If you care to watch my TEDx talk from a couple weeks back, it is now up. I'm not sure why the organizers gave it the title they did, but the talk is really about food innovation, food prices, and the poor.
Blog
The Need for Agricultural Research
Five agricultural economists published an article in the latest issue of Science on the effects of public and private R&D spending on agricultural research.
Here is the summary:
Most of the increase in global agricultural production over the past half-century has come from raising crop and livestock yields rather than through area expansion. This growth in productivity is attributed largely to investments in research and innovation (1). Since around 1990, there has been a decline in the rate of growth in yield per area harvested for several important crops (2). In parallel, the rate of growth in public spending on agricultural research and development (R&D) has also fallen, which may account for declining crop yield growth and may be contributing to rising food prices (3).
To this, I would add that a deluge of books and documentaries on food have demonized precisely those research developments responsible for yield growth. It's hard to know exactly what effect these cultural influences have had on firm and government decisions to invest in agricultural research.
However, many in the food community haven't connected the dots. Mark Bittman wrote just two days ago about hunger, saying:
It seems absurd to have to say it, but no one in this country should go hungry.
His answer for the problem was more government spending on food stamps and food banks. Yet, he has repeatedly denounced modern agricultural technologies and has called for food policies that will ultimately increase food prices.
There is the old saying that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; If you teach him how to fish, you can feed him for a lifetime. Food stamps give people fish for the day. Developments in agricultural R&D are the gifts that keep on giving.
How will we feed 9 billion people?
That's the question asked in a great video by Evan Fraser at the University of Guelph. I don't agree with all of this solutions but he provides some good food for thought on an important question that often gets overlooked in food discussions.
The Need for Food Innovation
In his recent New York Times column, Tyler Cowen echos some of the key themes in my forthcoming book. Here are a few excerpts:
THE drought-induced run-up in corn prices is a reminder that we’re nowhere near solving the problem of feeding the world.
and:
For all its importance to human well-being, agriculture seems to be one of the lagging economic sectors of the last two decades. That means the problem of hunger is flaring up again, as the World Bank and several United Nations agencies have recently warned.and:
There is no shortage of writing — often from a locavore point of view — in support of more organic methods of farming, for both developed and developing countries. These opinions recognize that current farming methods bring serious environmental problems involving water supplies, fertilizer runoff and energy use. Yet organic farming typically involves smaller yields — 5 to 34 percent lower, as estimated in a recent study in the journal Nature, depending on the crop and the context. For all the virtues of organic approaches, it’s hard to see how global food problems can be solved by starting with a cut in yields. Claims in this area are often based on wishful thinking rather than a hard-nosed sense of what’s practical.
WHAT to do? First, put food problems higher on the agenda. In the United States, there is no general consciousness of the precarious state of global agriculture. Even in the economics profession, the field of agricultural economics is often viewed as secondary in status.
Being an agricultural economist, you probably won't be shocked to hear that I agree with the last sentence. But, it's nice to hear someone else say it. And it's nice to see a nod to my fellow agricultural economists who have been studying these types of issues for decades but whose voices often tend to get overlooked or drowned out by those pushing the latest fashionable food fads or development policies.
Food Insecurity and The Politics of Rising Food Prices
Record high temperatures in the Midwest this summer have been met with near-record high prices for corn, soybeans, wheat, and other commodities. Thanks to federal disaster payments and crop insurance, many corn and soybean farmers will withstand the drought with finances relatively unscathed. Many livestock producers won’t be so lucky. Neither will many food consumers.
Although most analysts anticipate the drought will increase future retail food prices only around four to five percent, the hike comes on the back of a 2.3 percent rise in the food component of the consumer price index over the past year. Add that to the impacts of the recession and the result is that 14.9 percent of US households (more than 50 million people) are food insecure according to the USDA's latest report. The prevalence of food insecurity is about 33 percent higher than it was before the recession.
The rise in food insecurity has occurred even as the rolls of the federal food stamp program have swelled. A record number of Americans - one in seven of us - were on food stamps last year, causing critics to name Obama the “food stamp president.” Undaunted by the label, his administration has begun running radio ads encouraging further enrollment. And, his administration recently announced efforts to reverse the Clinton-era welfare reforms by removing work requirements for some people soliciting welfare money.
Obama’s election-year strategies to address the issue heighten class divisiveness: expanding social entitlements for the poor while raising taxes on the rich. Although the strategy might be successful in buying votes from those so downtrodden that a helping hand is needed to put food on the table, the longer-term impacts of this administration’s policies are as much the cause of the food price problems as they are a help.
Obama rode a tide of hope-and-change into office that captivated a core group of elite foodies who had been preaching messages like “pay more, eat less” for years. While more Americans have had a harder time finding enough food to eat, the White House planted a back-yard garden and began giving preferential treatment to local-food purchases in federal contracts. Despite the tastiness of local foods, they certainly aren’t cheaper; and anyone who has been to a parched Midwestern farmers’ market this summer can attest to why consumers need access to non-local fare (one of my colleagues claims to be on pace for growing a two hundred-dollar watermelon this summer). But, local food policies only scratch the surface. The Obama administration has sought to keep farmer’s kids from working on the family farm, fine farmers for kicking up too much dust, require beef processors justify quality-adjusted pricing strategies, and require schools to plate more veggies. Whatever might be said about the benefits of any of these policies, they all serve to increase the prices consumers pay for food. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Three months ago, I gave a talk to a planning workshop sponsored by the administration’s Centers for Disease Control and hosted by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies entitled “Exploring the True Costs of Food.” The underlying premise is that food in this country is under-priced, and that taxes, subsidies, restrictions, and bans must be engineered to get the prices of food up to the “right” level. Thus, what the administration giveth in terms of food stamps and unemployment insurance, they taketh away in terms of higher food prices from onerous food regulation.
There is a long term solution to food insecurity that has been pursued for decades. But, it is no longer politically popular with today’s fashionable foodies who spurn food technology and promote a return to nature. Yet, we seem to have forgotten that “nature” didn’t give us domesticated livestock, abundant, readily edible seeds, microwavable rice, or pre-washed baby carrots. The food we enjoy today is a result of man’s triumph over nature’s indifference to us. The solution to today’s food price problem is what it has been for hundreds of years; the application of human creativity, innovation, and research to food and agriculture. Previous public spending on agricultural research has more than paid itself, with current estimates indicating the benefits resulting from lower food prices exceeding the costs by a factor of thirty two to one. Private research has been similarly effective. Yet, spending on agricultural research has stagnated. We have adopted a food culture that, by rejecting food biotechnology, nanotechnology, cloning, and pesticides, is on path to prove Malthus right.
If Obama is really concerned about the economic downtrodden – and not just getting their votes in November – he’ll start thinking less about how to get others to grow their own gardens and more about how to make drought tolerant wheat.