Do we produce enough food already?

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of giving the George Morris AgriFood Policy lecture at the University of Guelph.  I primarily focused my talk on the benefits of food and agricultural technologies and the importance of productivity growth for solving our future world food problems.  

At the conclusion of my talk, an audience member played devils advocate asked an important question that deserves more widespread discussion.  In short, the question was something along the lines of the following: don't we produce enough food already?  It is a question reflected in many popular writings.  This headline, for example, is "We Don't Need to Double World Food Production by 2050." Here's Mark Bittman writing in the New York Times: "The world has long produced enough calories . . .".  Here's Bittman again under a headline in the same outlet "Don't Ask How to Feed the 9 Billion" because, in his words, "The solution to malnourishment isn’t to produce more food." 

Here are my main main thoughts on this line of thinking:

1) Even if we produce enough calories today to meet today's population, that doesn't mean we produce enough for tomorrow's population.  Productivity growth is gradual and incremental, and if we found ourselves in a situation of needing more food, the new technologies to produce them cannot be created over night.  This is particularly true of our ability to produce in the future is hampered by climate change.

2) There is no binary category of "enough food."  Greater food production leads to lower food prices and lower food insecurity.  I haven't yet met a food consumer who wouldn't prefer paying lower food prices, holding quality constant. 

3) I may be true in an accounting sense that we produce enough calories today to meet total caloric needs.  But accounting isn't economics, and we need to consider the incentives of the system that produces the sufficient calories today relative to an alternative system that is either less productive or involves widespread redistribution.  Massive redistribution of food can destroy the incentives of people to produce the food.  One cannot disentangle the fantastic productivity of our current system with the market forces that led to it's origin.  Stated differently, there is no reason to imagine we'd produce the same number of calories if "the system" were changed to one with massive confiscation/redistribution.  Brady Deaton altered me to this fascinating paper in the Journal of Political Economy showing that 75% of the increase in China's agricultural productivity after 1978 was due to strengthening of individual incentives.

4) It's important to look at productivity through the lens of sustainability.  Higher productivity means getting more (or the same) amount of food output using fewer inputs and resources.  Are people really wanting to argue that they'd prefer systems that require more of our natural resources - more land, more water, more fossil fuels? Since when is lower productivity and inefficiency preferred?  Even if "enough" food is produced today, improved productivity means we can keep producing the same quantity but shrink agricultural's footprint on the land, use less water, fewer pesticides, etc.    

5) If the solution to the food problem is simply shipping food from high productivity countries and sending (or stated more pejoratively "dumping") in lower productivity countries with hungrier citizens, this may harm the livelihoods of producers in low productivity countries and reduce their incentives to adopt efficient forms of agriculture.

6) If places like the US decided to forego new food and agricultural technologies and farmers were forced or incentivized to adopt lower productivity systems, what would happen to patterns of global trade and production.  US farmers compete with farmers all over the world to serve US consumers and consumers worldwide.  Not only would such policies likely reduce US exports, it would make imports relatively more attractive.  Is the solution then import tariffs to prop up our lower productivity system?

7) One can go back to writings from over 100 years ago and find claims that the problem of production and scarcity had essentially been solved, and all that was needed was a heavier handed state to ensure "fair" distribution (e.g., see Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1888).  Imagine the world we would live in today if that premise were widely accepted back in 1888 - that the state of production was "good enough" and we could stop worrying about growth and progress.  How much growth would we have lost out on had we stopping innovation in 1888?  We'd still be hand-picking cotton, planting with mules, eating much more salt- and vinegar-cured meats, and more.  What will the food and agriculture future look like in 2088, and what will we give up if we stop working on productivity-enhancing technologies today? 

ABC, BPI, and LFTB

A couple weeks ago, the lawsuit between BPI, the maker of lean finely textured beef (LFTB), aka "pink slime", and ABC news finally came to an end after the two parties agreed to an settlement for an undisclosed amount of money (here's one summary from CNN).

Here's another story from Inside Sources that touches on the economic impacts of the original ABC news coverage.  They reached out to me for comment and you can read a tad bit of what I had to say at the link above.  

Better yet, check out the chapter in my book 2016 Unnaturally Delicious entitled "Waste Not Want Not."  In that chapter, I talked about the history of BPI and it's founder Eldon Roth, the technology used in creating LFTB, some intriguing background on how BPI wound up in the documentary Food, Inc., and more.  Here are the law few paragraphs from that chapter.    

“It’s a bit hard to know what to make of all that transpired. To be sure, much of what was said about BPI was sensationalized. BPI didn’t use organ meats or bones or hoofs or hides or
“dog food.” The company used slightly fattier versions of same beef cuts that usually become roasts or ground beef. In fact, the day I visited BPI’s South Dakota plant, which is adjacent to a
Tyson packing facility, I was amazed at the beef entering BPI’s facility. The meat traveled on a conveyer belt in a tunnel that connects BPI and Tyson. A steer or heifer enters one end of the
Tyson facility, and a few hours later beef trimmings emerge at BPI without ever seeing the light of day. The trimmings consist of some small cuts of beef but there are also huge hunks of meat that looked almost identical to the briskets that I love to barbeque for get-togethers with friends and family. Lean finely textured beef is beef. That’s all. I suppose that’s why the company created a website called beefisbeef.com. No bone goes into the process. Big beef hunks go in one end and out the other end come three products: tallow, cartilage (which is the only waste), and lean finely textured beef.

I’ve visited a lot of food plants, and BPI’s was one of the most technologically advanced, safety-conscious plants I’ve seen. That a company that proactively invested millions in food safety measures found itself embroiled in controversy involving perceived (but unfounded) safety concerns is deeply ironic. What tarnished BPI’s reputation was no actual sickness or recall or outbreak; it was a series of TV shows and news stories.

But, given the information that consumers received, it is hard to fault them for their reaction. After all, best-selling authors and journalists have primed the public’s distrust of Big Food. In
an era when processed food has come to be seen as almost evil, “pink slime” struck a chord with consumers. Perhaps BPI should have required labeling of the beef that contained its products. Surely some of the public outcry arose from a feeling of having been deceived and of having no control over what is in our food. But from BPI’s perspective, what’s to label? “This product of ground-up beef parts contains more ground-up beef parts”? More fundamentally, BPI didn’t sell directly to consumers. Rather, the company sold to other processors, who sold to restaurants and grocery store chains. BPI was hardly in a position to force others to label products that contained lean finely textured beef.

So where does that leave us? Many shoppers, although I am not among them, no doubt want to avoid lean finely textured beef and are willing to pay a premium to purchase lean ground beef that does not contain it. There’s no harm in that.

But if we are really concerned about food waste, we probably need to change some of our narratives. We shouldn’t say we want companies to recycle and reuse and then turn around and vilify them for doing so.

The comedian Jon Stewart, who was more than willing to jump on the Big-Food-is-bad bandwagon, remarked that pink slime should instead be called “ammonia-soaked centrifuge-separated by-product paste.” He was working off a popular narrative. He could have instead featured the harm to a family owned business that was innovating to make food safer and more affordable by preventing food waste. But that’s not very funny.”

Authentic Food?

Over at Bloomberg, Megan McCardle questions consumers' fascination with authentic (dare I say "natural") food.  The whole thing is well worth a read.  Here is an excerpt.

“Too, we must remember that not everyone was a good cook. Cooking was a job, not an absorbing hobby, and as with any other job, many people did it badly. Every farm wife could produce enough calories to feed her family (at least, if the raw materials were available). Not all of them could produce anything you’d want to eat. Modern food-processing technology has relieved us of that most “authentic” culinary experience: boring ingredients processed by an indifferent cook into something that you’d only voluntarily consume if you were pretty hungry. Even the memory of these cooks has fallen away, though you’ll encounter a lot of them if you read old novels.

These facts help explain the great paradox at the heart of the authenticity obsession: If those authentic old foods were so great, how come our ancestors were so eager to switch to processed foods? ”

Is bigger safer?

The answer to the question in the title, at least in the context of consolidation and food safety, seems to be "no" according to this article by Anne Kim in Washington Monthly.

The subtitle of the article indicates:

“A consolidated food industry brings you salad and chicken nuggets cheaper—and spreads deadly food-borne pathogens farther.”

And later in the article:

“In other words, the same hyperefficient distribution system that brings you convenient and affordable salad greens and all the chicken nuggets you can eat can just as efficiently deliver E. coli, salmonella, and other dangerous bugs to your plate. Moreover, today’s industrialized food production processes carry other public health risks. ”

The article contains several interesting stories and interviews, but lacks solid evidence supporting the article's main premise that a less consolidated food system would be a safer one.  Yes, there has been consolidation in agriculture.  Yes, when a large firm has a food safety event, it affects more people.  But, what we don't know is whether, overall, a food system with many smaller firms is safer than one with fewer larger firms.  Indeed, the author even acknowledges the following:

“According to the CDC, no evidence suggests that smaller or larger producers have an inherent advantage on food safety. “It has to do more with your practices than your size,” says the CDC’s Matthew Wise. ”

What is not mentioned is that large size can sometimes lower the average (or per unit) cost of investing in certain food safety technologies.  

I touched on this issue in my book, Unnaturally Delicious, when talking to Frank Yiannas, the Vice President of food safety at Walmart.  Here's an excerpt:

“More than 120 million Americans (more than a third of the U.S. population) shop at Walmart every week. Does the sheer scale of the operation make the U.S. food system riskier? If Walmart has an outbreak, multitudes would be sickened. Yiannas replied: “One out of every four dollars spent on food are spent at a Walmart. We can make a big difference. Large organizations like Walmart result in a safer food system.” He points out that when Walmart makes a change, it affects the whole system. Sure, smaller companies might have outbreaks that affect fewer people, but when lots of small companies are having lots of small outbreaks, the problem is more widespread. A downside to small companies, said Yiannas, is that they can’t easily invest in improving the system as a whole. While Walmart often attracts negative attention because of its size and scale (e.g., Do they pay workers fairly? Do they hurt local mom-and-pop businesses?), at least in the world of food safety, their size has significant benefits for its customers, and as I’ll soon discuss, even for non-customers. ”

Yiannas went on to talk about the value of protecting Walmart's brand, the fact that their internal safety standards far exceed government minimums, and he presented evidence that the food safety initiatives that they've implemented have improved safety for the whole country (because of their size). You'll have to read the book for all the details.  

I'll also point out research by Marc Bellemare (here's his piece on the topic in the New York Times) showing a relationship between food safety outbreaks and the prevalence of farmers markets (you know, those places with many small farms and processors).  

I'm not saying that larger IS unilaterally safer, but I am saying there is no solid evidence to support the broad premise behind the Washington Monthly article.  There are a lot things to like about small producers and we ought to think about ways of lowering barriers to entry that are sometimes created by food safety regulations, but doesn't mean we should cast undue fear about our present food system, which is among the safest in the world.  

The Atlantic on Agricultural Fertilizer

Over at the Atlantic, Alex Fitzsimmons has an article on a vastly under-appreciated technology: synthetic fertilizer.   Fitzsimmons notes concerns about excess fertilizer application and reliance on fossil fuels, but he also weights that against the fact that we have forestalled the dire Malthusian concerns.

Fitzsimmons quotes me as saying:

“Pessimists like Malthus and Ehrlich consider people a self-destructive drain on nature, but as Lusk, the Oklahoma State University agricultural economist sees it, “they underestimated the ability of humans to adapt and innovate and make productive use of the resources we have available.””

Its nice to see some attention paid to this subject in the popular press. In any event, you can read the whole thing here.