Effects of Plant Variety Protection

New varieties of "self pollinated" crops have, in the past, been released by the public sector.  Self pollinated crops refer to those where farmers can save the seed after harvest, replant next year, and expect to have a new crop that is the same as the previous year (i.e., the "kids" are the same as the "parents").  Wheat is a staple crop that his both "self pollinated" and "inbred."

A lot of the research on wheat breeding has occurred in the public sector because of the belief that it would be difficult for private companies to recoup their investments when farmers can save their seed.  As a result, it is thought that private investment in wheat breeding would be "sub optimal" from a social welfare standpoint.

However, in recent years, a variety of changes have led to public and private companies being able to license new varieties and capture some of the benefits of the improvements in genetics.  Most controversial is the specter of GMO wheat, in which new varieties may have genes protected by intellectual property laws.  Unsurprisingly, some farmers and industry organizations don't like variety protection because it raises the cost of seed.  A cost that was previously borne by all taxpayers is now borne by the smaller group of farmers, millers, and bread consumers.  

A new paper in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics by Russell Thomson studies the effect of the introduction of new plant variety protection laws in Australia that allowed breeders to capture royalties on their new varieties. Thomson argues that the protection laws in Australia are "stronger" than in the US - giving breeders greater potential returns to their investments.

I have to admit that the findings are not what I would have expected.  Thomson writes: 

“The results indicate that varieties released by royalty-funded breeders are less valuable than those released by breeders operating under the alternative, prereform regime. The data provide no evidence that the transition to royalty-funded breeding is associated with an increase in the rate of variety release. Taken together, these findings suggest that the reform led to a fall in breeder output relative to what would have otherwise been the case. This statistical analysis is supplemented with a series of semistructured interviews with senior scientists, who were employed at Australian breeding programs over the period of reform. This qualitative evidence suggests that the fall in breeder output was caused by a combination of fewer research spillovers, lower release standards, and a possible fall in total investment in breeding. Analysis presented in this article suggests that plant variety protection alone does not ensure socially optimal breeding outcomes in the case of open-pollinated varieties.”

It is a little unclear whether this paper (which compares outcomes before and after a reform) is picking up the effect of the change in the law or some other secular trend.  Could it be the case that breeder output was falling everywhere even outside Australia (perhaps all the low hanging fruit had already been picked)?  The paper also doesn't tell us much (beyond anecdote) about whether total investment (public and private) in wheat breeding was steady or falling in real terms over this time period.  We also aren't told whether there were changes in how breeders who remained in the public sector were compensated after the law change.  Nonetheless, this is an interesting paper that should provoke more research in the area.  

Should you only eat food your great grandmother would recognize?

I've been reading the book White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain.  I'm only about a quarter of the way in, but so far it has been an informative take on some of the modern food debates seen through the history of white bread.  At times it falls into the big-is-bad or anything-for-profit-is-bad trap and often fails to fully appreciate the benefits of lower prices to the poor, but otherwise its an interesting read.  

I particularly liked the following passage:

“At the start of the twenty-first century, a wave of neo-traditional food writers urged Americans to eschew anything “your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” If your great-grandmother wouldn’t have eaten it, they argued, it wasn’t real food. This rule of thumb raised a few complications: I’m pretty sure my great-grandmother wouldn’t have recognized Ethiopian doro wat or Oaxacan huitlacochtle as anything a human would eat, and yet they’re two of my favorite foods. Neo-traditionalist’s dreams of “real” food have racial and nationalistic undertones, it seems. More importantly, they ignore the complexities and ambiguities of early twentieth-century American’s relation to food: which version of my great-grandmother’s bread am I supposed to reassure/ the laborious homemade one her husband demanded, or the factor-baked one she eventually came to love? Food writers selling a particular dream of “great-grandmother’s kitchen” rarely concern themselves with real people. What I want to know is how and why my great-grandmother’s generation came to desire the store-bought staff of life.”

When chefs meet geneticists

“One would think that the people who create new foods and the people who whip up new ways of enjoying them would have long been partners. But cooperation between plant breeders and chefs is historically rare; traditionally, breeders stick to the field and chefs to the kitchen, opposite ends of an increasingly long and complicated food chain. Lane Selman, an agricultural researcher at Oregon State University (OSU) and the emcee of the Portland feast, wants to change that. She recently founded the Culinary Breeding Network (CBN), a first-of-its-kind organization that fosters collaboration between cooks, farmers, plant breeders, and seed growers. Breeders are often “making a lot of the decisions alone, guessing what the consumer, chef, or institutional kitchen cook needs and wants from their produce,” Selman explains. She has chefs tour breeding plots to “witness diversity with their own eyes, hands, and mouths” and give breeders direct feedback. It’s a kind of immediate and powerful synergy that just makes sense: “Breeders bring knowledge of stored seeds and wild relatives. Chefs know how to evaluate flavor much better than we do.” Case in point: Mazourek was microwaving squash for taste tests until a chef educated him in proper roasting techniques.”

That's from an interesting article in Pacific Standard arguing that fruits and vegetables are about to enter a flavor Renaissance.

What will the future of food look like?

Time.com recently asked a series of "experts" to opine about the future of food and predict how our plates will change.  The predictions are rather predictable as are the choice of experts.  

The selection of experts only included one scientists - nutritionist Marion Nestle - and her future look to me a lot like our past, as many of us: 

“will enjoy home gardens and locally and sustainably produced food, at greater cost. ”

It is implicitly assumed that home gardens and "local" are the same as "sustainable".

Indeed, many of the answers fell prey to a kind of romantic traditionalism.

The list of experts mainly included chefs, journalists, and food activists.  Aside from Nestle, not one active food scientist was interviewed.  There was one restaurant consultant and one investor in "companies dedicated to solving food problems" interviewed, but not one person currently engaged in farming for a living, no food microbiologists, no geneticist, no agronomists, no animal scientists, no food engineers, no one working for today's largest food and agricultural companies.  In short, few of the kinds of people who are most likely to have the most substantive impact on the way we eat and farm in the future were interviewed.  

Its like our thinking about the future of food has become stuck in some sort of retrogressive mindset.  

Incentives for Safer Food

Over at the US Food Policy blog, Parke Wilde writes about the terrible track-record Foster Farms had with noncompliance leading up to it's widely publicized Salmonella outbreak.

Parke advocates for better public access to food safety information (such as, I presume, the public release of noncompliance reports written by food safety inspectors) as one approach to partially deal with food safety issues.  

He also points out the main challenge with food safety: as consumers we often cannot directly observe whether a food is contaminated before purchase.  Parke writes:

“Food safety problems are fundamentally about lack of public information. If consumers had magic sunglasses that displayed the presence of Salmonella on chicken in the grocery store, there would be no need for government regulation. Immediately, faced with market consequences for distributing chicken with Salmonella, the companies would clean up their product. ”

Well, they may not be magic sunglasses, but it appears entrepreneurs are working on hand held sensors, chopsticks, and iPhone apps that may one day let us quickly check for food contaminants.  

These innovations may, one day, prove to be a very powerful incentive for companies to provide safe food.  The nice thing - from the consumers' perspective - is that they let us take action before an illness happens.