Whole Foods vs. Walmart

Chris Blattman asks, does Walmart win?

I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.

The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.

Corby Kummer (who wrote the above) also does a blind taste test, and the results are mixed (which is frankly a win for Walmart).

As I had been in my own kitchen, the tasters were surprised when the results were unblinded at the end of the meal and they learned that in a number of instances they had adamantly preferred Walmart produce. And they weren’t entirely happy.

Food, Inc. also features Walmart, and against a general backdrop of anti-corporate sentiment, the retail giant comes off looking OK.

Finally saw Food, Inc.

So I finally watched Food, Inc. (long overdue); I came in with a somewhat skeptical attitude and felt similarly afterward (perhaps that says more about me than about the film). It makes some good points – for example, Kevin’s Law should pass, and much of industrial livestock production looks gross. I don’t object at all to the muckraking style (in the fine tradition of Upton Sinclair). But I felt much of the movie was grafting broader populist themes like “corporations are bad” and “our political system is broken” onto the agriculture and food world, rather than making nuanced and well-argued points that are specific to the latter.

Monsanto might be crossing the line when they attack someone like Moe Parr with litigation (emphasis on "might" - Monsanto has its own side of the story). But the broader argument that “farmers have saved seed for thousands of years” is specious given the importance of intellectual property to spurring innovation. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans could not have gone from 2% market share in 1996 to 96% market share in 2007 without offering really substantial benefits to farmers, benefits that could never in a million years have been developed through traditional seed selection and breeding. So while wrongful prosecution is not OK, enforcing the contract farmers who use Roundup Ready seed sign to not save their seed is fine with me.

My biggest disagreement with Michael Pollan et al is with how they disparage “efficiency” and are blasé about food prices (“good food costs more”). In the movie they even show a poor Hispanic family that wants to buy broccoli and pears, but they’re too expensive, so they get Big Macs instead. Michael Pollan’s response is “we need a system in which the bad food costs more than the good food.” I am all for ending ag subsidies (dare we hope the word is moving in that direction?), which are one weight that tilts the playing field. But moving to less efficient staple crop production methods will only increase prices and take up more land, resulting eventually in more deforestation and environmental degradation (particularly in the developing world), not to mention more malnourished people. And it won’t even bring broccoli within the purchasing power of the Gonzalez family. In fact, it’s easy to imagine a more extensive production system increasing the value of land and thus the price of all food crops, healthy or not.

Monsanto

Interesting Economist article on "whether Monsanto is a corporate sinner or saint."

I haven't yet seen Food, Inc., but this reminds me to.

Via Duncan Green, to whose blog I just subscribed.

Food Inc., continued

Comment on Parke Wilde's comment on Marc Gunther's review:

Point (b) is complicated by the fact that the majority of current meat consumption and the VAST majority of future growth in meat consumption takes place in the developing world. It’s easy to make a moral case for why an obese American should eat less meat; much harder for a poor Malawian farmer or Chinese laborer with a protein-deficient diet.

As far as I understand, the jury is still out on both the long-term environmental sustainability of the “Norman Borlaug” model (i.e. high fertilizer/pesticide/herbicide use, monocultures of GM seeds, etc.) and whether the “Michael Pollan” model (i.e. organic inputs, high crop rotation, etc.) can deliver sufficient yields on a large scale to feed a world population of 8-10bn people a nutritious diet without dramatically expanding land use (which causes deforestation, reduces biodiversity, etc.). I’d love to know if anyone is aware of balanced, authoritative academic research into these topics – most of what I’ve seen is fairly polemical from one side or the other.

Food, Inc.

The latest volley against Big Ag. I plan to reserve judgment until I see it myself.