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I was wrong about sustainability. Well, sort of.

I’ve changed my mind about sustainability.  Well, sort of.    

Perhaps I’ve just been a bit curmudgeonly, but I’ve bristled at the often-used word “sustainability” in the context of food and agriculture. Sustainability seems to be one of those feel-good, vacuous buzz words that is thrown around to support whatever cause the wielder of the word wants to support.  In fact, in The Food Police, I wrote:

the sustainability movement largely represents an elitist attempt to ration scarce resources using social pressure, guilt, and regulation

On the one hand, it is hard to argue with the concept of sustainability.  Wikipedia simply says it is the “the capacity to endure” and to remain “productive over time.”

That doesn’t sound so problematic.  Who doesn’t want to endure and remain productive?

I’ve come to realize my problem is not with the concept of sustainability per se but rather with the way many people propose to achieve the outcome.

In food and agriculture, “sustainability” has come to be interpreted as synonymous with organic, “natural”, and local.  In this sort of vision, the way we endure and sustain our production over time is that we have a smaller population, we need to spend more time working the land, we need to spend more money on food, and we need to learn to like to eat different kinds of foods.  Maybe that kind of future sounds good to some folks, but for my taste, if that is the kind of future that will be sustained, count me out.  I suppose our cave-man forefathers could have carried on quite “sustainably” for a very long time, but their “sustainable” life is not one I’d prefer being born into.  This “natural” future is not the kind of future in which I want to live, and I think that is why I’ve been bothered by the word “sustainability.” 

The thing that is missing in the local, slow, organic vision of sustainability is any serious consideration of the role of scientific and technological advancement.  Sustainable doesn’t have to mean stagnant.  Rather, I posit that any future worth fighting for is one that is dynamic, innovative, and exciting; one in which there will be many fellow humans, with bountiful opportunities to eat and work as their hearts desire.  In all likelihood, there will be another billion people show up on this earth in the next 40 to 50 years, and if we are to “endure” and remain productive and prosperous, it will require advancements in food and agricultural technologies.      

We don’t have to take a step back to sustain our current living and eating standards.  We can continue to enjoy the wonderful abundance of food and even improve our living standards.  But technological optimism won’t cut it.  We actually have to invest in research and development.  We actually have to be willing to adopt new food and agricultural technologies.

I am a proponent of technological advancement in food and agriculture because it is the root underlying cause of our gains in prosperity.  That’s why I now am in favor of sustainability.  Because, as I see it, in an ideal future, they’re one in the same.             

  

Animal Shelters for Chickens

That is the title of a post by Yvonne Vizzier Thaxton at Meatingplace.com.  She writes:

It was inevitable.  Community shelters are reporting the appearance of chickens looking for a new home. 

and

The problem is that many of the people who thought having a few chickens to supply eggs and teach their children about food had good intentions but not enough information.  First, several chickens can completely strip a small yard of vegetation leaving the area muddy and unattractive – gone is the image of chickens in the grass.  They don’t always lay an egg a day and don’t lay many, if any, after about 2 years but they still eat.

and

Our local shelters have been struggling for years to take care of the many cats and dogs they receive along with the occasional horse, exotic bird and reptile.  Finding homes for these, more common pets, is not easy.  Finding a home for chickens is likely to be significantly more difficult.

Think the HSUS will help out?

Locally-produced as compost the solution to global warming?

Gary Paul Nabhan published an op-ed yesterday in the NYT on global warming, agriculture, and farm policy.  Some of his suggestions, such as reducing regs and restrictions on "gray water" might have some merit (assuming food safety risks can be adequately handled) but most of his suggestions presume government is the only answer.

First, let's look at his premise that global warming will invariably lead to a "coming food crisis".  In actuality, a warming planet will produce some winners and some losers, and may be net-plus for agriculture.  It is possible that farmers in Arizona, where Nabhan resides, will lose from higher temperatures, but there likely to be other locations, like Canada, where agriculture benefits.  There is a lively debate among economists, fought out in the pages of the American Economic Review over precisely this issue (see the papers here or here suggesting climate change will benefit US agriculture or here, here, or here suggesting the reverse).  It would have been nice to see some discussion on this issue rather than simply claiming a disaster is coming.

Where things really go off base, however, are in the policy prescriptions.  Here are a few with some brief comments. 

First, he says about his strategies that: 

The problem is that several agribusiness advocacy organizations have done their best to block any federal effort to promote them
I'm not sure exactly what "blocks" these groups have but in the way of Nabhan's ideas, but more generally several farmer groups like the idea of carbon trading because they'd get paid for sequestration.   

His first policy is to: 

promote the use of locally produced compost to increase the moisture-holding capacity of fields, orchards and vineyards.

I'm not sure why the compost needs to be local if it is really so beneficial.  It is also unclear why farmers wouldn't source these materials now if they improved yield and limited chances of loss. I suspect if research showed these techniques could improve the moisture-holding capacity of soils, there wouldn't need to be much promotion or subsidy for farmers to adopt.

Then, we are told: 

the farm bill should include funds from the Strikeforce Initiative of the Department of Agriculture to help farmers transition to forms of perennial agriculture — initially focusing on edible tree crops and perennial grass pastures 

However, if the problem is that conventional crops are not as profitable in a warming environment, there needn't be a Strikeforce Initiative or top-town planning; farmers will willingly seek out those alternatives they can grow most profitably given altered weather conditions.

Then, we have another crisis: 

We also need to address the looming seed crisis. Because of recent episodes of drought, fire and floods, we are facing the largest shortfall in the availability of native grass, forage legume, tree and shrub seeds in American history

and

the National Plant Germplasm System, the Department of Agriculture’s national reserve of crop seeds, should be charged with evaluating hundreds of thousands of seed collections for drought and heat tolerance, as well as other climatic adaptations — and given the financing to do so.

Don't you think Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and other seed producers have a HUGE incentive to store and develop crop varieties that are likely to be more profitable in a warmer climate?  I'm not exactly sure what is described here as a "seed crisis" that profit-making seed companies (and University breeders) aren't already thinking about.  Moreover, if the problem is really so dire as Nabhan suggest, why doesn't he suggest using all methods - including biotechnology - to increase drought resistance of crop varieties?  

The answer to that last question, I think, says it all.  I suspect Nabhan doesn't support use of biotechnology to solve the problem he sets up because his issue isn't really with the global warming effects on crop production per se, but rather it seems he sees an opportunity to re-engineer a food system to his liking using subsidies, regulations, and Strikeforce Initiatives, without giving much thought into the effects of such a system on global hunger and the price consumers pay for food.  It is all together fanciful to imagine the food system he proposes as bring down food prices, which, ironically, Nabhan, sets up as being the problem he aims to solve.  
 

The fight over whether fat kills

A little after Christmas, Katherine Flegal and colleagues published a big review paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  They found that people who are overweight and even a little obese actually live a bit longer than "normal" weight people.  I wrote an article for Townhall.com in response with the tongue in cheek title (Will Fat Taxes Kill You?)

There was actually more to the story that I haven't previously touched on.  In particular, a very high profile Harvard Nutrition/Public Health Professor, Walter Willett, came out soon after the Flegal study and said  

This study is really a pile of rubbish and no one should waste their time reading it

And a symposium was pulled together to further criticize the study, which was seen as "dangerous" in some circles because it seemed to undermined the public health community's call to loose weight.  

Here is where it gets really interesting.  In May, Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific journals, actually called out Willett in an editorial and a feature article.  This editorial by Trevor Butterworth has most of the details, and as he summarizes it:

Science is complex, and Willett’s message to his fellow scientists appears to be that the public can’t be trusted with this complexity (except, as noted, when it might be something that he thinks is worthy of research); the question, which the public might ask in turn, is whether Willett can be trusted with complexity given his apparent intolerance for it in other scientists?

The problem seems to be that Willett and others could not separate their normative, ideological position from evidence-based science.  The evidence conflicted with their prior beliefs and commitments, ergo it must have been wrong.

I found this response from this from Mike Gibney (who also seems to have an interesting new book out) insightful:

Leaving the science aside, there is a critically important aspect to this row that needs highlighting. Think back to the BSE crisis. At that point, within the EU we had the risk assessment process and the risk management process both operated by the European Commission. That was then amended to take the risk assessment process away from the Commission and to create a totally science- based independent body, The European Food Safety Authority, to conduct risk assessment. The Harvard group is effectively seeking to be both risk assessors and risk managers. The former is science based and the latter is politically or policy based. If the two are attended to within the same institute, as the Harvard group seem to want, then the risk management process will filter the risk assessment process. Why support a scientific paper, which conflicts with your risk management goals? Indeed, in this week’s Harvard Gazette which covered this controversy, Professor Willett is quoted thus: “If you don’t have the right goal you are very unlikely to end up in the right place”[6]. Clearly, Professor Willett knows what is “right” and those who differ are “wrong”. This is simply bad for science. As I said, dissent is the oxygen of science.