Future Food Demand

Will we be able to produce enough food to feed a more populated and likely richer world in 2050?  The answer to this question depends not just on what technologies we develop but also on what people in different parts of the world will want to eat in 2050.  A new paper by Christophe Gouel and Houssein Guimbard in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics takes data from consumption of 7 categories of food in over 100 different countries to explore how food demand changes with income and population, and then they use these estimates to project future food demand given estimates of income and population growth.  

First, they show that as incomes rise, demand for oils and fats and for animal-based food increases. 

The following graph (from their appendix) shows the projected changes in global demand for different types of food on out to 2100.

Here is a summary of their findings:

“The main results of our projections to 2050 are that (a) food demand will increase by 47%, representing less than half of the growth experienced in the four decades before 2010; (b) this growth will come mainly from developing countries because in high-income countries, food demand is already at high per capita levels and population growth will be low; (c) growth in starchy staples will be small at 19%, supported by population increases because per capita consumption is predicted to decrease while demand for animal-based food will double, thereby increasing the global share of animal-based calories from 17% in 2010 to 23% in 2050; and (d) these projections present large uncertainties that are neglected in related studies: under alternative plausible futures for GDP and population, demand for animal-based calories increases between 74% and 114%.”

New findings on agricultural productivity

The American Journal of Agricultural Economics has recently published several new and important papers on agricultural productivity.  Whether agriculture is becoming more or less productive is a critical question as it relates to sustainability (are we getting more while using less?), food security (can food production outpace population growth?), and consumer well-being (are food prices expected to rise or fall?). 

These papers focus on "total" or "multifactor" productivity rather than just yield.  Yield is a partial measure of productivity - it is the amount of output per unit of one input: land.  One can increase yield by adding more of other inputs such as water, fertilizer, labor, etc.  What we want is a measure of how much output has increased once we have accounted for uses of all inputs, and this is total or multifactor productivity.

The first paper by Matthew Andersen, Julian Alston, Phi Pardey, and Aaron Smith is worrisome.  They write:

“In this paper we have used a range of data and methods to test for a slowdown in U.S. farm productivity growth, and the evidence is compelling. The results all confirm the existence of a surge and a slowdown in productivity but with some variation in timing, size, and statistical significance of the shifts. ... Over the most recent 10 to 20 years of our data, the annual average rate of MFP [multifactor productivity] growth was half the rate that had been sustained for much of the twentieth century. More subtly, and of equal importance, the past century (and more) of statistics assembled here suggest the relatively rapid rates of productivity growth experienced during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s could be construed as aberrations (along with the relative rapid rates of growth experienced during a period spanning WWII), with the post-1990 rates of productivity growth now below the longer-run trend rate of growth.”

The second paper by Alejandro Plastina and Sergio Lence provides a deeper understanding behind the causes of productivity growth.  They present a straightforward way to decompose multifactor productivity into six different factors: technical change, technical efficiency, allocative efficiency, returns to scale, output price markup, and the input price effect.    They write:

“Technical change is the major driver of TFP growth over the long run, and there is evidence that technical progress in the 1990s and 2000s was much slower than in the 1970s. This is a relevant result for policy makers, and begs the question of what is actually causing the slowdown in technical change. This is the first study to show technical regress in the agricultural sector during the farm crisis of the 1980s.

Another novel result is that annual changes in TFP bear no significant correlation with annual rates of technical change but instead are highly correlated with the markup effect, followed by the returns to scale component and allocative efficiency change. These findings suggest that evaluating the effects of research, extension, and other variables on each of the components of our measure of TFP change (rather than solely on an aggregate TFP index) can shed light on the actual channels through which those variables affect agricultural productivity growth in the United States and therefore contribute to policy design.”

Finally, there is Julian Alston's fellow's address from last year's AAEA meetings.  In addition to providing an excellent literature review, he makes several important points.  He argues that agricultural research is significantly under-funded relative to the benefits it provides in increased productivity:

“Evidence of remarkably high sustained rates of social payoffs to both private and public investments in agricultural R&D testify to a significant failure of government to fully address the underinvestment problems caused by the market failure. Moreover, if anything, in high-income countries like the United States, agricultural R&D policies seem to be trending in the wrong direction, making matters worse.”

and

“a reasonable first step would be to double U.S. public investment in agricultural R&D—an increase of, say, $4 billion over recent annual expenditures.4 A conservatively low benefit-cost ratio of 10:1 implies that having failed to spend that additional $4 billion per year on public agricultural R&D imposes a net social cost of $36 billion per year—an order of magnitude greater than the annual $1–5 billion social cost of $20 billion in farm subsidies.”

Alston also points out that the main beneficiaries of productivity growth are consumers, and the farmers may or may not benefit.  He writes:

“It seems inescapable that the agricultural innovations that made food much more abundant and cheaper for consumers did so to some extent at the expense of farmers as a whole—more than offsetting the effects of growth in demand for output from the sector. This finding is reinforced when we pay attention to the details of the timing. Specifically, the periods of the most rapid decline (or slowest growth) in [net farm income] seem to coincide with the periods of most rapid increase in farm productivity—the 1940s to 1980s, especially 1950–1980, as identified by Andersen et al. (2018)—consistent with the hypothesis that agricultural innovations have reduced net incomes for U.S. farmers as a group.”

This suggests something of a paradox.  Farmer groups have often been some of the biggest supporters of agricultural research and are proponents of productivity growth, while consumers have been skeptical if not hostile toward many productivity-enhancing technologies on the farm.  Yet, it is likely food consumers that have received the lion's share of the benefits from increases in agricultural productivity through greater food security and lower food prices.  

Wizards and Prophets

I've been reading Charles Mann's latest book Wizards and Prophets, which was released earlier this year.  Overall, I've enjoyed the book.  The subtitle, "Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World" is an apt description for much of the content, which describes food, agricultural, and environmental problems through the lens of Norman Borlaug and William Vogt.  The history is informative, and Mann gives a fair comparison of the underlying philosophical differences, which he attributes to Borlaug and Vogt, driving much of the debate today around food, agriculture, and the environment. 

I am very much in the "Borlaug-wizard camp" (which advocates for innovation, science, research to solve food security and environmental problems) but I came away with a better appreciation for the Vogt-ian, prophet point of view (focused on resource constraints, ecological limits, need to reduce consumption, etc).  

While I thought the book was well done and well worth reading, Mann gets one aspect of this debate wrong.  Because I've seen other writers make the same mistaken point, it's worth delving into a bit.

Throughout the book, Mann refers to the Borlaug way of thinking as "top down" and the "hard way," and he contrasts this with Vogt's approach which he depicts as "bottom up", "localized", etc.  This is exactly backward. 

Mann aptly describes a core belief among the prophets: that there are finite resources on earth and just like any other species, we will grow exponentially until we exhaust our resources, and then our population and civilization will collapse. The analogy is a jar filled with few fruit flies given a fixed amount of food.  Initially, the flies have ample resources and they multiple rapidly.  However, at some point the population becomes too large for the fixed food supply, and the population collapses.  The fruit fly population follows something like an S-shaped curve over time.

Moving from flies to people, the issue is typically described in a Malthusian manner.  As the graph below shows, as we add more labor to a fixed amount of land, diminishing marginal returns kick in and the amount of food available per worker eventually falls.

If this resource-constrained view is a core belief, how do you solve the problem?  Adherents to this point of view typically urge folks to consume less or use less resource-intensive systems/products or to constrain population in some way.  But, most individuals don't want less.  Particularly folks in the developing world - they want to have and consume the things those us in the developed world enjoy, whether it be meat, air conditioning, ipads, or MRIs.  Yes, persuasion may result in a few people cutting back, but not on a scale that matches the magnitude of the problem.  Thus, the only fully effective way for the prophets to accomplish their goal (preventing catastrophic collapse) is to force or constrain the population to adopt outcomes few individuals would choose on their own.  Thus, the call for policies to mandate a cap on the number of children one can have (as occurred in China), restrictions of resource use, taxes, bans, etc. In other words, top-down planning is required to constrain growth and population, which is often manifested in "one size fits all" or highly non-localized policies.  Just recall of all the clamoring by Vogt-type adherents when Trump decided to pull out of the Paris accord that had global (i.e., non-local) prescriptions to fight climate change [note: I'm not advocating for or against the Paris accord, only noting that it is non-local and more-or-less top-down).  

The wizardly Borlaug view, by contrast, operates via entrepreneurial innovation and individual decisions of whether to adopt or not.  When Borlaug worked for the Rockefeller foundation, he/they had no "power" to force individual farms to adopt their new seeds and production practices, rather as Mann himself reveals, the early Mexican adopters took on the new seeds precisely because they saw for themselves via Borlaug's demonstration plots that they could achieve higher yields.  Yes, the types of seeds and production practices developed by Borlaug et al. spread far and wide, but it is was largely because they "worked" not because it was mandated from on high.  And, the adoption was much more adapted to local conditions than Mann lets on.  Producers in different locations ultimately used different varieties, different irrigation and fertilization techniques, etc.  As time has gone on, precision agriculture has led to even more localization of management decisions.  

The promise and hope of the Wizard is that innovation can get us off the curve shown in the graph above and move us to a new, higher outcome, as shown below. 

This isn't a denial of resource constraints, it is a recognition that innovation allows us to get more with the same or fewer or even different resources.  But, for those innovations to be adopted, they must pass the market test.  Real life-farmers and consumers need to choose to adopt them (or not). This is precisely the opposite of top-down.

Here's what I wrote a while back when Nassim Taleb referred to GMOs as a "top down" technology. 

“Taleb makes reference to the Hayek bottom-up vs. top-down planning. He says GMOs are the top-down sort. I’m not so sure. Real life farmers and people have to be willing to buy varieties that have the GMO traits. No one is forcing that outcome. It is true that competition will limit - to some extent - the diversity of plants and genetics that are observed because some plants aren’t tasty or aren’t high enough yielding. But most plant breeders keep all kinds of “ancient” varieties precisely for the purpose of trying to breed in new traits to today’s varieties (and folks working on synthetic biology are creating their own, new strands of DNA, creating new diversity). Geography also increases diversity. Iowa grows a lot of corn, Oklahoma doesn’t because it isn’t our comparative advantage. I see little reason to believe that a single GMO variety will perform well in all locations. So, yes individual companies are planning and creating new varieties, but it is all our local knowledge of what works in our places and conditions that determine whether particular genetics offered by a particular company are used. We do not have a seed czar or a DNA czar. ”

Defining Meat

Meat and livestock producers are taking notice of the the rising interest in lab-based, cultured, and plant-based "meat."  Some of the larger meat packers and producers have chosen to invest in these new start-ups.  Other producers, facing the competitive threat, are turning to the legal system.  The U.S. Cattlemen's Association (not to be confused with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association) has officially petitioned the USDA to:

“limit the definition of beef to product from cattle born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner. Specifically, [the USDA Food Safety Inspection Service] should require that any product labeled as “beef” come from cattle that have been born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner, rather than coming from alternative sources such as a synthetic product from plant, insects, or other non-animal components and any product grown in labs from animal cells. ”

The state of Missouri already passed a similar law (although it has yet to be signed by the governor).

The labeling requests are in keeping with a long list of "standards of identity" whereby the government defines how certain words can be used on food labels and in marketing.  The stated purpose of the laws are to protect consumers and to prevent consumers from being misled.  In some cases cases, I suspect they standards have done just that.  However, in other cases, the rules can be used by incumbent firms to ward off competition from potentially innovative entrants.  In one particularly egregious example, a small creamery marketing "natural milk" didn't want to add vitamin A to its milk.  However, because the standard of identity say that skim milk contains vitamin A, a judge ruled they must label their milk "imitation skim milk" even though they added literally nothing to the milk (the ruling was later overturned).  Another recent example is when Hampton Creek was told they couldn't label their product mayonnaise because it didn't contain eggs.  I wrote about that case here, and concluded by saying:

“Ultimately, I think there are good arguments on both sides of this case, and it isn’t obvious what would be the consequences of the unraveling of these sorts of “food purity” laws. Sometimes it’s hard to know when consumer protection becomes protectionism.”

In the case of beef, I am a bit skeptical that consumers will be mislead by the start-up meat alternatives.  Why?  These aren't generic products being sold by companies trying to water down or adulterate a product with cheaper inputs.  These are branded products created by firms whose whole marketing strategy is to tell people their product is NOT beef.  Here's a picture I took with my cellphone at a restaurant selling the Impossible Burger, where plain as day its says "Meat from Plants." 

Here is an image of package of Beyond Meat.  Again, plain as day, it says "Plant-Based Burger."

In neither of the cases above, do the companies claim to be "beef" in the ads or packaging.  So, in a lot of ways, I suspect the calls for standards of identity may be much to do about nothing. 

Even without the identity standards, it is not as if consumers are totally unprotected.  If they are, in fact, misled, the legal system offers possible remedy. As witnessed by the numerous lawsuits over the use of the word "natural," I suspect there are plenty of lawyers out there willing to help a consumer who can show they've experienced damages.   

Food Demand Survey (FooDS) Finale - at least for now

Five years ago in May 2013, I put out the first issue of the Food Demand Survey (FooDS).  Every month since that time, a survey of over 1,000 food consumers (a different 1,000 each month), has been conducted where we've tracked concerns, attitudes, and preferences for various food issues over time.  This has been a really fun project.  Alas, all good things must come to an end and the May 2018 edition of FooDS will be the last - at least in its current incarnation.  

Here I wanted to highlight some of the findings we've generated and provide some graphs showing the trends we've observed over the past five years (every issue of FooDS and all the underlying data is available here).  At the end, I'll give a few "thanks" and give insights on where the project may be heading next.  

Some highlights.

• The survey result that easily generated the most attention over the past five years was the finding that over 80% of consumers said they wanted mandatory labeling of foods that contain DNA (we've subsequently asked this question at least a half dozen times in different ways and have consistently found similar results).
• About two thirds of consumers say that a food with "added salt" would be considered natural, but only about one-third say the same of a food with "added sodium chloride."
• During the past farm bill debate, we found that consumers supported a number of reforms to the SNAP (aka "food stamp") program but also opposed significant monetary cuts.
• The results were used to show how meat demand varies across different states in the U.S.
• How do vegetarians and vegans differ from meat eaters?
• We explored the "food values" of Millennials and looked at how food values varied for the rich and poor.  
• Who do people trust for information about food?
• How does spending on food vary with income?
• I haven't kept good track of it, but I'd guess we've published at least a dozen academic journal articles that have used FooDS data in one way or another, including my AAEA presidential address in the AJAE, a paper with Glynn Tonsor on meat demand in AEPP, a Food Policy paper with Brandon McFadden and Norbert Wilson on GMOs, a paper on food waste with Brenna Ellison in AEPP, a paper with Brad Rickard and Brandon McFadden in the Biotechnology Journal, a paper in AEPP on GMO labels with Brandon, papers in Ecological Economics and the European Review of Agricultural Economics with Trey Malone on inattention in surveys, another paper with Trey on impact of taste, health, and safety beliefs on meat demand in JAAE, and the data is also mentioned in papers on effect of new egg laws on egg prices in a paper with Trey Malone in JARE and another one with Connor Mullally in AJAE. Marc Bellemare even used some results from FooDS in his recent AJAE paper with Jenny Nguyen on farmers markets and food safety.

Now for some trends (note: each of the graphs below shows data from at least 1,000 consumers surveyed each month for 5 years for a total of more than 60,000 observations).  Because I've discussed these results many times in the past, I'm going to let these graphs "stand on their own" without interpretation or description of how the data are collected or analyzed.

note: "average" is the average of about 16 other issues tracked in the survey

note: "average" is the average of about 16 other issues tracked in the survey

Food Values over Time

Finally, I want to say thanks to Susan Murray who did the heavy lifting every month, Bailey Norwood who helped me conceptualize the project and kept it running for the last year, Glynn Tonsor who provided intellectual capital over the course of the project, and many graduate students who provided great ideas and analysis.  Early on, funding support for the project came from the Willard Sparks Endowed Chair.  Later, the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State pitched in.  For the past several years, funding support came from a USDA-AFRI-NIFA grant.  I've had numerous conversations with Bailey (at Oklahoma State), Glynn (at Kansas State), and Trey (at Michigan State) about the future of the project, where it might "reside", and how it should change to be even more informative.  All the details are yet to be worked out, but I think there is a good chance FooDS will re-emerge in the next several months with a new "home" and focus.