I missed the big news of two days ago, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has issued a preliminary report (which I have not yet read) indicating that the European Union (EU) moratoriums on GM food crops constitute a breach of WTO trade rules.
You can read about it at ABC Online, click here also at AgBioWorld, click here, and Agribusiness Freedom, click here.
But perhaps the best commentary came from a friend in the US who emailed me:
“The WTO has rejected the anti-scientific claims that EU governments are using to defend their populist policies. This was a decision about scientific evidence with trade implications, not about trade where there is scientific uncertainty. Even the EU’s own scientists have argued that the scientific evidence strongly supports the safety of these crops.
Otherwise, the anti-GM types are essentially trying (and probably successfully) to paint this as a purely technical decision driven by and supporting WTO policies favoring globalization and oppressing local rule.
In every case where anti-GM claims have met the hard rules of evidence of a high level court rather than the rumour mongering of public opinion (or the odd local judge), they have lost, whether for Percy Schmeiser, the New Zealand Royal Commission, or now the WTO.
Greenpeace, FOE and others have had their days in court, and lost.
This is a record equaled in modern times perhaps only by those other popular forces of anti-scientific irrationality, the advocates of creationism/intelligent design.”
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Regardless of bans, many food packages will still indicate ‘GM free’. Many producers and consumers are highly concerned and demanding no GMOs. Market demands are an important factor in this issue above and beyond regulations.
The WTO decision sends a clear signal to our state Governments that their moratoria will be challenged sooner or later on the basis of lack of scientific backing.
It’s a shaky ground for a moratorium of GM crops to be based on a ‘gut’ feeeling that GM crops might be bad for you or to protect an imagined marketing advantage.
Some have argued that it is the Federal Government that has signed up on the WTO and are responsible for the safety evaluation of GM crops while the state governments have called the moratoria because they have authority over land use.
They seem to rest assured that as long as its only a moratorium that deals with where the crops can be or can’t be cultivated the Federal Government and the WTO has not got any jurisdiction.
However Tasmania has extended its moratorium to include the importation of GMOs and in particular GM canola. In doing so it is clearly overstepping the line and is leaving its moratorium on GM crops open for challenge from WTO and /or the Federal Government.
Does anyone know, of the handful of cereals that make up most of the world’s food, **how many varieties** of cultivars make up most of that production?
Typically each seed company in each country will market about a dozen distinct varieties eg AWB in Australia
http://www.awb.com.au/growers/awbseeds/productprofile/
Similar offering can be seen at Pannar in SA, and various other companies eg in North America Pioneer Dekalb
More importantly new varieties constantly to maket come from the assets in germplasm collections.
CIMMYT in Mexico is a major germplasm resource for the main cereals wheat and maize.
in 1997 the CIMMYT accessions held there were
Bread wheat 71171
Durum wheat 15490
Triticale 15200
Barley 9084
Rye 202
Wild wheat related 11794
Maize
Zea mays 17000
Tripsacum 181
Teosinte 162
Total 17,343.
Pardey et al in “Saving Seeds” Koo B and others CABI 2004
Books and papers by R Evenson published through CABI give the full story but I dont have the book out of my library at the moment. From memory China eg has some 40 or more of each of the main cereals in use.
PS total wheat accessions at CIMMYT, 122,941
PPS there are about 70 soybean varieties in use in North America. There number has risen slightly since the introduction of GM versions.
Thanks for that detribe. I ask because I gather that some protests aren’t so much concerned with GM itself, but with the centralised corporate seed ownership and distribution model (I realise this is not exclusive to GMO’s alone but GM traits can be particularly limiting).
I wonder about the security aspects of having a diminishing number of varieties, many of which are similar, particularly with seed production being increasingly centralised. One concern is the potentially devastating impact of new blights, another is terrorist targets. People worry about terrorist nuclear threats but what if terrorists were to bomb western grain stores and seed centres, particularly given the pervasive use of cultivars that don’t seed well or at all, and hybrids that don’t produce productive descendents? Is there a potential security issue going largely unremarked?
And as a seperate issue, traditional peoples are worried about corporate seed ownership disrupting their deeply entrenched cultural practices of developing and exchanging seeds. These practices form an integral part of their institutional structures and social order.
The Norwegian government has taken some action to secure a store of seed on the Island of Spitsbergen close to the North pole.
The storage facility has been labelled a “doomsday vault” designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world’s crops. It is being built to safeguard the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies.
It will be located inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost . The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors.
And it will be patrolled by polar bears.
Each of the concerns you nominate has a strong counter argument. Unfortunately those who voice those concerns don’t usually articulate the counter argument.
Briefly, Thinksy, the counter arguments include the following issues:
If corporate control is the issue, other means that inflated safty propaganda and extreme caution with innovation are more effective political solutions to the mooted problems- eg restrictive trade practices act, anti-trust laws.
Secondly, adding to the costs and time delays of regulation intereferes with free competition, and consumer choice, as only the biggest corporations can afford the costs, and developing countries are shut out by the cost hurdles.
The beneficial effects of corporate/government investment in better seeds (see R Evenson’s book CABI)need to be recognised as poverty reduction and environmentally beneficial forces that deserve encouragement (see my website End of Poverty Series gmopundit.blogspot.com)). Discouragement of investment in the developing world is bad for the poor and bad for health and wastes and and water.
There is no intrinsic connection between GM techniques and monoculture practices. In fact in practice, the reverse is true- GM trait DEPEND of convential variety suitability for success: alone they are often useless, as illustrated well in Australian cotton.Transgenics is a tool to intrinsically INCREASE the relevant genetic biodiversity.
And where did you get the idea that there is “pervasive use of cultivars that don’t seed well or at all, and hybrids that don’t produce productive descendents?”. I respectfully submit it is totally divorced from factual reality.Please give me an indication of your sources, I’m serious; I want to ilustrate where the nonsense is being created. It is the complete opposite of this situation “on the ground”.
Traditional peoples should keep whatever methods they wish to preserve. They may wish however to take advantage of newer methods,and these at the moment feed the 2 billion or so on this planet that traditional methods could never supply. The fact is that many traditional methods are a source of poverty and hunger, and that aspect should be part of the discussion too. Fortunately, in Btitain 300 years ago we left “traditional methods” behind with more productive methods.Half the world now relies on synthetic fertiliser.
Thanks for your comments. THey well illustrate that misinformation about this issue is circulating among intelligent people and that supression of free debate and contrary argument to reveal this information is a serious problem. Whether this vacuum is due ignorance or deliberate spin I do not know, but it is clearly the rule that these contrary arguments I am quicky typing iut (without much English finesse, I’m sorry) are generally not addressed by the critics of GM technology.Why are they avoiding them? – well you tell me.
oooh. Spelling corrections needed due to lack of breakfast coffee and arthritis in the typing fingers:
other means thaN
wastes Land and water
I am quickly typing out
That’s better (Ill leave the others in!)
WTO Rulings and Conclusions
Apparently some one has leaked the document of the WTO ruling on biotech crops. . You can view twenty pages of it at
http://www.tradeobservatory.org/library.cfm?refid=78475
This doc can help focus debate on WTO to what they actually decided and how they actually decided it, rather than the PR spin on their decision.
detribe I wasn’t denying that GM’s can offer important benefits. Aside from the topic of traditional peoples’ cultural habits, I wasn’t repeating anything that I’d heard or read so feel free to educate me and me alone! As I indicated above, I was just wondering and asking. Actually I was surmising about the potential security risks of relying on bought seeds (how many years’ worth stored in bunkers?) to maintain high yields. I haven’t read anything on this particular issue. I had however recently read and promptly forgotten about the Norwegian seed bank.
On the matter of not seeding well or producing productive descendents, I realised as I posted my comment that I had mixed several points rather messily. I was clumsily referring to the movement away from seed saving to seed purchasing. And first generation hybrids as I understand it are often developed to have valuable characteristics that aren’t present in the second generation which is more heterogeneous and is less productive or has less useful characteristics as a food crop. Therefore dependence on companies to keep up seed supplies.
I wasn’t arguing for a blanket protection of traditional farming methods either, although I am aware of research in LDC’s showing that small-scale subsistence farmers achieve the highest yields per unit of land and per unit of inputs, ie exceeding the productivity of industrial farming activities in the same countries. Labour intensive techniques may be more appropriate to growing food crops in LDC’s, labour saving technologies in Aust.
Friends,
I am a member of the last generation on the North American continent to have learned, from those who actually practiced “self-sufficient” farming, what it really entails. Today, what they did is glamorized as “traditional” farming, but with the travails and tragedies of those methods, the farmers embraced new technologies as fast as they could afford them. To abbreviate, I’ll just say, they found “traditional” tech deadly.
In one sense, “traditional” farming is quite robust–but to find that attractive, you must first adopt a “survivalist” mentality, i.e., civilization has collapsed and you are thrust from Eden and made to live by the sweat of your brow. So you won’t die if you can sweat.
What we now have in agriculture is a rather intricate interdependence among those who supply inputs, grow crops, and consume the results. The nouveau phrase is “corporate ecology,” and from what I’ve seen of how the phrase is used, it fits.
I’ll build a bit on that metaphoric phrase and admit, in only the most general terms, this ‘ecology’ can be damaged in any number of ways. And as a human creation, it is like a work of art; it is vulnerable to vandals. That’s the problem with being at the top of the food chain for a long time; your predators are the same species, so of course they understand you *very* well.
Claims about things such as inherent difficulties in the narrowing of germplasm are quite nice, but easily handled. We’ve dealt with them before, and will again. But agriculture is a human invention, and ultimately, the only credible threats to agriculture are of human origin. And there *are* vandals out there.
Schiller.
It’s worth making a couple of distinctions:
If a culture is allowed to preserve some cultural practices that they value, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they have to be stuck with unchanging traditional farming methods. (eg peoples that swap seeds do so to continually develop new strains and maintain a diversity of strains, so they might welcome new varieties if they can freely cross and swap the seeds)
The use of labour-intensive farming methods in LDCs and the practice of small-scale farming doesn’t necessarily require old traditional practices. (Ag research for small-scale farmers is a very different kettle of fish to research for industrial farmers. We can have both models in the world, and both can continue to adapt and modernise).
Traditional farmers have historically experimented with new methods and crops, hence we’ve arrived at modern farming today which is a mix of old and new. However research into the needs of subsistence farmers in LDCs has shown that they’re highly risk adverse. They simply don’t have any surplus resources or safety nets to encourage them to experiment or take risks with new practices or new varieties. Introducing modern techniques for these farmers can demand comprehensive field tests on-site prior to take-up, and the provision of safety nets and enabling factors such as micro-loans and the recognition and protection of the farmers’ property rights.
Thinksy’s comments
“And first generation hybrids as I understand it Therefore dependence on companies to keep up seed supplies.”
The point is that the seed companies allow a boost to productivity over what the farmers can achieve with their own seeds. The historic proof of this is that in America, (1920-1960) corn farmers voluntarily gave up producing their own seed because of the economic advantages offered to them by the US seed companies. Positioning this new technology “as making farmers dependant on seed companies” is ignoring the advantages they may gain from buying seed (and being rather patronising towards clever people who can make their own choices). Where are they to get productivity gains if they miss out on the opportunity from buying commercial seed? From Food Handouts? From retreating from modernity? They can allways stay at their original low productivity by using their own saved seed. That’s their worst option, staying where they are by saving their seed. The progeny of the commercial seed will do about as well (or badly) as their original seed.
Getting past Objectionable content block in stages
contd
By the way, most small-holder farmers in Southern Africa by commercial seed. Commecialised seed operations are not a new system introduced with GMOs. And about 50% of productivity improvement 1965-1995 in developing countries’ farming came from introducing scientifically bred modern varieties.
Ill say that again, 50% of agricultural progress in most of the developing world since 1965.
It the basis of the Asian Economic Miracle, and you are arguing against it?
URL DELETED FIND BOOK AT GOOGLE SCHOLAR
Crop Variety Improvement and Its Effect on Productivity
edited by Robert E Evenson, D Gollin 2003
The whole process is an example of specialisation of labour. You might like the freedom to “not to be forced to buy” manufactured good such as cars, computers TVs, and washing machines, you could be freed from “having to buy them” by making them yourself, but you’d be much poorer.
That would be your own choice. But why do you advocate keeping others poor by denying them the opportunities for more prosperity?. The poor who don’t have the advantages you take for granted might see things very differently.
“I am aware of research in LDC’s showing that small-scale subsistance farmers achieve the highest yields per unit of land and per unit of inputs, ie exceeding the productivity of industrial farming activities in the same countries.” Please cite the source. This may be true in some circumstances, but the much bigger problem is poor crop results for subsistance farms – I would worry more you that you might be forcing extreme poverty on others.
“Labour intensive techniques may be more appropriate to growing food crops in LDC’s, labour saving technologies in Aust. ” The women who do all the backbreaking work in Africa may disagree with you. The Zulu people I talk to tell me they like the benefits to family life from labour reducing techniques.
I readily do admit there are some risks involved for developing farmers taking up new technology,(higher risk and but higher returns?) and the following URL is a reasonable discussion of them. I argue we don’t help farmers in developing countries untill we at least tackle the topic at the level of the following URL.
http://www.checkbiotech.org/root/index.cfm?fuseaction=news&doc_id=12209&start=1&control=226&page_start=1&page_nr=101&pg=1
To finish Thinsky – I’m really interested on where you get your agricultural views from. Ive asked once already, but didnt get a reply. Could you outline it? Generalities would be enough.
detribe I started by wondering about potential vulnerabilities in current practices, particularly in seed production and distribution and the extent of the variety in key cultivars. You questioned my sources on that. In response I said simply that these weren’t informed views, simply that it occurred to me to question the security of this situation. Now however we’ve drifted onto a somewhat different set of issues.
My initial, uninformed question was about the security of the ag system that produces most of the world’s food. This is a different issue to whether or not current crops have greatly expanded yields. In fact the more heavily we rely on a highly productive region or narrow number of crops, the more important it is to build redundancy into the system. What are the potential vulnerabilities in global food production? How resilient is the system? How resistent is it to blights (recent eg = bananas), political disturbances, terrorist attacks, the pace of climate change, etc – ie, could a series of normal and freak events have a significant negative impact on world food production? Is it diverse enough? Do you know of a thorough risk and impact assessment of these issues?
I said above that modern techniques/inputs can be adopted alongside some traditional or culturally preferred practices. Please get it clear that I’m NOT arguing that modern ag techniques haven’t raised productivity or aren’t important. I’m NOT arguing that modern varieties shouldn’t be used or that farmers should not buy seeds. I am suggesting that diversity in agricultural practices within a given area or diversity among responses to common agricultural situations may provide greater long-term resilience and security in food production. As to my views: out of interest I’ve been reading academic articles on the social and economic aspects of agricultural and general development in LDCs and NICs. I had a quick look but didn’t find the source on productivity – I will post it if I see it. (There tends to be distinct productivity patterns in each of latin Amer, Asia and Africa).
Labour-intensive (as opposed to capital-intensive) small-scale farming is not necessarily the same thing as “backbreaking work”. I mentioned above the “provision of safety nets and enabling factors”. These, with property rights, could help African women in particular. Rural development that involves the labour of the masses in food production and a range of associated rural services is important in crowded LDC’s where rapid urbanisation outpaces employment opportunities, food demand exceeds supply, rural areas are impoverished and often lack essential infrastructure and public services (which are expensive and which urban areas are reluctant to fund). Development efforts that have neglected to strengthen and encourage employment in rural areas have failed (unbalanced economy, widening income inequality, strong urban growth and demand pushing food prices beyond the reach of rural masses, leading to unwieldly tax and redistribution efforts and more rural to city migration).
Eg rather than substituting back-breaking labour with labour-replacing large-scale industrial machinery, say a large tractor that does the work of many African ladies who then join the large mass of unemployed and underemployed, instead a local could rent plough animals or small-scale machinery – bolstering livelihoods with rural services and local markets. Such an enterprise involves risk for which safety nets are important. One such family fell into extreme poverty when their young bull died at a critical time, not long after they’d bought it.
“the much bigger problem is poor crop results for subsistance farms”. Yes, exactly. Crop failures and degraded land. Technological advances in practices and inputs are very important. To benefit smallholder and subsistence farmers and address high unemployment in LDCs, ag research can focus on ways to increase, not reduce, labour employment. Successful green revolution practices in LDCs are often labour-intensive.
From Meier and Rauch “Leading issues in economic development” ch VII ‘Agriculture’: “Agriculture has been the weakest link in the development chain. Industry in LDCs has grown at around 7 percent per annum, . . . the picture everywhere is bright until one turns to agriculture” Population growth is clearly a problem so that export surpluses of food are now import surpluses. “..the technological revolution in tropical food production has only just begun, research in the colonial days having been confined almost but not exclusively to commercial crops exportable to the world market”.
David and Thinksy,
I am familiar with what Thinksy is referring to when he says, “I am aware of research in LDC’s showing that small-scale subsistence farmers achieve the highest yields per unit of land and per unit of inputs, ie exceeding the productivity of industrial farming activities in the same countries.”
These figures are based on an agronomic model advocated by Vandana Shiva and others, i.e., that farming is “part of the ecosystem,” and therefore should sustain the “biodiversity” it exhibits. Therefore, the entire output of a given field is considered to be *all* its production–in raw terms of total biomass. A “holistic” approach to statistics, you might call it.
Accordingly, per-acre output figures include weeds. To the extent that weeds are more successful than food crops in producing biomass, “biodiverse” fields in LDCs with poor weed control will often outperform conventional farming methods.
This quaint approach to agriculture rather pointedly ignores the fact that the farmer’s main battle is *against* biodiversity. This is seen not only in the uniformity and reliability of the seed they select, but also in the hours of labor dedicated to removing non-crop plants from the field.
The approach also smuggles into the discussion the widespread presupposition–one overtly championed by Greenpeace–that human welfare is secondary to the needs of the environment.
Schiller.
Schiller.
No Schiller I wasn’t referring to ecosystem or biodiversity models by Shiva or similar. But prompted by your comment, I did a quick search: Shiva is concerned for human welfare in India where new farming practices don’t satisfy needs (eg weeds providing an important subsistence crop) or don’t increase profits. To my mind, that doesn’t mean that modern practices/inputs can’t be used, but they may need to be adapted or introduced with complementary activities to ensure the livelihood needs of the farmers and the community are met.
Extracts follow from http://gos.sbc.edu/s/shiva2.html
It will also destroy the biodiversity that is the sustenance and livelihood base of rural women. What are weeds for Monsanto are food, fodder and medicine for Third World Women.
In Indian agriculture women use 150 different species of plants for vegetables, fodder and health care. In West Bengal 124 “weed” species collected from rice fields have economic importance for farmers.[6] In the Expana region of Veracruz, Mexico, peasants utilise about 435 wild plant and animal species of which 229 are eaten.[7]
However, while biotechnology is projected as increasing food production four times, small ecological farms have productivity hundreds of time higher than large industrial farms based on conventional farms.[9]
Extracts follow from http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Heroes/Vandana_Shiva.html
‘When Third World farmers began to grow single crops, plants that for centuries had provided communities with essential vitamins were suddenly declared “weeds” and doused with pesticides. In some villages in India blindness increased severely because the so-called “weeds” had been the community’s only source of Vitamin A. . . Genetic changes to shorten the height of grain and increase yield led to a scarcity of straw; that meant less humus, depleted soils and eventually fewer grazing animals.
The end result of all this was not more but less food. Reducing the financial support for farmers will only make it easier for multinational corporations to tighten their grip on global markets.
‘In India I’ve discovered that farmers can grow more grain and lose money. In the group of farmers I worked with those planting their own seeds earned 3,000 rupees a year. Others planting Cargill’s “new improved” hybrid seed netted only 297 rupees after the harvest because most of their earnings were used to pay for inputs like fertilizer and pesticides.’
On productivity (esp. yield per area): Chayanov (1926) first documented that small farms produce more output per cropped area in the Russian agriculture and it’s been puzzled over since. Agricultural production policies commonly assume constant returns to scale across various LDCs but this might not apply to all or most situations.
‘Agrarian structure and productivity in developing countries’ Berry, R. Albert and Cline WR. ILO. (from abstract:) “Comparison of the impact of agrarian structure on agricultural production and agricultural employment in developing countries – comprises case studies of relationships between farm size, labour intensiveness, land utilization, agrarian reform and technological change in Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, West Pakistan, India and Malaysia, concludes that small farms are more productive than larger farms, and falls within the framework of the WEP.”
In “Testing Competing Explanations for the Inverse
Productivity Puzzle” (plot-level studies in India:) “In our first estimation, an increase of 1% in the cropped area is associated with a 33% decrease in the output per acre. When we control for observed land quality, this coefficient is reduced to 18%”
From Celso Furtado ‘Economic development in Latin America’, minifundios in some countries yield more than double the value per cultivated ha than the latifundios (more than 10 times when considering total farmland held). In Brazil in the 90s, farms under 10 ha earned $85 per ha, the largest farms only $2 per ha (this large discrepancy is probably due to underutilised land).
Extracts follow from: ‘Is Small Beautiful? Farm Size, Productivity and Poverty in Asian Agriculture’ Shenggen Fan and Connie Chan-Kang 2003
In the past decade, agricultural production has become more diversified into high value commodities, for example from grains to cash crop, from crop to livestock and horticultural products, in which small farms may have comparative advantages. Moreover, large size farms and input intensive practices (fertilizer, pesticides, machinery) have led to the degradation of natural resources and the environment. When these externalities are considered, large farms are no longer considered efficient.
. .as average size of farm increased in Japan and South Korea, both land and labor productivities have increased, with a much faster growth in labor than land productivity. Moreover total factor productivity has shown a declining trend in Japan. On the other hand, in China, India, and Thailand, as farm size declines due to increased rural population, land productivity has increased much faster than labor productivity. In the case of China and India, TFP continued to increase. This all suggests that there might be an inverse relationship between farm size and land productivity and TFP, but a positive relationship between farm size and labor productivity.
It is true that small farms are efficient in terms of land productivity. However, as demonstrated above, the relationship between farm size and labor productivity is not clearly established.
Farms of less than 2 hectares constituted 78% of the total number of farms in India but contributed nonetheless to 41% of the national grain production. (in 1990/91?)
Assuncao and Ghatak: Berry and Cline (1979) compute the ratio of productivity of small farms to the largest farms. The index is 5.63 in Northeast Brazil, 2.74 in Punjab, Pakistan, and 1.48 in Muda, Malaysia. Using the ICRISAT Indian village surveys, Rosenzweig and Binswanger (1993) show that the profit rates for poorer farmers are systematically higher.
The explanations vary:
“Can unobserved heterogeneity in farmer ability explain the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity” Assuncao and Ghatak
Evidence suggests that there is an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity in agriculture. The usual explanation for this is based on diminishing returns, and the presence of
frictions in the land, credit, labor or insurance markets that prevent the efficient allocation of land. For example, Eswaran and Kotwal (1986) examine economies in which labor is subject to supervision problems and land provides better access to credit. . . Can we still observe an inverse relationship between farm size
and productivity? We show that with endogenous occupational choice and heterogeneity with respect
to farming skills, the answer is, surprisingly, yes and follows from a simple self-selection argument. The result is, of course, strengthened if there are diminishing returns.
. .Our analysis shows that the well-known inverse relationship between farm size and productivity can be a result of imperfect credit markets and heterogeneity in farmer skills even if there are no diminishing returns with respect to any input.
And: Testing Competing Explanations for the Inverse Productivity Puzzle
Juliano J. Assuncao Luis H. B. Braido 2005
also “On price risk and the inverse farm-size productivity relationship” 1993 Barrett
also: Why are farms so small? Nancy L. Johnson and Vernon W. Ruttan
On your other question that I forgot to answer earlier: protection sought via technical means (and trademarks) to limit the activities of the farmers. The source I read recently was Bisby et al 1995 “Genetic diversity as a component of biodiversity”:
“modern cultivars may be populations where some traits have been fixed and are maintained by mass selection, or increasingly, F1 hybrids . . . allows a high level of homogeneity of the crop, and a technical protection for the breeder, as planting the seeds of a second generation will lead to segregation of characters and the growing of a heterogeneous crop” etc
Thinksy,
Thanks for your considered reply. May I make the same plea as you. Don’t misunderstand my responses to your comments as being hostile, but consider them as throwing the same searchlight of skepticism back on your points as you do on mine. There are many reasons for me to be skeptical,and the tragic effects of European NGOs on African food policies in Zambia these last years for instance are fully sufficient to justify hard criticism. Eminent scientist (Peter Raven, from memory) has drawn attention to “Crimes Against Humanity” in this context, and his position is one I support.
Good policies are inevitably a trade-off between conflicting priorities, a trade off only discovered by hard honest debate. Unfortunately social sciences and biological science don’t always get woven together well and there some really weak arguments coming in this arena – Vandana Shiva perhaps being the best instance of unhelpful opinion.
Even higher quality discussions such as history professor James C. McCann’s recent interesting “Maize and Grace” Harvard University Press, on African maize, are amazingly naive and out of date on the agricultural science (and the constant undercurrent of Marxist ideology is a little worrying).
My view is that both the social science and the biology science are to much confined to talking to themselves – with the cloistered scientists being largely unaware of how much nonsense is being spread “out there”, and the social sciences too little challenged to be more realist and rigorous, so full of inane opinions like “We have plenty of food” in the face of massive challeges to food, land, water, transportation, capital, infrastructure, and disease, all connected to one another, but with the connections constantly denied by people who call themselves social scientists. Its a true intellectual scandal that has to be confronted.
When I confront it, I mostly get refusal to address the key issues. Denial. These people I’m referring to have read Amartya Sen perhaps, but misunderstood what he says.
For what it’s worth, I suspect that many of the non-intensive farming approaches are very valuable, if not essential in many situations. Unfortunately, in with the genuinely open minded and professional low intensity approaches, there are many frankly dangerously misguided zealots out there, with not practical experience in farming but lots of theoretical opinions based on faith, not evidence. Greenpeace and Shiva are good examples.
I leave you with these likely benefits of commercial seeds:
Higher yields, stress resistance, disease resistance, tolerance of higher planting densities
The full crop available for use
Choice of varieties in response to seasonal weather events
Higher seed viability from commercial seed treatments like drying, coating, fungicide
Even perhaps in the future, herbicide coats to kill Striga
Less labour for women.
I’m not convinced that labour generation per se is the best priority for ag innovation. I’m not saying capital intensive changes are all good, just the presumption that increased labour in the fields is a desirable outcome can only be made by people who don’t have to do the work themselves or depend on subsistence farming for a living. I would argue that poor farmer’s income growth and farm productivity improvement is far more important, and that suggest decreases in labour efficiency conflict with these. In short, you are again broaching policies that keep destitute people poor.
Thinsky,
Go to the IFPRI website. Search for reports on India. You will find that the last 20 years, the Green revolution is associated with rises in rural incomes, falls in percent people living in extreme poverty, and increases in food security in India. Now explain to me why Shiva’s opinions should allow us to discard these benefits, and also explain why Shiva doesn’t mention these sources, any why this is not incompetence or irresponsibility on her part. Also why do you favour Shiva’s view over academically respectable academic economists?
One brief point. The Green revolution started at a time of food crisis and famine threats in India. The best ecologist in the world Paul Erhlich had established it was a lost cause. This is the context of agtech in India in the 1960s. Are you saying Thinsky, that Paul Erhlich was wrong? And that you know better how this lost cause should have been managed, with all the benefits of hindsight. ie That you know how traditional approaches would have coped with this crisis, better than Ehrlich and the Indian farming system knew?
On productivity (esp. yield per area): Chayanov (1926) first documented that small farms produce more output per cropped area in the Russian agriculture and it’s been puzzled over since.
An subsequent events showed that collective farms in USSR were a disaster,
#Small farms: Correlation does not establish cause:
Small farms Need more income per hectare for suvival and will choose more profitable high value lower volume crops to survive.
There will not be a market for all farms to produce higher value crops, some farms have to produce them.
Small farms are likely to be in earlier colonised areas with the best fertile well watered land.
With labour intensive farms, a smaller farm may be easier to manage.
The studies need to establish how many of the samaller farms are using better modern varietiess too.
. .as average size of farm increased in Japan and South Korea, both land and labor productivities have increased, with a much faster growth in labor than land productivity. Moreover total factor productivity has shown a declining trend in Japan. On the other hand, in China, India, and Thailand, as farm size declines due to increased rural population, land productivity has increased much faster than labor productivity. In the case of China and India, TFP continued to increase. This all suggests that there might be an inverse relationship between farm size and land productivity and TFP, but a positive relationship between farm size and labor productivity.
#But R. Evenson has looked at this in statistical detail and in China 50% of this TFP growth in China is due to breeding better plant varieties.Similar resuls in other counries over several crops.
(And by the way, in China crop breeding is a government activity, and the objections to GM mixed with commerce dont apply).
Using the ICRISAT Indian village surveys, Rosenzweig and Binswanger (1993) show that the profit rates for poorer farmers are systematically higher.
#Thats good, it compensates them a bit for their smaller land holdings
Overall, Its great to publicise the empirical findings and the questions they raise.
What are the firm conclusions these reports establish for technological methods? As I said several times, R Evenson has looked at this thoroughly.
One of his empirical finding is unexpected finding with irrigation and TFP improvement.
d
detribe you keep misrepresenting me. eg “Also why do you favour Shiva’s view over academically respectable academic economists?” etc. This question misrepresents me. I never previously sought to read Shiva’s work. As you can see I’ve been drawing on the proper academic stuff, definitely not opinion pieces or one-sided popular works. I was aware of Shiva and she may have some solid reasons for her concerns but I’m not familiar enough with her arguments to endorse or reject her. It was Schiller that raised Shiva.
You keep suggesting that I’m discounting green rev but I repeat again, I am not. I’m fully aware that it has raised productivity in asia (and there are other issues in Africa). Nor was I recommending “decreases in labour efficiency”! Growing populations on finite land areas, along with degraded land, more marginal land being farmed etc mean that yes I agree that we need productivity improvements (in yields per cultivated area, per labour unit and per inputs and improvements in small-scale farmers incomes too). I contend that LDC farmers can benefit from productivity improvements appropriate to small-scale farming and the development of associated rural institutions, local markets, services and infrastructure. ie: Labour enhancing technology for labour augmenting productivity improvements, NOT labour replacing technologies in LDCs.
You continue to claim that I’m “broaching policies that keep destitute people poor” but in fact I’m concerned with the opposite. If you will
a) entertain the idea (from the references above) that the land productivity of small and medium farms in LDCs can be as high or higher than large industrial-scale farms, and
b) accept that there are many millions of unemployed and underemployed people in rural areas with few employment opportunities, growing disparities between rural and urban areas that LDCs find difficult to manage, and urbanisation at rates beyond employment growth, and
c) that human development indexes recognise livelihoods (the right to work and opportunities to earn entitlements) as being a key path to address poverty,
then it follows that rural labour employment and labour-enhancing technologies are important.
I have various other articles I could reference on the importance of rural labour employment and domestic markets as a pathway to a more robust and resilient economy; and the combined issues of entitlements, the food gap, increasing inequality between rural and city areas, and rural institutional development but well, phew(!) and I expect that you only skimmed my earlier comments. I too am writing this in the spirit of a learning exchange, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble of referencing my sources and answering your questions above!!
Let’s come back to where this started. detribe I started by wondering about potential vulnerabilities in current practices, particularly in seed production and distribution and the extent of the variety in key cultivars. My initial, uninformed question was about the security and long-term viability of the ag system that produces most of the world’s food. This is a different issue to whether or not current crops have greatly expanded yields. In fact the more heavily we rely on a highly productive region or narrow number of crops, the more important it is to build redundancy into the system. What are the potential vulnerabilities in global food production? How resilient is the system? How resistent is it to blights, political disturbances, terrorist attacks, the pace of climate change, etc – ie, could a series of normal and freak events have a significant negative impact on world food production? Is it diverse enough to adapt and cope? If you know of a thorough risk and impact assessment of these long-term security issues I would like to know about it.
“#Small farms: Correlation does not establish cause” True. My points above mainly probed the r’ship between farm size and yields (as you questioned) and less about explaining the causes.
There are differing views on causal factors, some of which I did mention, but the causes are hard to establish.
“What are the firm conclusions these reports establish for technological methods?” In short, the causes and I think the technology remain controversial. A factor is the huge gap and perpetual lag between technologies that could be used and those are made available and supported. I’m considering the practical series of steps that could get from A to B towards C (ideal theoretically possible situation). Given that the large number of small-scale farms play an important role in ag output and that these small farms will persist for the foreseeable future, their important contribution should be addressed.
You continue to claim that I’m “broaching policies that keep destitute people poor” but in fact I’m concerned with the opposite.
Thats good and I bever imaged that you would inted to do that, what I’m raising is the point that your are unaware that some of your proposals may, inadvertantly, cause the opposite on what you intend.
If you will
a) entertain the idea (from the references above) that the land productivity of small and medium farms in LDCs can be as high or higher than large industrial-scale farms, and
# Yes, but small or medium scale does not necessarly mean that new plant varieties are not adopted: GM technology to a first approximation is scale neutral- and your assumption that GM equates with “industrial” farming is questionable also. Small holder can benefit from technological innovation, and infact may benefit more in the developing world because many practices (pest control for instance) are so bad.
b) accept that there are many millions of unemployed and underemployed people in rural areas with few employment opportunities, growing disparities between rural and urban areas that LDCs find difficult to manage, and urbanisation at rates beyond employment growth, and
Yes Im well aware of this.
c) that human development indexes recognise livelihoods (the right to work and opportunities to earn entitlements) as being a key path to address poverty,
then it follows that rural labour employment and labour-enhancing technologies are important.
Its here where we part ways. Contradictory as it may seem, efforts to create labour rather than improve productivity are unlikely to improve farmer or worker income. Its productivity enhancement that will improve welfare, and there empirical support for this. I doubt whether we will finish this discussion here, so I wont go on and on, but I end this for by stating that emphasis on creating labour rather than improving productivity is problematical, and that increasing productivity, by flow on effects, can create employment in other areas by increasinsing disposable income. There is so much to be said, but people with little experience in the economics of innovation are unlikely to fully address the key issues.
Historically all the wealthy countries have moved labour off the farm into other activities this way, and a full examination of those transitions, and the demographic transitions associated with them is worthy of close attention. What I am suggesting that the easy logic you apply is missing a lot.
But no matter, its a debate that will continue for quite some time.
To round up Thinksy
Here are some of my sources via GMO Pundit
Farm Productivity and Poverty examined.
http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2005/11/improved-farmer-income-is-much-more.html
http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2005/12/end-of-poverty-part-i-positives.html
http://gmopundit.blogspot.com/2006/01/end-of-poverty-part-ix-blogging-world.html
Thinksy,
I do believe I finally get your drift when you say, “What are the potential vulnerabilities in global food production? How resilient is the system?”
Unfortunately, these and related questions can’t ever be fully answered. How does one plan for a disaster? A disaster is, by definition, something you are not prepared for, and that is because it is a surprise. The only way I know of to prepare for surprises is to expect them and be willing to respond creatively.
It’s like demanding tests for the “unknown side-effects” of GM crops. How does one devise a test to detect unknown effects? It would be, literally, “the unknown test.”
Thinksy, I admire your acknowledgement that rural/human development issues are complex. Too few notice how difficult they truly are and therefore have little context to work with. Unfortunately, the ag biotech field has become so contentious that many lies are masqueraded as fact and utmost care in whom to rely on is essential.
With hopes that all your surprises are good ones,
Regards,
Schiller.
“efforts to create labour rather than improve productivity” – these don’t have to be entirely mutually exclusive, compatibilites exist. ie labour enhancing technology for labour augmenting productivity improvements, NOT labour replacing technologies.
I have not said that GM = industrial farming. Indeed, I’ve repeated that modern techniques can be used alongside some traditional and cultural practices.
Easy logic? Hardly. Considering the many faceted social and economic issues and the various approaches that have not worked to date, one of the now increasingly acknowledged problems with previous development efforts has been the urban bias at the neglect of the rural populace.
“Historically all the wealthy countries have moved labour off the farm into other activities this way”. Yes, during the agricultural development of the now developed countries, the proportion of the population engaged in agricultural activities was proportionate to the contribution that those agricultural activities made to GDP. Conversely, this is highly disproportionate in LDC’s today, ie income inequality is increasing between the underemployed rural masses and the rapidly urbanising centres. Farmers aren’t going to increase their disposable income by being replaced with machines. Land reforms and structural improvements to provide new jobs to unskilled labour simply can’t happen fast enough and cannot succeed without a healthy rural backbone because masses of impoverished unskilled people, in cold hard terms, amount to serious economic inefficiencies and underutilised capital.
Thanks Schiller. If anyone can respond to that doozy of a question “What are the potential vulnerabilities in global food production? How resilient is the system?” over the long-term I’m very interested in hearing from them. As the saying goes, by failing to plan. . .
Thinksy
I agree with you that there has been an urban bias in development, but do not see rural productivity improvements as being an urban bias.
Probably we are going to have to agree to disagree for the moment to avoid boring other readers.
I think the lesson of the Luddites should be taken seriously (this is not a slur on you Thinsky, but we need to remember how they were misguided). We face change whether we like it or not, and the environmental challenges of agriculture imply great change will occur.Productivity improvement is inherently being involved in being resilient in the face of that change.
As far as the question of vulnerabilities in agriculture the question is too big. Almost all agricultural research is relevant. A good starting discussion is given in Gordon Conway’s great little book, The Doubly Green Revolution (Penguin 1997), especially chapter 9, Sustainable Agriculture.
More rapid breeding techniques address that vulnerability. Research on stress resistant crops address that vulnerability. Research on disease addresses that vulnerability. Genomics addresses vulnerability. Transgenics addresses that topic too. Just where do you want to start. Poverty reduction addresses it too.
GM basically is a tool for increasing relevant crop diversity and hopefully resilience. Hybrid formation – which Thinsky mentoned in the context of commercial exploitation – also increases crop diversity and genetic resilience, so by opposing commecial hyprids, one is opposing a major tool for promoting resiliance. The mechanism is called heterosis or hybrid vigour. (Search hybrid vigo(u)r at GMO Pundit as a start to discussion). Thats how hybrids boost yield in the F1 generation by enabling greater diversity in the variety genotype. But oddly, the commercial seed company haters never mention this, as it would ruin the anti-monoculture PR spin.
What doesn’t help resiliance is politicking that slows down technology development in developing countries. For that we can thank Greenpeace and associated NGOs for their good intentions but bad consequences.
Thinksy.
Last year I actually got out in Africa and talked with subsistence farmers and this season I’m helping some continue to try new labour saving technologies to grow maize more productively. That is I get in there and help subsistence farmers experiment.
One of my Zulu farmer contacts Rabie Mntungwa had interesting things to say about labour productivity.
Rabie and his family (9 children) hold 16 hectares of hilly farmland near the Swazi border in Zwa-Zulu Natal. They only cropped 6 hectares maize 2004-2005 as its “so much work”. They do it all by hand. No truck, no tractor, no mechanical hoe.
With less labour needed for better yields from new technology he says -” next year I’ll plant more- the full 16 I hope – because it’s worth the effort. I hope to then buy a 4×4 ” (4 wheel drive in SthEfrican).
Thus his family farm output is “labour limited”. More labour productivity means more output from the same amount of hard manual (and womenual) work, and more family income. Of course there is more risk, especially when there are more hectares sown. Droughts are the biggest problems.
I’m personally helping Rabie and other Zulu’s, and several Xhosa, with next year’s crop through “Sow the Good Seed” Foundation in a very direct material way. I buy them inputs for one hectare per family. I’m always looking out for fellow enthusiasts for helping similar farmers by underwriting the cost of inputs. Just email me if anyone is interested.
detribe—AT—–gmail—DOT—com
This has been a good exchange detribe, thankyou. The only issue I have is where you insist on attributing motivations or oversights to me that aren’t correct.
eg in no way have I argued for a cessation or a reduction in technological advances. I’d like to see more research, field trials and dissemination of technologies for farmers – technologies that are appropriate and useful to farmers in LDC’s, according to the structure of those LDC agricultural segments and their cultural preferences.
Africa has hundreds of millions of smallscale subsistence farmers. In many Asian countries, around 85-90% of farms are less than 5 ha. In latin American 36-78% of farms are less than 5 ha, and these are far more productive than the latifundios. Smallholders make a crucial contribution to agricultural output. The trend is actually towards small farms diminishing in size and growing in number (due to population pressures and govt land reforms) so we need appropriate, highly targeted technologies to improve total factor productivity for these farmers (regardless of what we believe to be the best farm size). Bolstering small farms and associated rural services is a key step to establishing a robust domestic economy.
I arrive at this position from having read papers on the scientific ag extension efforts in LDC’s and socioeconomic assessments of past development attempts and the changing developing scene. David your comments do not indicate that you yourself have been reading such papers recently, but I respect that fact that you are involved in this industry.
btw yes I’m aware of hybrid vigour. Re: the hybridisation benefits that you raised, there are also potential disadvantages because many “hybrids . . are inferior to either parent” and “is often associated with breakdown of finely tuned gene complexes and with developmental instability”. You can arrive at an outbreeding depression or coadaptation. I say this not to extend a debate on hybridisation (which can also act as an evolutionary process), but only to point out that there are pros as well as cons.
Re your response that “vulnerabilities in agriculture the question is too big”. Oh, agric security, development of LDCs, human rights, diminishing diversity in human cultures and languaged, conservation of biodiversity, climate change, resilient energy policies . . . all of these issues are big and difficult but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to understand them and addressing them if we can! I will continue to read and think about these issues as well. cheers for now then!
that’s good stuff (africa & inputs). I spent a little time among farms in central america where they were predominantly limited by soil nutrients (and ability to buy fertilisers). You will note that I have been saying that productivity increases are necessary and important, but the scale, the method, the target, the technology and the cultural fit is important too.
Thinks,
I think we are approaching the same summit from different faces of the mountain.
My apologies for needing to ask aggressive questions if the questions dissect views you don’t hold, but no apologies for the questions themselves. You sorted them out with firm courtesy. The truth speaks for itself, and its obvious that you’re contributing thoughtful commentary.
As far as commercial hybrids, a lot of effort goes into breeding them so they are superior in agricultural performance.
David and Thinksy,
There is an unsettling undercurrent to this entire discussion, and that is the notion that we should conduct studies to see what technologies are appropriate for farmers. Farmers are well-equipped and highly motivated to discover and choose what works best for them.
If you want to find out what technologies are best suited for farmers in varying circumstances, give them access to the full array of available technologies and let them choose. Then sit back and observe the result. I submit that anything less than that may well be morally reprehensible.
Schiller
Dear Schiller,
I have a similar response, yet untyped, due to Thinkys excellent subsequent responses, to an earlier remark by Thinksy that we should plan for the future. (and Thinsky should elaborate where this doesn’t quite capture his/her opinion).
My point is we can’t PLan exactly as we don’t have enough information about the future to Plan precisely. If Central Planning is a Failure, Future Planning is a Disaster.
We can however invest in resources (knowledge, techniques, portfolio of options, infrastructure, networks, contacts like this website) to give communities and regions the resilience, flexibility, and agility to respond to emerging challenges appropriately.
The blockages to such a resilient resources asset that Greenpeace and their allies have achieved by stigmatising innovation is the single worst thing that has been done to future sustainability that I can think of.
Fortunately we have weapons to deal with this problem. One of them is the existance of decent people like Thinsky, who engage in open honest principled critical dialogue, which gives us all hope to establish more robust conceptual schemes and appreciations of our predicament, so we can tackle these challenges more effectively .
Maybe this is actually close to Thinksy’ plan?
(PS The old row of periods nearly got me for questionable content, but I now have the resiliance to deal with that!)
ionolsen23 May we exchange links with your site?
16bc92a339b3 I bookmarked your site and will read it regularly
Well i have to say that i am agree with your post, keep on the great writing, need extra money How to Make Money Online Secret is the right site for you.