Blog

GMO bans and labels

It appears that voters in Jackson county Oregon have passed a ballot measure that would ban GMOs in the county.  

Much of the discussion by supporters of the ban leading up to the vote focused on GMOs "contaminating" organic crops.  But, that really doesn't make any sense because organic is a labeling scheme based on process not outcomes.  Just because an organic-labeled food was found to have synthetic pesticide residue or (heaven forbid!) trace elements of GMOs, that doesn't make it non-organic as long as the producers followed organic rules and procedures.  

I suspect the outcome will embolden supporters of mandatory GMO labeling laws and will speed the efforts of GMO advocates seeking some kind of over-riding national labeling law (which is unlikely to require mandatory GMO labels).  

At the same time, there seems to be growing acceptance and acknowledgements of the benefits and safety of biotechnology by the mainstream media and by prominent food writers.  Mark Bittman's recent writing is one prominent example.    

In that vein, I noticed this recent piece in Slate by the food writer and historian, James McWilliams on GMO labels.  You'll see a quote from me about some of the pseudo science that's sometimes used to promote such labels, but McWilliams mainly focuses on the potential costs of such labels:

It’s certainly possible that food will be reorganized into three general tiers—GMO, non-GMO, and organic—with non-GMO food moving toward the more expensive organic option while GMOs, which will be seen as less desirable, drop in price.

However it happens, a cost-free label is a happy thought. But until the label becomes the law, and until consumers are set free to cast their votes in the aisles of the marketplace, we’ll have little more to go on than tea leaves. And until they are genetically modified to be more accurate, I’d prepare to pay more for food.

Pollan and Bittman on GMOs

A good passage by Keith Kloor on the subtle shift by some in the "food movement" on GMOs:

As I have said to Lynas, this kind of turnabout owes not so much to discovering science but more to unshackling oneself from a fixed ideological and political mindset. You can’t discover science–or honestly assess it–until you are open to it. The problem for celebrity food writers like Bittman and Michael Pollan, who is also struggling to reconcile the actual science on biotechnology with his worldview, is that their personal brands are closely identified with a food movement that has gone off the rails on GMOs. The labeling campaign is driven by manufactured fear of genetically modified foods, a fear that both Pollan and Bittman and like-minded allies have enabled.

Kloor argues that 

Now that this train has left the station, there is no calling it back, as Bittman seems to be suggesting in his NYT column.

There may be no calling it back but I suppose we should at least celebrate the fact that celebrity foodies aren't actively at the engine anymore.  Now if I can just persuade Bittman and Pollan on the science and economics that conflict with some of their other pet food causes (including some of the nonsense Bittman spread about organics in the same column where he admits the safety of GMOs) . . .

GMOs and Indian Suicides

Just as Keith Kloor seems to put the issue (or myth as he calls it) to rest in an article recently appearing in Issues in Science and Technology, now comes a new article in the journal Globalization and Health suggesting a link between farmer suicides in India and farmer debt, a finding that will no doubt re-ignite the argument that adoption of GMOs caused suicides.  Indeed, the authors conclude the article by saying

Some observers have suggested that the introduction of genetically modified varieties of crops since liberalization has considerably worsened the situation . . .

 For background on the controversy, see this Wikipedia page.

I personally didn't find the new analysis in Globalization and Health as being particularly compelling, and it does NOT, as some reports of the study have suggested, provide "causal links."  The authors estimate simple linear regressions specifying suicide rates (suicides per 100,000 people per year) in a region (or state) as a function of indebtedness (measured as the % of farmers in a region that have taken out a loan in excess of $5).  

I don't doubt that indebtedness and suicides are correlated, but isn't it possible that there is some unobserved factor (or factors) causing both?  Macro-economic conditions? Social-cultural factors within a region (there are no regional fixed effects in the models)? A shift in time preference caused by other unobserved factors? If this sort of endogeneity exists, the estimates are biased.  Although the authors have 5 years of data on their dependent variable, they only have one measure of "indebtedness" at a single point in time, and assume it is the same for all time periods; thus, they cannot include year by region fixed effects.  This means that they cannot separate other regional-specific shocks to suicides from indebtedness effects.

For a more complete and through analysis of the issue, I suggest the papers by Guillaume Gruèrea and Debdatta Sengupta, which first appeared in a working paper with IFPRI and then later in a more condensed form in the Journal of Development Studies.

  

Comparison of farm technology adoptions

Earlier I posted a graph showing the trend in adoption of the tractor over horses and mules.  It took the better part of 50 years for near full adoption of the tractor.

Presumably, farmers adopted when the perceived benefits exceed the perceived costs.  How does the above compare to a more recent farm technology?  Biotechnology.  Here is data from the USDA

What it took a half a century for the tractor to do, herbicide tolerant (HT) soybeans did in less than a decade. 

Apparently, from the farmers' perspectives, the tractor wasn’t as compelling better than the mule (all factors considered) as was HT soybeans over conventional soybeans!

There are, of course, many reasons for the difference, but they do cast a lot of doubt on the presumption and claims of many anti-biotech advocates that farmers don't perceive themselves better off with the new technology.  Would many be willing to make the claim that, despite their revealed preference as exhibited in their adoption behavior, that farmers perceived themselves (or actually were) worse off with the tractor than they were the mule?  Then, how can that sort of claim be leveled at farmers adoption biotechnology?