smell a “shock doctrine” rat? While we are awash in an overabundance of calories and meat, to what extent will the alarm bells of the impending “global food crisis” become a frenzied excuse for more corporate welfare – i.e. agricultural production subsidies, and grants for biotech research among food corporations and their vendors? And why do we only talk about macro-economics and not competitive strategy – the true determinant of long-term profitability for farmers. A taxpayer-funded push for deepened penetration of high-yield, standardized, mono-cropped grain systems into the fields of the developing world could end as a competitive strategy checkmate for big ag: commoditize your suppliers.
Backyard pizza madman – a former subject of our Pizza-Oven Lifestyles series – Paul Gianonne (aka Paulie Gee) is opening his own joint in Green Point.
Definitely hit on some points that I myself wondered after reading the debate (namely why aren’t we addressing the fact that we already have enough calories to feed the world and why is everyone so certain of and defeated regarding an inevitable dramatic population increase), but you’ve brought up some big agriculture, political, and economical points I’d be fascinated to hear more about. Thanks for sharing the article and your opinions–some great critical thinking leads.
Erika, 2009 NYU Reynolds Scholar
I think your second point is an important observation–we need to reframe the discussion and fundamentally change our consumption and distribution patterns. Aiming to simply expand them to the poor is actually counterproductive.
So, if we’re on the same page there, what’s up with points 1 and 4?
-”This is first and foremost a distribution problem.”
That’s not technically inaccurate, but it’s specious. If it were that simple, we wouldn’t continuously observe food exporting in famine-stricken regions like Ethiopia (1973) and Bangladesh (repeatedly during the colonial period). It is more useful to frame the issue as a failure of food –entitlement- decline than food availability decline. When a food crisis causes prices increases, a carpenter finds himself unable to afford food and unable to find work, because his neighbors are stretching their incomes just to buy the food they need. In other words, his income dries up just when the cost of survival soars. So what about farmers?
-”The majority of the world’s poor are food producers. They should benefit from high food prices!”
First of all, you correctly point out that forced mono-cropping has caused farmers to specialize in products which can be relatively un-nutritious (like corn compared to grain) or even inedible. If food prices soar, these farmers will be unable to afford food just the same. Will a rice producer benefit from rising prices? Not if the crisis has put his doctor out of business, malnutrition in the community has caused disease to spread to his family, and the members of his village who supplied him with animal feed and water have moved to the city to find more stable work. Suddenly the rice producer’s position isn’t as enviable.
What are the solutions? End subsidies, yes. Encourage crop diversification. Link to external markets, yes, but recognize that this can actually exacerbate the problem if there are not adequate systems in place to ensure that rural-dwellers maintain their entitlements to food during a crisis—entitlements which are as strong or stronger than those that foreigners command. To start, how about creating some employment opportunities in farming communities which are unrelated to food?
Madeline, thank you so much for your feedback.
I’m not quite sure we disagree as much as you say. Your example of Ethiopia exporting food while there is simultaneously a famine occurring seems to me to be a square example of a distribution problem. The food is right there in the same country, but not going to those who need it most. Where my distribution claim becomes “not incorrect, yet spurious”, as you say, is when there are warehouses of excess food in the U.S. but famine in hard-to-reach or conflict-ridden areas Africa. It’s not necessarily realistic to distribute those stores of food; or perhaps, as Lauren pointed out, it must be done through Food Aid which creates perverse incentives. But most areas hit by the food crises last year were not hard to reach or conflict ridden, and thus it remains a global distribution problem.
Secondly, I really liked the point you highlighted about communities being degraded due to high food prices. I agree that in general, this type of social capital is a key driver for a family’s success. However, in rural areas in the Global South, at least 90% of the people are farmers or farm laborers. So if food prices increase in the market in town, the carpenter may take a hit, but it “should” benefit 90% of the rural poor.
I say “should” because, due to the reasons I listed (e.g. market linkages, capital, information, etc.), these food producers do not benefit as much as they should. Furthermore, as you kinda pointed out, many are not growing the types of crops, or at sufficient yields, to subsist. So farmers themselves actually purchase staples in the market to feed their families, and that is why there’s the paradox of food producers starving due to high food prices.
Lastly, I’m interested in your point regarding promoting other rural industries. What are some examples of the types of work you’re referring to?
I agree with Maddie that it is maybe not a food distribution problem but more of a problem of power, conflict and displacement that does not allow people to make investment in their land. Another major distribution issue that is criticized a lot today and that I will add to, is food aid and its continuance long after a conflict has ended, keeping people dependent on free grain. For example In Ethiopia during the 80’s, food aid was used by the regime to draw the rebel militias into camp’s, however people were mostly never given their ration. Also, in many conflict regions food aid is used by the army first and only in tightly run camps, does food get to the civilians (even then civilians are sometimes forced to give up their ration). This also depends on the region you are talking about, as I am mostly referring to the horn of Africa in this argument, where famine and drought is commonly touted as a natural disaster, but rather it is a more of political problem.
This is also an incentive problem, as when food aid is distributed in a time of stability, people lose incentive to produce their own crops. A friend provided a very good example of this in Southern Sudan, where he was working with local farmers on an agricultural collective. A large NGO offered to support the program by giving oil and bags of grain to farmers. The result was that the farmers lost their incentive to farm and stopped working.
Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa that have been stable for a while are relatively well-off in terms of food. For example in Uganda (minus northern Uganda because it is a conflict region) people are fat! Almost no one goes hungry because soil fertility is so high and their relatively long-lived stability has created an opportunity for farmers to make the time and financial investment in their land! You can basically drop a seed anywhere and it will grow, people have fruit growing on their lawns and food is cheap and plentiful.
I also wanted to note that saying to drop all subsidies is a dangerous idea. I would agree that large agribusiness should be starved of subsidies, but small farmers in the US need these subsidies to survive. I believe that we should follow the Europeans and subsidize organic agriculture in the US. Most farmers complain that it is too expensive to switch over…so this is where subsidies would come in handy. I also think that third world governments should subsidize small farmers (this of course can become an equity issue) so that they can compete with the low prices of food imports on their local markets. There are too many different nuances in this, in terms of subsidies and also tariffs, that we cannot say to just get rid of food subsidies.
Just one final note on Collier: Economists really need to stay out of food issues. Doesn’t he get that by using GM crops to feed our current population, the population will continue to grow to that 9 billion point that we are avoiding and also that GM crops will potentially destroy soils and therefore the food supply for the generation of children produced by the GM food eaters?
Thanks for your comments, Lauren. I agree with you, and I think you’re essentially highlighting regional differences, food aid, and especially the driver of conflict and displacement, which I failed to address. I’ve worked mostly in non- or low-conflict areas, whereas I know you were working in the Sudan, which is a whole different ball game. Thanks for highlighting this.
Good point about the subsidies. I should clarify by saying I think we should end first-world subsidies that distort the market. In the U.S., 2% of farmers receive 70% of the $11 billion in subsidies each year. And 83% of those farmers make over $100,000 a year. It would be a vast budget savings to eliminate subsidies to industrial farms, expand support to poor farmers who are organic or otherwise good stewards of the land.
This concentrates our supports on the farmers who are actually sustainable (not really the case with industrial organic, if you believe Michael Pollan). It reduces poverty and encourages stable livelihoods in rural communities. It improves our trade relations with WTO countries, who are fed up with dumping–that is, massive imports of US commodities priced below the cost of production. And it gives local producers in the developing world a chance.