How US Companies Should Help Farmers Increase Sustainability

That's the title of an article by a marketing guru, Doug Austin, in the Farm Journal.

While some of the discussion is sensible, I found it a bit interesting to see the "solution" proposed to increased sustainability:

“When large companies partner with farmers, they have more influence on how farmers take their products to market, and they’re involved much earlier in the process. For instance, a corporation could instruct a farmer to plant 10,000 acres of corn without any pesticides, GMO seeds, etc., and the farmer would be under contract to deliver. This is a big shift away from the traditional farming mindset that uses yield as the primary success metric.”

First, I don't know that corporations "instruct" farmers. They can offer incentives.  They can offer premiums.  Or, as Austin suggest, they can offer contracts.  

The idea is hardly new.  And indeed, the rate of contracting is already increasing at a rapid clip, precisely for many of the reasons suggested by Austin - food companies trying to achieve more uniformity ad price stability, and to be responsive to consumer concerns.  

Here for, for example, is a graph out of a USDA report by William McBride and Nigel Key on the percent of hogs marketed in the US under contract from 1992 to 2009.  In some parts of the U.S. virtually 100% of hogs are produced under contract.

There are many advantages to contracting (mainly protection against price or production risk), but the practice also opens up food production industries to all kinds of criticism (e.g., see how Tyson was vilified in The Meat Racket for its use of contracts).  If a corporation wants to exert the kind of control it needs to achieve various end-use characteristics, that means farmers conceding some freedom (in exchange for certainty of income).  However, this relationship can get construed as "big bad market power exerted by Big Food."

The contracting situation isn't unique to hogs.  Many (perhaps most) vegetable growers produce under contract with processors.   And, here is another graph from the USDA-ERS by James McDonald on the extent of contracting for the major commodity crops

The other problem with the quote above is the implicit assumption that the use of GMOs or pesticides are not sustainable.  Or, that yield isn't one metric of sustainability.  Corporations may (one day in the future), in fact, want to contract with farmers to plant certain GMOs precisely because they are more sustainable.

What's the good of advertisers?

Much of what I read and hear in debates about obesity, nutrition, and public health seems to assume that all corporate food marketing is "bad".  Food marketers are nudging us away from healthful choices toward the more profitable (for them) unhealthful ones (never mind that some companies sell healthy products).  Many people argue that the government needs to make its own commercials to counter-nudge us back toward health eating.

With that backdrop, I was interested to read the back-and-forth letters between Rory Sutherland and George Loewenstein at the beginning of this paper, The Behavioral Economics Guide 2014. (HT: Andreas Drichoutis)

Here's an interesting point by Sutherland:

“Interestingly the late, mostly great, Gary Becker (in a paper with Kevin Murphy) seems to agree with me on this. Their model of advertising seems to suggest that advertising should be viewed not as persuasion (something which distorts preferences, as you suggest) but as a complementary good, the consumption of which, alongside the main product, increases the value of that main advertised product and which therefore allows sellers to capture more of the consumer surplus. He sees advertising as potentially a value-add, not as manipulation.

Nonetheless, I agree that we are right to be suspicious of manipulation. After all, the most successful advertisers over the past 150 years have been totalitarian regimes. ”

Sutherland also responds to Loewenstein's story about a recent joy-ride to the country ending in a meal of burgers and beer which was ruined when Loewenstein learned he was simply playing out a scene he'd seen in a credit card commercial.  Sutherland writes: 

“But what is strange is that we are already affected by frames, without being remotely aware of them. When you described your cycling experience, it was clear that you saw the cycle ride as virtuous and the food and beer as sinful. Yet people have been enjoying the consumption of beef products and fermented beverages since the time of the pharaohs.

Indeed, perhaps 900m people in China would have read your story and said, “The beer and the burger I understand. What I don’t understand at all is why a presumably wealthy Yankee professor would get to the restaurant by bicycle, when I have been dreaming of owning a car for the last ten years. Travelling by bicycle is the lowest form of drudgery.” You have clearly been manipulated here. But it’s not the credit card company I blame, it’s Nike.”

Loewenstien responds with some interesting observations of his own.  Do read the whole exchange. 

How high are the food companies standards?

"Big Food" is often vilified, and there are often calls for more regulation of food production and processing.  Is it possible, however, that private companies' food standards are actually "too high"?  Or, that food companies' standards are higher than government standards?  A recent paper in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics by Thijs Vandemoortele and Koen Deconinck sheds some light on these issues.  

They start with an interesting (if not widely mis-perceived) observation:

Empirical evidence shows that 70-80% of retailers assess their own private standards slightly or significantly higher than public standards

They offer several possible reasons for this phenomenon.  First,

private standards may reduce consumers’ uncertainty and information asymmetry about product characteristics such as safety, quality, and social and environmental aspects, thus increasing consumer demand.

Second, 

firms may use private standards as strategic tools to differentiate their products, thus creating market segmentation and softening competition.

Third,

firms may use private standards strategically to improve bargaining power over their suppliers.

Fourth,

private standards may also serve to preempt government regulations.

The authors construct a conceptual model, in which they argue that market power is a primary motive.  This is something of a counter-intuitive outcome: a "bad" (market power) creates a "good" (high standards).  As they point out, the political economy relationship between companies and government probably also has something to do with the extent to which private standards are greater than public ones.  So does consumer demand; if consumers want an are willing to pay for higher standards, there will be an incentive for companies to provide it.  But, as this article points out, high standards can also be used to create barriers to competition.