SeekerBlog

Henry I. Miller reviews The Food Police, a new book by agricultural economist Jayson Lusk.

(…) he exposes the sophistry of current food movements that seek a return to a romantic but imaginary view of “nature.” He observes that certain journalists, columnists, celebrity chefs, and cookbook authors have conspired to create a distorted, dystopian picture of modern agriculture, promoting the view that “the prescription for our ailments is local, organic, slow, natural, and unprocessed food, along with a healthy dose of new food taxes, subsidies, and regulation.” (Just writing that makes me gag.)

Lusk confronts many of the sacred cows of food activism. One is the silliness of compulsory locavorism – specifically, forcing municipal hospitals, schools and other institutions to source an arbitrary percentage of their food locally. He is especially critical of government subsidies for locally sourced foods: Along with a few other cities, New York doubles the value of food stamps when used at farmer’s markets, which translates to a 100% supplement in the subsidy.

Why, Lusk asks, does locavorism need public subsidies? If local foods are, in fact, tastier (and they may be if you live in the right place at the right time of year), few of us would need to be coerced into eating them. Economics 101 teaches us about the importance of the economies of scale. Because of the efficiency of large, expensive pieces of equipment, the larger a farm grows, the more efficient it tends to become and the lower its per-unit costs of production. Lusk cites data: “One study of Illinois farms showed, for example, that average total costs were 82% lower on soybean farms and 38% lower on corn farms that were larger than nine hundred acres as compared to those that were smaller than three hundred acres. Another study showed that average incremental costs were 85% lower on dairies with herd sizes greater than 2,000 head as compared with dairies with fewer than 30 cows.”

The locavores seem to have missed other important lessons of elementary economics – namely, the benefits of specialization and comparative advantage. Lusk reminds us that “by letting people specialize in those things they are relatively good at making and then trading with others, we’re all richer,” better fed and better off than if we all tried to be self-sufficient. It’s no coincidence that the cultivation of crops such as corn, wheat, citrus and grapes is clustered in certain parts of the country best suited to them.

It may not be intuitively obvious, but buying local isn’t environmentally friendly. Although local foods do travel shorter distances, there is much more to calculating environmental impact than food miles. The vast majority of greenhouse-gas emissions are released near where the commodity is grown. Therefore, it is logical to find the most efficient spots to grow our fruits and vegetables and ship them to other regions. The reality is that on a pound-for-pound basis, collectively we are likely to consume more energy getting ourselves to the supermarket than it takes to deliver a trailer-truckload of Georgia-grown Vidalia onions or Florida oranges to Wisconsin.

Lusk heaps well-deserved ridicule on food elitists like Berkeley restaurateur, activist and elitist Alice Waters, who believes the “idea that we have been indoctrinated to believe, that food should be fast, cheap and easy…is destroying the world.” She believes that for everyone, obtaining and preparing food should be as slow, expensive and hard as it is for the poorest of the poor.

Lusk has an excellent chapter on the baseless, mindless, relentless antagonism of the food police toward genetically engineered plants. He describes the venerable and very long history of the genetic improvement of crop plants. “Ten thousand years ago, wild rice was little more than a stalk of grass,” and it was “only by interfering with Mother Nature did we reach the point where rice can now account for one fifth of the world’s total caloric intake.” He cites the many proven advantages of genetic engineering – the need for far less spraying of chemical pesticides, more efficient and effective control of weeds, higher yields, and environmental benefits.

Lusk reminds us of something that is revealing yet consistently eludes the food police, who have tirelessly opposed genetic engineering: Farmers have embraced genetically engineered crops at a pace that makes them the most rapidly adopted agricultural technology in history because these varieties increase the growers’ financial and food security. The “repeat index” – the percentage of farmers who plant genetically engineered crops again after trying them once – approaches 100%.

Lusk treats us to a delectable irony: The strict (and largely gratuitous) regulation of genetic engineering demanded by the food police actually benefits their worst nemesis, the Great Satan itself – Monsanto. How can that be? As Lusk observes, “Who benefits from stricter regulations that make it harder for new biotech seeds to enter the market? It certainly isn’t the small start-up firms trying to break down entry barriers to get their new invention on the market. Rather, it’s the established behemoths who have teams of lawyer and lobbyists and who can absorb the regulatory costs that keep out their smaller competitors.”

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University of Florida plant scientist Kevin Folta invests a lot of unpaid personal energy in science communications. In the volatile comments to Mark's Cornell speech, Kevin gently introduces the working scientist's perspective:

29 April 2013 at 8:31 pm

@Jim Bell . I’m sorry that you have such a negative view on the accomplishments of our human family. To me, I see it the other way around. Like you, I see us as remarkably clever, but I think we are somewhat wise. Where we don’t foresee a problem, we correct it, and learn from it.

The one instrument and technology that has changed the world the most is attached to that keyboard in front of you now. We are now instantly connected, interactive, learning together. Health care has brought our life spans to new highs with amazing new diagnostic methods and improved therapies. I could go on and on about how the human family has been a brilliant steward of technology.

There are bumps in that road. Use of nuclear weapons has been widely decried. Environmental disasters like DDT and others were halted, we learned, we corrected. Rivers once dead are alive. We make decisions with a consciousness that was not there years ago. We have a long way to go, but I think technology helps us be better caretakers of the planet.

There are successes. Nuclear power serves many in a carbon-free manner. DNA-based technologies now help diagnose and treat disease. We put a man on the moon 40 years ago. C’mon, this is good stuff.

We also have unprecedented means to predict and test for adverse effects of our technology. Genetic engineering is hardly a new science. We know more about how it works and its effects than ever. Our ability to detect problems, were they to occur, is amazing.

So unlike you I feel that our track record as a civilization is pretty awesome. Our handle on technology is great and the benefits massively outweigh risks.

Where we fail is in the deployment of technology. How can we use technology to get food, medicines, water, fuels to those that desperately need it? Once that is satisfied, how do we get them connected with educational resources and the best information?

Our job is to ensure that we leave the next 100,000 generations with a healthy, happy, functional world. Health, happiness and function will come from our understanding and implementation of science and technology.

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More from Mark's Cornell speech:

(…) And real-world evidence so far gives grounds for optimism. The use of Bt cotton in China has been shown to dramatically improve biodiversity, unlike broad-spectrum insecticides which kill everything, pests and predators alike. The Bt protein only affects the insects which bore into the crop, is entirely safe for us, and has led to insecticide reductions of 60% in China and 40% in India on cotton.

The introduction of Bt brinjal in India, a project which I know people here in Cornell were closely involved in leading, would have dramatically reduced insecticide poisonings associated with that crop too, had the anti-GMO activists in India not succeeded in preventing its use.

India today seems to be perched on a scientific knife-edge, with a vociferous lobby pushing dark-age traditionalism on the brink of permanently capturing the entire political and legal agenda. If they succeed, hundreds of millions of food-insecure Indians will be the losers.

In Africa too there are a multitude of western-funded NGOs who all claim to be mysteriously protecting biodiversity by keeping cultivated plant genetic improvements permanently out of the continent. In many African countries GMOs are subject to the same kind of de-facto ban as is the case in Europe, leaving poorer farmers at the mercy of a changing climate and exhausted soils.

However, a showdown is looming, because some of the most exciting biotechnology initiatives are now based in African countries. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is putting substantial funding into these efforts – such as improved maize for poorer African soils, a project which is looking to get yield increases of 50% even where fertiliser is not available or the farmer cannot afford to buy it.

There’s also the public-private partnership called Water Efficient Maize for Africa, using biotech to produce drought tolerant corn specifically for African smallholders facing the challenges of a changing climate. There’s C4 rice, aiming to improve the photosynthetic capacity of rice and thereby dramatically increase yields.

Another Gates-funded project is based at the John Innes Centre in the UK and aims by 2017 to have cereal crops which fix their own nitrogen available for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. The list goes on: there’s biofortified cooking bananas in East Africa, and cassava fortified with iron, protein and vitamin A in Nigeria and elsewhere.

I haven’t finished! There’s resistance to cassava brown streak disease, which is currently spreading rapidly and threatens the staple crop for two out of every five people in sub-Saharan Africa.

And of course transgenic technology focused on conferring wheat rust resistance at the molecular level to head off the threat of a global pandemic which could otherwise threaten one of humanity’s most important staple foods.

But if the activists have their way, none of these improved seeds will ever leave the laboratory. And this brings me, by way of conclusion, to the essentially authoritarian nature of the anti-GMO project.

All these activists, strikingly few of whom are themselves smallholder farmers in Africa or India, claim to know exactly which seeds developing country farmers should be allowed to plant. Those which are not ideologically approved by self-appointed campaigners should be banned forever.

The irony here is that predominantly left-wing activists, who are supposedly so concerned about corporate power, are determined to deny the right to choose to the most powerless people in the world – subsistence farmers in developing countries. In fact, this is more than an irony – it is a cruelty. And it is a cruelty which must stop, and stop now.

HG Wells is often quoted as saying that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. The New Yorker writer Michael Specter, who wrote a great book about anti-science movements called ‘Denialism’, updates this, writing that civilisation is a race between innovation and catastrophe.

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Protecting our freedoms is hard. Consider freedom of speech, where we must defend the right-to-say-nonsense of charlatans like Vandana Shiva. Here's Mark Lynas:

Speaking of the lunatic fringe, someone else who claims scientific credentials is Vandana Shiva, probably the most prominent Indian anti-biotechnology activist, who incidentally draws much larger audiences than this one to her fiery speeches about the evils of Monsanto and all things new in agriculture. Shiva tweeted after my Oxford speech that me saying that farmers should be free to use GMO crops was like giving rapists the freedom to rape.

That is obscene and offensive, but actually is not the half of it. Let me give you my all-time favourite Vandana Shiva quote, regarding the so-called terminator technology, on which she launches constant blistering attacks without once acknowledging the salient fact that it was never actually developed.

“The danger that the terminator may spread to surrounding food crops or the natural environment is a serious one. The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet”.

Now, I’ve said and done some pretty stupid things in my time, but this one takes some beating. You don’t need the intelligence of a Richard Dawkins or indeed a Charles Darwin to understand that sterility is not a great selective advantage when it comes to reproduction, hence the regular observed failure of sterile couples to breed large numbers of children.

As Shiva’s case so clearly shows, if we reject data-driven empiricism and evidence as the basis for identifying and solving problems, we have nothing left but vacuous ideology and self-referential myth-making. Indeed in many related areas, like nuclear power, the environmental movement has already done great harm to the planet, even as it has rightly helped raise awareness in other areas such as deforestation, pollution and biodiversity loss.

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The source of this post is the Mark Lynas speech hosted by the International Programs – College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (50th Anniversary Celebration) , and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Cornell University. Here are Mark's opening remarks:

I think the controversy over GMOs represents one of the greatest science communications failures of the past half-century. Millions, possibly billions, of people have come to believe what is essentially a conspiracy theory, generating fear and misunderstanding about a whole class of technologies on an unprecedentedly global scale.

This matters enormously because these technologies – in particular the various uses of molecular biology to enhance plant breeding potential – are clearly some of our most important tools for addressing food security and future environmental change.

I am a historian, and history surely offers us, from witch trials to eugenics, numerous examples of how when public misunderstanding and superstition becomes widespread on an issue, irrational policymaking is the inevitable consequence, and great damage is done to peoples’ lives as a result.

This is what has happened with the GMOs food scare in Europe, Africa and many other parts of the world. Allowing anti-GMO activists to dictate policymaking on biotechnology is like putting homeopaths in charge of the health service, or asking anti-vaccine campaigners to take the lead in eradicating polio.

I believe the time has now come for everyone with a commitment to the primacy of the scientific method and evidence-based policy-making to decisively reject the anti-GMO conspiracy theory and to work together to begin to undo the damage that it has caused over the last decade and a half.

On a personal note, let me explain why I am standing here saying this. Believe me, I would much prefer to live a quieter life. However, following my apology for my former anti-GMO activism at my Oxford speech in January, I have been subject to a co-ordinated campaign of intimidation and hate, mostly via the internet.

Even when I was at school I didn’t give in to bullies, and at the ripe old age of 40 I am even less inclined to do so now. Moreover, I have been encouraged by emails and other support from globally-renowned scientists who are experts on this issue, and who all said basically the same thing to me: ‘You think you’ve got hatemail? Welcome to my world’.

I think these scientists are the unsung heroes of this saga. They carried on with their important work and tried year after year to fight against the rising tide of misinformation, while people like me were belittling and undermining them at every turn. I won’t mention names, but they know who they are. Some of them are here today, and I would like to give them my deepest thanks.

So for me also there is also a moral dimension to this. The fact that I helped promote unfounded scare stories in the early stages of the anti-GMO movement in the mid 1990s is the reason why I now feel compelled to speak out against them. I have a personal responsibility to help put these myths to rest because I was so complicit in initially promoting them.

My activism, which I wrongly thought of at the time as being ‘environmental’, has done real damage in the world. For me, apologising was therefore only the beginning. I am now convinced that many people have died unnecessarily because of mistakes that we in the environmental movement collectively made in promoting anti-GMO fear. With that on your conscience, saying sorry and then moving on is not enough. Some restitution is in order.

Following a decade and a half of scientific and field research, I think we can now say with very high confidence that the key tenets of the anti-GMO case were not just wrong in points of fact but in large parts the precise opposite of the truth.

This is why I use the term conspiracy theory. Populist ideas about conspiracies do not arise spontaneously in a political and historic vacuum. They result when powerful ideological narratives collide with major world events, rare occasions where even a tiny number of dedicated activists can create a lasting change in public consciousness.

(…)

The anti-GMO campaign has also undoubtedly led to unnecessary deaths. The best documented example, which is laid out in detail by Robert Paarlberg in his book ‘Starved for Science’, is the refusal of the Zambian government to allow its starving population to eat imported GMO corn during a severe famine in 2002.

Thousands died because the President of Zambia believed the lies of western environmental groups that genetically modified corn provided by the World Food Programme was somehow poisonous. I have yet to hear an apology from any of the responsible Western groups for their role in this humanitarian atrocity.

Friends of the Earth was one of those responsible, and I note that not only has no apology been forthcoming, but Friends of the Earth Europe is still actively promoting GMO denialism in the EU in a new campaign called Stop the Crop. Check out their Youtube video to see how they have learned nothing in ten years.

Another well-known example is that of Golden Rice, genetically modified to contain high levels of beta carotene in order to compensate for the vitamin A deficiency which kills hundreds of thousands of children around the world and blinds many more every year. One study on the prospects for Golden Rice in India found that the burden of vitamin A deficiency could be reduced by 60%, saving 1.4 million healthy life years.

Here the actions of Greenpeace in forestalling the use of golden rice to address micronutrient deficiencies in children makes them the moral and indeed practical equivalent of the Nigerian mullahs who preached against the polio vaccine – because they were stopping a lifesaving technology solely to flatter their own fanaticism.

Mark proposes that we counter the anti-science, anti-GMO Greenpeace, FOE, UCS positions. To be effective against such rich, trust-funded activists requires a similar level of funding for full time staffing.

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