That's the title of a magazine article about a talk I gave a couple months ago in Canada. The talk (and the academic paper I published about it in the journal Agriculture and Human Values) delves into an idea I've been developing for a while that attempts to release some of the steam from the animal welfare debate using a bit of free-market economics.
The idea, in short, is to create a separate market for animal welfare that is decoupled from the market for eggs, meat, and milk. Farmers have a product they're supplying (animal welfare) that is only indirectly (and poorly) reflected in the price of food. Animal advocacy groups have a product they want to buy (higher animal welfare) but there is currently no mechanism for them to achieve this outcome in a market setting. It is no wonder then, they they often turn to bans, litigation, and protests. The idea is create an index of animal welfare being produced on the farm and assign "credits" or "units" based on production that can be sold in a newly constructed market. The idea somewhat analogous to pollution trading markets, and I argue that it could be more effective than bans on production processes (like gestation crates), meat taxes, and other policies that are currently on the table.
If you want more details, see my paper. I'll leave you with the conclusion from the article in Canadian Poultry Magazine:
Coming back to the concept of Animal Well-Being Units, would people be willing to buy animal welfare? Lusk asked. For those who feel strongly about animal welfare but have already changed their diet to reflect their preferences, buying welfare credits is an option that could appease their need to support animal welfare: they can’t not buy eggs anymore if they’re already not buying eggs. Agribusiness, animal welfare groups, you and me, we could all buy AWBUs and producers could participate and make money for doing so.
“The current market price for animal welfare is zero,” says Lusk. “Therefore not many farmers are going to sell it.”
From this economist’s perspective, we’ve just got the price wrong.
Food Safety Magazine just published an article Bailey Norwood and I wrote on animal welfare and food safety.
Here are a few excerpts:
The premise of [the movie] Contagion is that raising hogs on “factory farms” encourages the emergence of deadly pathogens. How accurate is this caricature? In reality, a bat is more likely to drop food near hogs or chickens raised outdoors. Would the movie have been more realistic if the bat infected a pig raised on an organic farm, a farm where animals roamed “free range,” or a farm owned by a small producer slaughtering his own animals and selling locally? Or would a more accurate film show the bat shedding feces near a field of broccoli, sickening people consuming fruits and vegetables instead of meat? Is it true that animal welfare and food safety are trade-offs, or are they instead complements? When we pay more for humane meat, are we also getting safer food or are we accepting greater risk? These are the questions we investigate in the present article.
and
Americans today consume more poultry than any other meat product so even if a meal containing poultry is safer than beef or pork, more illnesses may result from poultry consumption simply because chicken is consumed on such a large scale. Using the data in Table 1 to claim poultry is risky is a bit like claiming roads in Texas are more dangerous than those in Wyoming simply because more Texans die in car crashes—however, the population size of the two states would seem the more logical culprit. Analogously, the volume and value of the food should be taken into consideration when comparing risks. Consumers might voluntarily accept riskier food if they value it more.
and in summary:
In general, production systems that provide animals outdoor access have the potential to expose animals to pathogens, viruses and other parasites. In some cases, it appears that this potential is realized. However, in other cases, perhaps due to effects of lower stocking densities or better managerial competence, the risks can be alleviated or even reversed. In short, animal housing conditions are but one factor, and a far from deciding factor, affecting food safety.
However, consumers don’t always see it that way. Consumers conflate perceptions of safety with perceptions of animal welfare. They are not necessarily irrational in doing so, as care and managerial competence in one domain are likely to be correlated with meticulousness in another.
There was an interesting paper published last week in Nature Biotechnology by some University of Wisconsin professors of agricultural economics and agronomy (by the way, one of the authors, Chavez, is a preeminent agricultural economist - he's also one of the most well read economists I've ever been around).
The study used crop yield data from plots in Wisconsin and showed that not all biotech corn varieties outperform conventional varieties in terms of yield. As they put it:
Compared with conventional hybrids, the impact of transgenic traits (both single and stacked traits) on mean yield ranges from −12.2 to +6.5 bushels per acre.
Not surprisingly, the result has been picked up by the anti-biotech crowd, such as Tom Philpott at Mother Jones.
According to the biotech industry, genetically modified (GM) crops are a boon to humanity because they allow farmers to "generate higher crop yields with fewer inputs," as the trade group Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) puts it on its web page.
Buoyed by such rhetoric, genetically modified seed giant Monsanto and its peers have managed to flood the corn, soybean, and cotton seed markets . . .
Turns out, though, that both assertions in BIO's statement are highly questionable.
There are numerous problems with Philpott's arguments.
First, is rhetorical. Monsanto didn't "flood the market." Somebody had to buy those seeds. Those somebodies were farmers who willingly adopted, and even paid price premiums to have biotech seeds. Which leads to the second issue.
As the Nature Biotechnology study shows, the biotech varieties had an important risk-reducing effects, even if they sometimes led to slightly lower yields. Moreover, biotech can save on other inputs like labor. When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time hoeing and spraying cotton weeds. That job is (thankfully) now obsolete due to biotechnology.
You also can't just cherry-pick the results you want to emphasize if you want to actually be objective. As I reported earlier, larger studies conducted over a much wider geographic region DO show yield improvements from biotech adoption (though that study shows - like the more recent one in Nature - that yield effects of traits are not additive). Moreover, check out table 1 (gated) of the aforementioned study in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, which shows 31 different results from numerous studies, almost all of which show a yield boost from biotech. Or see this study in Science by another preeminent agricultural economist showing significant yield gains (and pesticide reductions) from biotech adoption in India. The totality of the evidence suggests that - in most locations and for most crops - biotech does increase yield most of the time (though not always and not in all locations and not for all crops).
That gets to my last issue with Philpott. He (and others) continually reference the work of Charles Benbrook on pesticide use associated with biotech. But, rarely do they differentiate between pesticides use (which biotech DOES reduce) and herbicide use (which biotech has increased). Also ignored is the relative toxicity and environmental effects of pesticides vs. herbicides or the reduction in toxicity that has occurred over time as a result of biotech (see this recent critique of Benbrook's work). If that weren't bad enough, such authors also fail to point out that use of herbicide-resistant biotech facilitates no- and low-till farming practices, which are a real environmental benefit (indeed, the data shows that biotech adoption is strongly correlated with no- and low-till adoption).
I'm not saying there are no downsides to biotech use (e.g., more rapid development of herbicide resistant weeds; potential market power in the seed/chemical sector). But, one has to look at the totality of the evidence and not just cherry-pick. Moreover, you have to look at the decisions made by real-life flesh and blood farmers all over the world who have voluntarily adopted GMOs. The fact that biotech was so readily adopted by farmers (and is still so widely in use) aught to tell you something.
One of the reasons I’m often critical of government policies that attempt to force healthy eating on the public (say through ingredient bans or fat taxes) is that I have a different view of “Big Food” than many foodies. Big Food is often portrayed as powerful, nefarious entity preying on helpless consumers. I’m more apt to seeing fast food restaurants as responding to consumer demand for convenient, inexpensive, quick food. They offer burgers and fries because this is what consumers are willing to pay for.
However much we may want McDonald’s et al. to offer healthier alternatives, at the end of the day they must make enough money to stay afloat. If more salads are offered than consumers want or are willing to buy, that’s a recipe for disaster. As one organic farmer put it: the first rule of sustainability is that you have to make enough money this year to do it all over again next year. I have little doubt that the McDonalds of the world would offer a lot more salads if they thought they could make money doing it.
Against this backdrop, I noticed a recent study by the Hudson Institute that examined the offerings of fast-food restaurants over the past five years (it was covered by the WSJ here). Here’s what the study found:
“between 2006 and 2011, lower-calorie foods and beverages were the growth engine for the restaurants studied. In 17 of the 21 restaurant chains evaluated, lower-calorie foods and beverages outperformed those that were not lower-calorie. In addition, chains that increased their servings of lower-calorie items saw positive returns as a result. These chains generated:
The lesson is that you don’t always need government regulation. The market will deliver healthy foods when the public decides that’s what they want.