I buy “organic” food because it tastes better and I can, but I feel guilty about reinforcing all the kinds of delusion and superstition and viciousness that are tied up in that label. We simply cannot feed a world population of 6.6 billion without pesticides and factory farming and GMOs and preservatives in most bread; now, and probably forever, “organic” food will remain a luxury good.
Try telling its political partisans that, though. Hyped on their belief in their own virtue, and blissfully ignorant about scale problems, they have already engineered policies that have cost thousands of lives during spot famines. The potential death toll from (especially) anti-GMO policies is three orders of magnitude higher.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Eating Organic
Eric Raymond hits it out of the park. 100% agreement (no 110% here, we're math literate):
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
13 comments:
Organic = Mark is too lazy to spray his tomato plants.
As for buying local, for some reason produce tastes better when it's trucked in from Safford AZ than some place in south America.
Aretae, I'm surprised you think he hit it out of the park. His comments on food production wreck his rant on marketing.
"We simply cannot feed a world population of 6.6 billion without pesticides and factory farming and GMOs and preservatives in most bread"
Hey, for all I know this might be true, but where are the numbers? It is a hell of a claim.
[aside: If true, it has the corollary that pesticides, GMOs and bread preservatives were a precondition for the population to grow to 6.6 billion in the first place.]
There's a long-term cost. I'd rather have soil that hasn't had decades of Roundup sprayed on it. Then there's the Roundup-resistant weed problem that the USA is getting.
The pesticide/GMO system came about to improve the yield per-farmer, since Western farm labourers cost a fair bit. It is way more profitable in the USA to have a single dude driving a tractor with a sprayer to cover a paddock of corn with chemicals than to have a team of workers do the hoeing, but it doesn't improve yields per-acre. That Fukuoka thing you posted says the opposite of Raymond; it claims highest per-acre rice yields without using checmicals.
I'm with him on the anti-vegan rant and I hate those 'no GMO' labels, too. But he messed up his rant about marketing by ranting about food production. That whole billions condemned to death thing is hilarious. If he wants to save those billions from wheat rust maybe he should recommend that wheat farmers diversify from just growing wheat. Species diversification has worked on this planet ever since there were two species.
[Now I'm going to spend the day wondering about that corollary. How do rich countries with expensive labour provide food to poor countries with cheap labour? Did the good farm land make them rich in the first place? If you do supply subsidized grain to poor countries which allows their populations to increase, are you then morally bound to keep up that food supply? What would be the impact if grains weren't subsidized in the USA and Europe? I'll be thinking immigration, protectionism and subsidies for hours. Where does libertarianism fit in here? Curses.]
Brent,
I thought it was pretty solidly established that Norman Borlaug and his green revolution, with its pesticides, fertilizers, and special (indistinguishable from GMO, but different method of breeding) strains of wheat/rice/corn are the ONLY thing that prevented the world from hitting malthusian traps near population 1-2 billion.
Rich countries provide food to poor countries via MASSIVE agricultural subsidies and protectionism. Water may be the biggest of those, but I'm not sure. The EU/USA policies on food are insane and distort the word market massively. Probably one of the best activities that could be done to help the 3rd world is to stop subsidizing 1st world farmers...thus giving sudanese farmers a market for their grain that isn't depressed by HUGE subsidies..
Really...read about Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. Without fairly specific strains of corn, wheat, rice, soy, we (the world) cannot feed our population.
"If you do supply subsidized grain to poor countries which allows their populations to increase, are you then morally bound to keep up that food supply?"
I'd argue that you're morally bound to STOP.
Let's say you set up a system whereby you and a bunch of your buddies grab guns, go out and steal money from your neighbors, then spend the money on heroin, and then take the heroin into the ghetto and give it away free to anyone who promises to vandalize the home of any of _their_ neighbors who defy the odds by going out and getting a job.
That's essentially the moral equivalent of what happens when Western countries give tax-subsidized food to the third world. They tax their own citizens, and spend the money keeping poor foreigners dependent on charity, thereby simultaneously fostering social pathology and destroying the prospect of a decent ROI for any of those foreigners who might otherwise actually grow some food of their own. How would you like to try making a living as a farmer, when your would-be customers can get food for free?
We owe the third world a big apology. But first, we owe it to them to stop making the problem WORSE.
I'm scanning the net to remind myself about Borlaug, but it is a bait-and-switch over the meaning of GMO. Borlaug produced high-yield crops. GMOs are pesticide-resistant plants owned by the same companies that produce the pesticide.
The Raymond quote listed 1) pesticides, 2) factory farming, 3) GMOs and 4) bread preservatives.
He’s pointing at these things as the cause for a population increase of billions and not mentioning the high-yield crops or the widespread deployment of machinery?
1) The problem with pesticide-resistant plants is that they go hand in hand with increased use of pesticides and you run the risk of a long-term loss of soil fertility. You spend the capital stored in the soil for the ability to kill weeds with chemicals. And you get pesticide-resistant weeds.
2) Factory farming. Battery hens and cow feedlots. I don't think so. Grains dominate this discussion.
3) GMOs. Other half of 1.
4) Bread preservative. Seems like a random shot at preservative-free bread rather than a genuine cause of population increase. But hey, maybe there’s a Wonderbread Revolution as well.
Remember that low food supplies don't prevent population growth via decreasing fertility.
It prevents population growth via dead babies.
On that basis, how can you argue that reduced food supply is "moral"?
Brent,
3. GMO is a lot bigger category than you suggest. Effectively, GMO is any NEW technique for getting genes into specific plants that we didn't ahve before. In the past, Borlaug had to use old, slow methods to get the genes he wanted into plants. Now we have GMO Tomatoes that allow Tomatoes to get some of an apple-tree's frost resistance. rather than VERY slowly breeding that, we isolated teh gene in apples that did it and dropped it into tomatoes. The difference between breeding and GMOs at this point is decades vs. months, not qualitative differences. Specific pesticide-resistant crops are only a portion of the GMO issue.
1. Michael Pollan, arch-foodie and pro-naturalist has pointed out the very substantial increase in the cost of food from pesticide-free plants vs. pesticide-used plants. BIG cost. The book (Omnivore's dilemma) is good to.
2. Ditto. Factory farms massively decrease the cost of meat. The choice for many people is meat from factory farm, or it's out of the price range.
4. Bread Preservatives. I don't know a thing about them. I know that preservative-free bread usually/often goes bad in 2-3 days, and therefore can't really handle being shipped across country, or handle significant scale-returns. I'd be willing to bet even odds that Preservative'd bread bought at least Walmart vs. National Unionized Grocery Chain (Safeway) level price decreases in bread -- 20%-ish, and decreased waste by similar amounts? And 40% increase in bread-buying dollars is worth a lot. But I admit, I haven't looked seriously at bread preservatives.
Dr. Pat,
I think that Matt was saying:
Our assistance is destroying the local farmers in the 3rd world. HUGE issue...and it's actively causing a portion of the poverty that we see in Africa by preventing folks from escaping via the most promising path (farming). As such, it's unconscionable.
As a left-lib...I'd argue that we had a moral duty to SLOWLY (10 years?) decrease price supports on American/European grain, so as to allow 3rd worlders to profit from growing food, where I'm certain they have a Ricardo-style comparative advantage.
Actually I was responding to Brent's
[aside: If true, it has the corollary that pesticides, GMOs and bread preservatives were a precondition for the population to grow to 6.6 billion in the first place.]
But now that I've re-read his comment, I see he wasn't really saying that this was a bad thing.
If you’re talking about the fuelling of the population growth, you’re talking about high-yield grains and heavy iron, and then you could get in to fertilizer. Raymond didn’t mention any of those things. He wrecked a fine point about unwillingly supporting GMO-free foods by ranting about factory farms and billions of deaths. OK, it’s a rant, but not at the level of thought of the stuff you usually point to. Aretae, your comments about Borlaug and his grain varieties are spot on, but not what Raymond said.
GMO) The population didn’t get to 6.6 billion with GMO foods. The GMO tomatoes did not do it. High-yielding hybrids did, mechanization did it too, fertilizer as well. Maybe new GMO species will increase the population to 8 or 12 billion, but they weren’t responsible for the Green Revolution. That was hybridization.
If you want to define GMO to include old-school plant hybrids then sure, it has everything since einkorn. I didn’t think that’s what you or Raymond meant, but hey, I’m a blogreader not a mindreader.
Pesticide) There’s costs and there’s yield. Borlaug’s crops are responsible for the yield. You can spray all the weeds you like and you’re not getting that level of population growth without the high-yield varieties. Reading what little I have, I’m impressed a committee was smart enough to award him the Peace Prize. When I went looking for books on the Green Revolution, I found all sorts of pro-organics texts since Green now means the opposite of what it did in the Green Revolution. I’ll keep looking. Maybe there’s a Dava Sobel-like book out there on Borlaug. [Heck, if there isn’t maybe I should write one. Maybe not.]
Factory Farms) The 6.6 billion population is not because of cow feedlots in India, it is because of high-yielding grains. Animals use a multiple of their calorific value in feedstuffs (3-5x IIRC, with the 3x being chickens and the 5x being cows) so meat lowers the number of folks the grain mountain can feed. I’m talking factory farms here, not pastured animals. Then again, we’d be lowering the number of vegans so there are good things that come out of it. Feedlots themselves are a result of high-grain yields and lower grain prices, so even without the multiplier Pareto still would point at Borlaug over feedlots. [Aside: this form of farming profits from subsidized grains and I don’t know how efficient it would be if true costs were figured in.]
Bread Preservatives) Not relevant. This is a West-centric point. Pareto kills any discussion of bread preservatives. It isn’t the cause of massive population increase.
Note: If Raymond was complaining about labels that proclaimed ‘tractor-free’ or ‘high-yielding variety free’ or even ‘fertilizer-free’ then I’d be OK with the 6.6 billion number.
Brent,
1. Big disagreement: My & ESR's claim:
GMOs is a big category, and not materially different from regular aggressive breeding...just a bit faster. Effectively, GMOs & Borlaug are same result different method. If you take this seriously (I do), then a lot of the disagreement may poof. Borlaug's stuff has been improved upon as well, since. Frequently by using GMO methods.
2. Yield drives cost, and cost is the important factor. If someone can produce stuff, but it costs too much to produce, it's equivalent (in purchasing terms) to not being able to produce it at all. Pesticides FTW.
3. Factory Farms -- Meat is better for you than bread (so sez paleo-dude). Increasing health by eating meat is a good thing, even if it's relatively crappy meat.
4. Preservatives: Agreed. Not as far as I know a population issue.
BUT...on my reread of ESR, his points still seems very strong, and rather orthogonal to your read of it.
1. Breeding is equivalent to GMO (you can't tell which is which after the fact).
2. Breeding/GMO saved/created the modern world population.
3. Most "organic" support is pure sanctimonious BS based on NO science.
4. It also happens to taste better.
5. Therefore even when buying organic, one feels guilt about supporting the products of the hippies who want to enforce policies that may be appropriate to rich folks in rich cities, but which would result in mass starvation starvation if applied on a large scale.
Roughly it's the anger of someone like me who likes the liberal goals (happy, healthy, rich people instead of current 3rd world conditions...and tastier food), and thinks that the organic movement/status game/politics is idiotic, and dangerous to 90% of the goals.
Which doesn't seem to be the way you read it.
I'm enjoying reading about this stuff. It is a part of Ag history that I haven't read much on. Thanks for taking the time to put your thoughts down.
At first I was a little surprised that you don't see what was odd about the line I quoted. I know you are a smart guy and therefore there I have to assume that your reading is consistent. I think I figured it out:
GMO means something to me that it doesn't to you. It means Roundup-Ready corn and superweeds. It means No-Till. It means legal issues with Organic certification. It means private ownership of plant DNA. GMO affects the business of agriculture in a way that plant hybridization doesn't. It is different, and it means something to me. [Note that I'm not stating a position on GMO here, just that the word has meaning.]
As you state it: "Breeding is equivalent to GMO (you can't tell which is which after the fact)"
I can totally believe that in terms of DNA - I buy that you can't tell the difference between DNA changes due to GMO or due to hybridization. But that doesn't make them equivalent in terms of farm business. There's a difference in farming techniques between the Green Revolution way and the GMO way, and you can't lay the credit for the former on GMO. That is what rang false when I read that line I quoted way back in my first comment. If you want to define GMO as all genetic modification of crops then the point becomes trivial - you need farming to feed people.
OK, enough typing. I gotta cook some animal product for dinner.
Brent,
Then we're in good shape.
ESR, and then me, were talking the biology of GMO.
You were talking the business of GMO.
Clears up the confusion nicely.
Post a Comment