Third largest ag exporter is... the Netherlands?

Take the case of the Netherlands. Unbeknown to most people, it is world’s third largest agricultural exporter, despite having little land (it has the world’s fifth highest population density). This has been possible because the Dutch have “industrialised” agriculture by, for example, deploying hydroponic agriculture (growing plants in water) that uses computer-controlled feeding of high-quality chemicals—something that would not have been possible if the Netherlands did not have some of the world’s most advanced chemical and electronics industries.

Via Chang via Yglesias via MR. Note that the data is from 2003-2004 (I was suspicious because Brazil didn't breach the top ten). But nevertheless an impressive feat. Although it's worth mentioning that a large $ trade surplus in agriculture is not the same thing as being self-sufficient - the Netherlands is as exposed to rising staple crop prices as any other country (albeit with a high level of income, so consumers don't feel the hurt nearly as much).

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.

Parsing questions about GMOs

Parke Wilde at U.S. Food Policy helpfully parses the potential questions about genetically modified food:

But, exactly what question are we picking sides on?

Question A is:

Could there ever exist a GMO technology worth supporting?

Questions B1, B2, B3, and B4 are:

Are current oversight systems inadequate to protect against food safety failures and environmental harms? Do current GMO technologies promote increased chemical use? Have current GMO technologies been oversold prematurely? Does the current regime of intellectual property rights favor multinational corporations over farmers?

I have no answer to Question A right now. I'll find out the correct answer in a few years.

Here's where I am more confident: If you oppose GMOs, it benefits you to remain friendly with everybody who shares your answers on Question B, regardless of their answer to Question A.

I'll interpret from the wording of Question A that Parke is skeptical of GMOs. First, from a clarity of argument/logic perspective, it seems to me like a stretch that we could conclusively prove that GMOs are never worth pursuing within the next few years. Second, like Michael Specter, I tend to be more positive on at least giving GMOs strong consideration, simply because no one has convincingly demonstrated that future food demand of the entire world can be met relying solely on traditional (or "wholesome" organic) food production systems.

I wish promoters of organic agriculture would engage more substantively with the broader debate of how food production can satisfy both growing population and growing per capita consumption throughout the developing world, rather than the blindered rich-world-centric view that's implied by many of their arguments (e.g. the Michael Pollan/Vandana Shiva argument that "industrial agriculture makes food too cheap", as I've pointed out before).


Update: I've been meaning to post this Michael Roberts post but wasn't sure exactly what to say about it, so I'll awkwardly append it here and excerpt some quotes relevant to the above discussion:

I think higher food prices--the kind the poor will see much more than anyone reading this blog post--are one of the biggest risks from global warming. If you don't care about whether the poor eat or not, I think you will care about the civil conflict that would accompany their hunger. If GMOs solve the problem, great. But I'm kinda skeptical that they will...

... and...

For people in the United States these dramatic predictions are actually of little direct concern. Raw commodities make up such a tiny share of retail food prices we would hardly notice a 10-fold increase in corn prices. The price of a quarter-pound hamburger (produced from corn-fed beef) would probably go up by less than a dollar. It’s hard to believe we’d buy much less meat as a result. Indeed, demand growth today comes less from population growth and more from rising incomes and meat consumption in China. (Keep in mind that it takes five to 10 calories of staple grains to make one calorie of meat.)

But three billion people — nearly half the planet — live on $2.50 per day or less. The poor typically spend a third to half of their income on food, composed mainly of staple commodities. If food quantities go down and prices go up, it’s the world’s poor who consume less.

The complexities of commercial agriculture

An interesting student essay on the often unrecognized complexity of modern commercial agriculture, made poignant by the circumstances. Here's a taste:

I will never forget the dexterous and visionary employees who taught me not just that wearing shorts while working on a farm is equivalent to modeling a Speedo at a consulting interview, but more importantly how complicated producing food is with advanced mechanized systems. Whether it be welding an auger for grain transfer, converting a piece of scrap metal into a rotating laptop computer harness for the cattle chute, or actually building a propane-powered irrigation pump, the competency of those with whom I worked was remarkable. I learned untold lessons and skills from colleagues, reminding me that a cattle pen could also be an educational setting.

But no business could be productive without a savvy leader. During my last few weeks in Nebraska I spent time alongside the manager I so esteemed. His ability to synthesize futures and cash market strategies, reconcile input and output data to avert risk, and heed both large issues and small in a multifaceted business was phenomenal. The organization was a machine in itself—protean, even despite its seasonality and daily routine.

Big Ag gets a lot of bad press, and the amount of skill it takes to do it well - and in the process feed the planet - deserves to be recognized.

The food-healthcare connection

Michael Pollan connects the healthcare debate to food:

To listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

This is, of course, Pollan talking to his own pet cause… but in this case it makes a certain amount of sense.

I found this interesting:

Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a “foodshed” — a diversified, regional food economy — could be the key to improving the American diet.

All of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis. To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on improving our health – which means going to work on the American way of eating.

I think the battle between the proponents and critics of industrial agriculture will be fought on many battlefields for a long time.

RIP Norman Borlaug

A great man with a controversial legacy, but one could argue that he did more for human well-being than anyone else in the history of the world.

In 1960, before his techniques were widely adopted, the world produced 692 million tons of grain for 2.2 billion people. By 1992, largely as a result of Borlaug's pioneering techniques, it was producing 1.9 billion tons for 5.6 billion people -- using only 1% more land. India and Pakistan are now agriculturally self-sufficient as a result of his intervention.

That's from this LA Times obituary, the first of many I am sure. It has an engaging discussion of his quest to improve crop yields through breeding.

Critics (particularly from the organic agriculture world) see him as the forefather of monoculture-dominated industrial agriculture and the myriad environmental and nutritional damages it has wrought. The jury is still out, but in my mind the burden of proof still lies on those who hold that organic agriculture can scale up to feed the world without bringing massive tracts of new land under cultivation.

Update: Here's a great story from later in Borlaug's life:

Borlaug formally retired from the International Wheat and Maize Project in 1979, becoming a professor at Texas A&M University. But in 1984, he got a call from Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa, who offered Borlaug funding for five years of work to aid agriculture in Africa.

Speaking through an interpreter, Borlaug said, "I'm 71. I'm too old to start again." Sasakawa called back the next morning and said, "I'm 15 years older than you, so I guess we should have started yesterday. Let's start tomorrow."

Update 2: World-Grain.com has a good quote from Borlaug's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, showing awareness of the wider world beyond his discipline:

"We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life. For a decent and humane life we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing and effective and compassionate medical care."

It also has the interesting tidbit that Borlaug was a Hall of Fame wrestler at the University of Minnesota.

Update 3: Chris Clayton:

In the U.S., we are blessed so much that debate over agriculture focuses on the quality of food, where it comes from, how it's grown and how it's cooked. With the passing of Dr. Borlaug, perhaps people will be inspired to reexamine the higher calling of agriculture and those throughout the world who still have yet to be touched by the green revolution.

Update 4: A few people try to size how many lives Norman Borlaug saved. The Indian Minister of Agriculture says 245 million. The Liberty Papers says 1 billion. Greed, Green and Grains thinks even 1 billion might be an understatement (and with over 1 billion people currently suffering from undernourishment, I think he could be right).

Update 5: A long and interesting interview with Borlaug from 2000.

Update 6: Here is a provocative but loosely-reasoned piece on Norman Borlaug's complicated legacy. I applaud the author's attempt to explore the rippling ramifications of Borlaug's work, but, as this commenter details, there are "several inaccuracies - some tiny, some major."

Update 7: Here's a longer NYT article, including this reference to Vandana Shiva; I'm sympathetic with Borlaug's response.

In a characteristic complaint, Vandana Shiva, an Indian critic, wrote in 1991 that “in perceiving nature’s limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable practices worldwide.”

Dr. Borlaug declared that such arguments often came from “elitists” who were rich enough not to worry about where their next meal was coming from. But over time, he acknowledged the validity of some environmental concerns, and embraced more judicious use of fertilizers and pesticides. He was frustrated throughout his life that governments did not do more to tackle what he called “the population monster” by lowering birth rates.

Food prices are a double-edged sword

Higher food prices are good for farmers and bad for poor consumers, particularly those who live on the edge of undernourishment. This is totally tautological, but the Michael Pollan/Vandana Shiva side of the food debate appears to ignore this frequently by decrying the low costs of industrial production as an unadulterated, obesity-causing evil.

As real food prices fall over the last half century, undernourishment as a proportion of world population was cut almost in half (22% to 13%), and then it spiked recently due largely to higher food prices.

That's all (but I expect to link back to this post frequently as this comes up all the time).

The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals

That's the name of a new piece by Missouri farmer Blake Hurst in The American. As I mentioned, I haven't finished The Omnivore's Dilemma yet, but I still found this an interesting and well-written rebuttal, appealing on both logical and emotional dimensions. Here is a sample of the latter:

He was a businessman, and I’m sure spends his days with spreadsheets, projections, and marketing studies. He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t make projections with tea leaves or soothsayers. He does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory that makes his product to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver his products instead of trucks and trains. But he expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way he runs his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book, and is sharing that expertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance.

Well-versed in both the recent literature on the organic debate and the trials and tribulations of everyday farming, Hurst details a number of ways in which Pollan's "solutions" would be impractical or ineffective. He then closes with a reasonable appeal:

Farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined notebook and a pencil, but I'm still farming the same land he did 80 years ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have learned tells me this: we have to farm "industrially" to feed the world, and by using those "industrial" tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us.

I wouldn't say Pollan has been refuted, but this is a high-quality contribution to the debate.

Via Chris Clayton.