Growing Flintstones

That's the title of Chapter 5 of Unnaturally Delicious, which discusses a variety of efforts to combat malnutrition in the developing world by breeding crops with higher vitamin and mineral content.  

“Providing vitamin supplements (think Flintstones Vitamins on a global scale) has indeed produced positive outcomes in many parts of the world. The approach, however, has proved less beneficial than the optimists had predicted. Vitamin supplements present a number of challenges. First, you’ve got to deliver them to where they’re needed—some of the most remote, unpaved, undeveloped places in the world. Then you’ve got to convince people to take them. Regularly. Then you’ve got to do it all over again. Every year. In perpetuity. Supplements are a one-off, partial solution to an ongoing problem. . . .

A more innovative, bottom-up approach is starting to challenge this top-down approach to ending malnutrition. One of the root causes of malnutrition is lack of dietary diversity, caused by both a lack of access and the inability to afford different foodstuffs. . . .

In this conundrum may lie a solution. If the staple crops of these farm families were more nutrient dense, some of the problems of malnutrition could be solved. Biofortification is the science of breeding crops to increase nutritional content.”

I talk about the organization Harvest Plus, and about one of my former students Abdul Naico who's back home in Mozambique working to increase adoption of sweet potatoes that are higher in beta carotene.  Here are a couple pictures he sent me.

While the efforts of Harvest Plus and other organizations have utilized conventional breeding techniques to create, for example, "high iron beans" in Rwanda, others have used biotechnology.  The most famous example is the work of Ingo Potrykus, who graciously answered some questions for me about golden rice, which contains a daffodil gene so that the rice produces beta carotene (which the body converts to vitamin A).  

“The initial varieties of rice createdby Potrykus and colleagues expressed only a small amount of vitamin A. Further iterations of golden rice have resulted in a twenty-threefold increase in the carotene content. Current varieties can produce 55 to 77 percent of recommend daily intake of vitamin A by eating a mere hundred grams of uncooked rice (or about half a cupful), and human research has found it safe and as effective as vitamin A supplements”

The Golden Rice Humanitarian Board shared the following photos with  me.

Where do we like to shop?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this paper by Rebecca Taylor and Sofia Villas-Boas, which was just published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.  The research makes use of a new data set - the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) - initiated by the USDA to study where people of different income levels prefer to shop for food.  This question is relevant to the debate on so-called food deserts.  Are poorer households eating less healthily because of the lack of "good" food outlets in their area, or are there no "good" food outlets in an area because people there don't want that kind of food?  To sort this out, you need to know where people of different incomes prefer to shop, and that's precisely what Taylor and Villas-Boas estimate.

Their data suggest that, if anything, lower income households tend to have more stores near them, and at least one store closer to them, than higher income households.  For example, in a 1 mile radius, low income households have, on average, 1 superstore near them, whereas higher income households have, on average, only 0.58.  Using the USDA's definition of a food desert, the authors calculate that only 5%, 8%, and 3% of low, medium, and high income households live in a so-called food desert.  Whereas low income households live, on average, closer to the nearest farmers market than high income households (10.7 miles vs 11.93 miles), high income households are more likely to actually visit a farmers market.  

The authors go on to estimate a consumer demand model.  Where do consumers prefer to shop given the distances they have to travel?  When economists say "prefer" - they don't mean how one feels about a location or the images it conjures up, but rather what is actually chosen.  The authors find that people prefer going to locations that are closer to home.  That is, people don't like to travel too far to shop.  This estimate, then, lets them calculate how far one is willing to travel to shop at one type of store vs. another.  The authors consider 9 types of stores (including restaurants and fast food outlets), and find farmers markets are the least preferable shopping outlet in that people are willing to travel the least distance to get to a farmers market.  

Using the authors estimates, I calculated how much people would be willing to pay ($/week) to shop at each of the 8 other types of food outlets instead of the (least preferable) farmers market.

Both low and high income households would be willing to pay around $25/week to shop at a superstore instead of a farmer's market.  The data also suggests that higher income households prefer farmers markets more than do lower income households.  Across all the outlet types, low income household are willing to pay $18.67 to shops somewhere other than a farmers market, but for higher income households, the figure is only $13.95.  The figure also shows that higher income households are more willing to pay to eat at restaurants than are low income households.  This suggests that farmers markets and restaurants are normal goods - the more income you get the more you want to shop in these kinds of outlets. 

The authors write in the conclusions:

“the households in this sample have low WTP for Farmers Markets to be closer to home, and high WTP to pay for Fast Food to be closer to home. This implies that simply building Farmers Markets will not induce households to shop there. ”

The authors interpret this finding to mean, "low-income households may need to be compensated to shop at Farmers Markets."  But, why?  Why would we use tax payer dollars to encourage shopping in food outlets people least prefer?  Perhaps some would say that farmers market sell healthier food.  Maybe, but the highly desirable superstores sell healthy food too.  And, if the problem is healthy eating, where is the market failure, and why would farmers markets be the most efficient solution to solve that failure?  

In any event, I look forward to seeing the authors' follow up work on the subject, which they discuss at the end of this paper.  

The Value of Farmwork

Like most parents, I want my sons to be successful adults - to know the value of hard work and appreciate a job well done.  For me, those lessons came early.  I started mowing lawns at the age of 8 or 9, and regular summer jobs hoeing and spraying cotton weeds started about the age of 12 as did the annual raising of farm animals for 4-H and FFA competitions. These jobs weren't necessarily my choice, as my dad play a key role in making sure these "opportunities" presented themselves every year, but they nonetheless had a important impact on my outlook on life.  If anything, it gave me some motivation to do well in college!   

I'd like my 10 and 13 year old sons to have some similar "opportunities", and it appears Ben Sasse, a U.S. senator from Nebraska, wanted the same for his teenage daughter.  According to this article in the Wall Street Journal he's been tweeting out “lessons from the ranch”, which he received as text messages from his daughter who went to work for a month on a cattle ranch. 

Topics like animal welfare, and experiences of life and death, take on a new meaning when you've got first-hand involvement.  Here's one message from the daughter:

“Had a stillbirth last night. Sad—but I can hand off my bottle-heifer. We paired the newly babyless mama with my orphan.”

Most of us try to shield our kids from this kind of heartbreak but perhaps its just the sort of thing they sometimes need.  

Speaking of the stark reality of cattle-raising, I can vividly remember the first time I saw the following (and decided I would definitely not be a vet):

“Today we checked to confirm some cows were pregnant—which Megan did by jamming her hand up their rectum. Eww.”

Here's the article's author:

“There’s also something to be said for knowing where your groceries come from. It’s hard not to notice that the less contact Americans have with farmers, the more afraid they become of food—GMOs and gluten and whatnot. ”

Do Farmers Lie on their Taxes?

I ran across this 2007 paper in the Economic Journal by Naomi Feldman and Joel Slemrod.  The authors used an interesting method to identify people who might have shortchanged the IRS.  In particular, they look at (unaudited) IRS tax returns and calculate the ratio between charitable giving and reported taxable income.  Their assumption is that that the "true" ratio should be relatively constant across households who receive their income in the form of wages/salary from an employer and those who earn their income from a small business or farming (that is, there is little reason to believe a salaried employee is more or less generous toward charities than a business owner; this is an assumption they test and discuss in detail in the paer).  Of course, the crucial difference here is that salaried employees have their incomes directly reported by their employer to the IRS, which isn't always true of people who earn income in other ways.  

From the paper:  

“We find that the implied amount of noncompliance on non-wage-and-salary income is substantial and that it varies among these sources of income as well as between positive and negative values of each type of income. On average, reported positive self-employment, nonfarm small-business and farm income must be multiplied by a factor of 1.54, 4.54 and 3.87, respectively, in order to obtain true income.”

elsewhere they write:

“Farm income is estimated to have a compliance rate of 25.9% and Schedule E income has an estimated coefficient of 4.54, which corresponds to the lowest compliance rate in this study – 22.0%.”

Nutrition and Genetics

“But this new study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shows that different people may need radically different ratios of the substances in their diet depending on their genes, and it supports the growing evidence against a one-size-fits-all approach to nutrition and for highly personalized advice.”

That's from this article in the Washington Post discussing some recent research that has found a genetic variation that is much more prevalent among vegetarians.  The author writes:

“Cornell University researchers have found a fascinating genetic variation that they said appears to have evolved in populations that favored vegetarian diets over hundreds of generations. The geography of the vegetarian allele is vast and includes people from India, Africa and parts of East Asia who are known to have green diets even today.

Researcher Kaixiong Ye said that the vegetarian adaptation allows people to “efficiently process omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids and convert them into compounds essential for early brain development.””