Salil Tripathi
Click here to discuss this piece at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
When the Doha global trade negotiations collapsed in July, many countries shared the blame. But one of the more surprising culprits was India. Indian consumers have suffered during the recent food crisis, with inflation over 12 per cent for some commodities. Removing agricultural trade barriers would surely have helped get cheaper food to India’s many millions of poor citizens.
Yet Indian trade minister Kamal Nath declined to open India further to farm imports, claiming he had to protect the “livelihood of millions of farmers” in India. What was behind this decision? Double-digit inflation often sounds the death knell for Indian governments. Elections are due by next May, and the governing coalition barely survived a recent confidence vote.
Read more »
Robert Paarlberg
As everyone knows, the price of many basic foodstuffs has surged in the past half year. Rice tripled in price over just the first four months of 2008, wheat doubled and corn rose 46 per cent. The New York Times has dubbed this a “world food crisis” and the Economist called it a “silent tsunami.” High grain import prices, on top of high fuel prices, place an acute economic squeeze on urban consumers in developing countries that depend heavily on the world market. In Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia, the urban poor have been taking to the streets.
Yet it is a mistake to see high prices as a proxy for actual hunger. Most of the world’s hungry citizens do not get their food from the world market, and most who rely on the world market are not poor or vulnerable to hunger.
In south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, hunger levels are twice as high as in the developing countries of east Asia and four times as high as in Latin America. Yet these two hungry regions import very little food from the world market. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa take only 16 per cent of their total grain consumption from the world market, and less than 10 per cent of total calorie consumption. The developing countries of south Asia satisfy only 4 per cent of their grain consumption through imports. So fluctuations in international prices will have little impact within these hungry regions—far less than fluctuations in rainfall, job loss, government subsidies or civil conflict.
Read more »
Alex Renton
Is your fish sustainable?
I’ve been asking every restaurant that I’ve visited recently where they get their fish. It’s a bore for whoever I’m eating with, but the results are interesting. Even at the restaurants that boast their devotion to “sustainable” sourcing, the waiters usually have little idea what the provenance of the fish is. At one Edinburgh restaurant I was told, with some pride, that the scallops were from the west coast and definitely not diver-caught—though this is in fact the only environmentally friendly option.
Monkfish is a particular problem. Chefs love this gloriously ugly bottom-feeder for the texture of the flesh of its long tail. Indeed, it’s said that in the days when monkfish were dredged up by the scallop-boats as by-catch, the skippers would sell it on to the fish processors who would chop up the tails and pass the bits off as scampi. But now monkfish is endangered in the North sea and Scotland. If you care, it should not be eaten without positive assurance that it was line-caught, not trawled. Yet at two very right-on restaurants I visited recently, a Conran outlet and one of the Loch Fyne chain, the waiters had no idea where the monkfish had come from.
Read more »
John Quiggin
Click here to read a reply from Roger Bate of Africa Fighting Malaria
Rachel Carson launched the modern environmental movement. She was posthumously awarded the US presidential medal of freedom, and has conservation areas, prizes and associations named in her honour.
Yet Carson has also been accused of killing more people than Hitler. Her detractors hold her responsible for a “ban” on the use of the insecticide DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), which, they claim, halted a campaign that was on the verge of eradicating malaria in the 1960s.
Read more »
Chris Haskins
Extraordinary events are taking place in the global food market. The price of wheat, soya, maize and milk products has more than doubled in the last few years as demand has outstripped supply for the first time since the second world war. Why? The world’s population is growing, but not at an accelerating pace. Yet millions of poor people, especially in China, can now afford to buy meat, and the production of animal protein requires a much larger input per kilo than that of vegetables. The average Chinese citizen eats 30 per cent more meat now than five years ago. Second, there have been a series of poor harvests across the world. And third, many western countries are subsidising farmers to switch from food to renewable energy crops.
Over 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus argued that population would outrun food supply, and that without stern limits on reproduction the world was heading for disaster. So far, he has proved utterly mistaken; the world’s population has increased tenfold and there is less starvation than in his day. But the global population will probably rise from 6.5bn to 9bn by 2050, which will require the world’s farmers to produce more food in the next 40 years than in the past 200. The Malthusian predictions were wrong for 200 years, but might prove right in the next 50.
In 1800, Britain, like most countries, gave farmers extensive levels of protection in order to keep food prices high and the ruling landlords happy. The price of wheat was higher in 1815 than in 1960.
Read more »
Alex Renton
We were gathered in a cold upstairs room, 20 of us, making a respectful circle around the corpse as it lay on a steel table. The Italian butchers were sharpening their knives—cleavers, choppers, long thin blades with upward curves for separating fat from skin, flesh from bone. What we were about to watch was an ancient winter rite, once universal, now half-forgotten and barely legal. As the knife was raised over the hairless flesh, I found myself looking over my shoulder, half-expecting some breathless enforcers of decency to burst through the door—the inquisition, the police, the Edinburgh health and safety inspectorate.
Europeans have always slaughtered pigs in early winter. Saints days, from St Andrew’s to St Stephen’s, are marked for the job; the tradition of combining religion, the winter solstice and a feast of freshly killed pork goes back to the Roman Saturnalia, and probably beyond. Pigs have been domesticated for 9,000 years. It’s a wholly practical ritual: by December, forage has run out, but the nine or ten-month-old pigs of the year’s farrowing are fat on the nuts, berries, mushrooms and other debris of autumn. As the temperatures drop, the best time to preserve their meat arrives. The new wine pressing should be ready for sampling—in any case, it’s a good moment for a party.
The Europeans who do still slaughter their own pigs are mainly in the east, where subsistence agriculture is still alive. But the embrace of the EU brings with it the cold hand of regulation. In Romania, some 1.5m pigs are usually slaughtered in backyards in the week before Christmas. They are drained of their blood and then rolled into a bonfire, to singe and clean the skin. But Brussels rules don’t permit amateurs to slaughter pigs: a vet must be present and a stunning device used. According to the Economist, the Romanians asked for a derogation to kill animals according to their traditions, just as Muslims and Jews can. It is Christmas, after all. The commission said no, but, as I write, the Romanian smallholders’s pig slaughter will go ahead as planned.
Read more »
Colin Tudge
Dick Taverne is a clever man who has been led astray by hype. Genetic modification (GM) may have useful roles to play in agriculture, but it does not offer the bounty Taverne and his fellow enthusiasts believe it does. GM crops do not routinely outperform those bred by traditional means, and there has been no demonstration that GM crops can sustain their high performance in the real world, as opposed to the cosseted plots of the showpiece farm. More broadly, the good that GM might in principle do is far outweighed by the harm, in particular the control of world agriculture by transnational companies. Whatever the theoretical advantages of GM, the world is unlikely in the foreseeable future to use it in an advantageous way.
The example with which Taverne opens his article—”golden rice”—is a case in point. As Taverne says, golden rice contains carotene, the precursor of vitamin A, courtesy of a gene from a daffodil. But Taverne does not mention that carotene is one of the commonest organic molecules in nature. It is present in all dark green leaves—the many that manifest worldwide as “spinach” and cabbage—in yellow roots such as carrots and varieties of cassava, and in fruits such as papaya and mango.
Vitamin A deficiency is indeed a huge health problem. But this is because millions of people no longer have access to horticulture. English country people had their cottage gardens; much of traditional African agriculture is horticulture; and in China, the islands of higher ground around the traditional paddy-fields are dripping with green leaves and fruits of all kinds. What happened to local horticulture? One answer is that it has been swept aside to make way for industrialised, monocultural agriculture that insists on rice or another cash crop to the exclusion of all else.
Read more »
Jonathon Porritt
The pro-GM lobby has always had a tendency to shoot itself in the foot. From Monsanto’s bully-boy tactics trying to force its GM products on reluctant EU countries back in the 1990s, through to today’s inept combination of legal threats and would-be seduction, the GM lobby knows how to alienate people more effectively than any other sector. Dick Taverne operates comfortably in this tradition.
His starting point is simple: that anyone who has reservations about the use of genetic modification (GM) in agriculture is simply “anti-science.” Taverne then attributes to GM opponents an almost superhuman capacity to whip up fear and hostility among ordinary citizens, whom he portrays in turn as ignorant, gullible folk who should just sit back quietly and put their faith in the men in white coats.
I resent this on both counts. I am not an anti-GM fundamentalist. I have always been open to the possibility that GM might have a role to play in securing a more sustainable food production system, and have said so in public. I recently caught up on various cutting-edge projects on a recent visit to the John Innes Centre near Norwich, and have just finished a radio documentary on agricultural biodiversity, which I like to think was reasonably balanced. But the fact that I still have concerns over GM—on health, environmental, agronomic and governance grounds—marks me down in Taverne’s world as an emotionally flawed dipstick.
Read more »
Helen Wallace
The story of genetically modified “golden rice” is indeed shocking, as Dick Taverne says, but not, as he argues, because public reluctance to eat GM crops in Europe has somehow denied a life-saving technology to people in developing countries.
Golden rice was launched on the world with much fanfare in 1999, with claims that it could cure blindness in millions of children brought on by vitamin A deficiency. But the levels of beta-carotene in golden rice were far too low to make an impact on this deficiency. Although scientists have recently succeeded in increasing the levels of beta-carotene, there is still no scientific study that demonstrates that this technology can overcome vitamin A deficiency in humans. In contrast, other proven strategies exist, including supplementation, food fortification and increasing dietary diversity (ensuring that poor children have vegetables to eat as well as rice).
More broadly, the act of engineering enhanced levels of vitamins and nutrients into the food chain is deeply questionable because it does not target nutrients at the people most in need, and may cause harm to others in the population. Food fortification requires paying careful attention to the “non-target” population—people who are not suffering from the deficiency the fortification aims to address, and who may be harmed by unintended effects. GM crops introduce new dangers because the nutrients are engineered into the plant, rather then being added during processing. This makes it doubly difficult to track where the product will end up, to monitor adverse effects in the food chain or environment, and to withdraw the product should harmful effects be identified.
Read more »
Malcolm Kane
Dick Taverne’s article was disappointingly shallow, not just because he regurgitated every half-truth and misleading mix of selected “benefits” attributed to GM foods by the PR and marketing gurus, but because he failed to think through the true balance of risks and benefits involved in specific GM applications.
Only two GM applications have achieved any significant market penetration: herbicide resistance and insect resistance. The supposed benefits of these applications need careful dissection.
Take herbicide resistance. Historically, weed killers have not been approved for use on food crops—conventional crops would be destroyed. Yet the farmer’s need for weed control is understandable—weeds compete with crops for soil moisture and nutrients, reducing crop yields. Weeding is timely and costly, but necessary. GM herbicide-resistant crops allow for easy and effective application of weed killer without fear of crop damage. But this has an unexpected consequence: it means that weed killers can be sprayed directly on to food crops. GM crops therefore contain higher residues of herbicides than conventional crops. This is the true cost to the consumer, ignored by the biotech industry.
Read more »
Post a comment »
