Ronald Bailey has a post on the question, in which he praises Nina Federoff for defending genetically modified foods and criticizing the push for organic farming. I don’t have much to say about the first issue, except that the kind of genetic modification that happens in a lab is obviously different in a bunch of ways than the kind that is “the basis of all evolution” – but whatever, that’s not really one of my hobby-horses.
But the second issue at least sort of is, though it’s not one that I’ve researched with anywhere near enough care to speak to it with much real authority. The present case is especially tough, since while – as I’ve indicated before – I’m hugely inclined to buy into Kevin Carson’s wonderfully contrarian take on this matter, I also tend as a rule to defer to Bailey on just about everything scientific. So what I’m going to do here is just raise a few questions about what he says (or happily quotes Federoff as saying).
Here’s the claim that really jumped out at me (he is quoting Federoff):
If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population — maybe half.
I’d love to see the support for this, since it strikes me as the same sort of hyperbole that leads people to say that the result of global warming is guaranteed to be nothing short of another Great Flood. (Surely Ron Bailey of all people knows what I’m talking about.) And from what I actually do know of the literature, it’s a huge overstatement: for example, the 2002 Mäder et al paper ($) that I mentioned in my TAC piece puts the difference between organic and conventional yields at 20%, and a while a quick look at a few of the great many papers that cite Mäder et al suggests a good deal of variation than that (I see figures of anywhere from 10-40%), I know of no sound evidence for a claim as strong as the one that Federoff is making here. As I said, though, I’m no expert.
Secondly, though, the notion that we should carry on this discussion by asking what would happen if everybody (by which I take it Federoff means every current farmer) took up organic farming is simply a red herring. It is entirely possible for organic farming to be a good thing even if it is not the right thing for everyone, and there is nobody out there with any real influence who is agitating for anything on the latter sort of scale. Indeed, what we have right now is a system that quite obviously rewards large, industrialized growers rather than small-scale and organic ones, and so the best case for organic farming is the one that demands simply that the subsidies be withdrawn and the playing field leveled: it is only in this way that the market, as opposed to the government, can decide which sort of farming is the best sort.
Finally and relatedly, what’s the big deal? I know that Bailey’s always got his eye out for junk science, and no doubt some of what gets drawn on by organic foodists is just that. But big agriculture has its biases, too, and it strikes me as weird to see a libertarian like Bailey getting sarcastically excited about the fact that there’s “someone in the Bush administration [Federoff advises Secretary of State Rice] defending science” when the scientific consensus that’s being (hyperbolically) defended is one that’s got the force of billions of dollars of corporate interests and decades of government subsidies, regulations, and official rhetoric behind it. Whatever happened to freedom?
Ack, I feel like I’m just rambling here. But that’s what blogs are for, after all. Any input from the peanut gallery?
[ADDENDUM: Two more points:
- There are presently over
150 million acres[EDIT: That's not even close to right, dammit - that's the total number of acres in the US growing corn and, um, soybeans. Right now I can't find the numbers I'm looking for, but in writing my TAC piece I somehow calculated the relevant acreage as in the "millions". In any case I take it that the point I'm driving at is clear enough.] of US cropland devoted to ethanol production. Surely switching some of that over to the growth of edible goods would offset some of the reduced yields that would come with even a very widespread move to organic farming. [UPDATE: In the comments, we're circling in on a number in the vicinity of 15 million acres.] - Organic farming methods use far less energy than “conventional” ones, and do not rely at all on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. (The Mäder et al paper puts energy input at 47-66%, and pesticide usage at 3%.) Especially as oil becomes harder to come by, these differences are obviously significant, too.
That’s all, I think.]
(Image via Flickrer JamSki.)
Filed under: agriculture, government/law, science/tech
An important issue you miss and which Michael Pollan talks of extensively is that we can’t just measure food in units like pounds, etc. One of the reason US calorie consumption has gone up so much – and that you see so many obese poor people – is that food today contains much less nutrients per unit of volume/weight (often times less than half) as it did even 40 years ago.
I am not clear on the science as to whether GMO has the same problems as Pollan generally discusses this in the context of hyper-fertilization. But in any case, it’s important to keep in mind when talking about this issue that a lot of food demand isn’t just a result of the basic amount of organic matter people need but in a very real way the quality of that matter — returning to organic food would help address that underlying issue in our “food crisis.”
Um, also I fail at spelling after 11 pm.
Thanks, David. I imagine that that is once again the sort of thing that Bailey would roll his eyes at, of course.
Re. corn ethanol yields:
– Corn bushels-per-acre (*): 151.2
– Corn ethanol yield (**): 2.75 gal/bushel
– Specific energy of gasoline: 132.3 MJ/gal
– Specific energy of ethanol: 79.76 MJ/gal
– US gasoline consumption (***): ~142 billion gal/yr
Putting all these together…it would take ~566 million acres to produce enough corn ethanol to replace annual US gasoline usage.
(*) USDA, “The Economic Feasibility of Ethanol Production From Sugar in the United States”, p. 16, Table 13. Available here:
usda.gov/oce/reports/energy/EthanolSugarFeasibilityReport3.pdf (368 KB)
(**) eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/biomass.html
(***) eia.doe.gov/bookshelf/brochures/gasolinepricesprimer/index.html
Thanks! Turning those numbers to present production, 6.5 billion gallons / 2.75 gal/bushel / 151.2 bushels/acre = 15.6 million acres, though I guess that some of those billions come from sorghum and/or switchgrass, so that number is bound to be a bit off. This article puts ethanol production at 18% of the U.S. corn crop, which would be 12.3 billion bushels / 151.2 bushels/acre = 81.3 million acres * .18 = 14.6 million acres for corn alone, which is pretty close to that other number.
Thanks for the link, John.
As for myself, I can’t say I’m too impressed by Bailey’s rigorous approach to the facts. For example: he has, fairly recently, repeated the canard that DDT was banned for purposes of mosquito eradication in the Third World, that it’s responsible for a rise in malaria deaths, and that it’s all Rachel Carson’s fault.
He also dismisses all questions about the safety of GM foods as “junk science,” even though agribusiness has gone to great lengths to suppress the work of researchers who raise such questions (e.g. Arpad Pusztai’s findings on possible health dangers from GM potatoes). Since research dollars are largely controlled by agribusiness or by USDA and university agri colleges aligned with agribusiness, research on GM safety tends to be extremely inadequate (e.g. on possible cancer effects of rBGH milk).
On top of everything else, Bailey shows himself to be extremely shaky on the use of measures that most libertarians would regard as illegitimate and statist, to promote GM foods. He explicitly endorses patents, and has strongly hinted that he favors federal R&D funding as well. And he really has to be pressed to the wall, HARD, before he will (very grudgingly) concede that food libel laws and FDA restrictions on labelling food GMO-free are, uh, kinda sorta illegitimate.
I suspect he’s less a principled libertarian, than a technofascist like Jerry Pournelle: he just likes business and gee-whizzy science, and only hates government intervention when it *hinders* those things.
Below is the comment I left at H&R:
“If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population — maybe half.”
I’ve seen such statements many times, and invariably they turn out to be snap generalizations made, on little reflection, by people with little concrete knowledge of organic techniques. It’s one of those things the people in the agribusiness/USDA/research complex like to repeat that “just ain’t so.” I’ve heard such bald assertions from, among others, an agribusiness professor and an agricultural extension agent. In response, I asked “Are you seriously saying the world couldn’t feed itself on the same amount of land using intensive raised-bed techniques, careful rainwater conservation, composting and green manuring?” The answer: “Oh, you mean like in Japan? Well, I guess the world might not starve if that kind of thing was widely adopted.”
Such party line statements typically assume a continuation of the same kind of inefficient and land-wasteful row-cropping used by conventional large-scale, mechanized, chemical farming–just without the chemicals.
In fact, soil-intensive cultivation on small plots (IOW, adoption of the kind of technique that’s specifically suited to organic farming) is actually more productive per acre than large-scale row cropping on the American pattern. It produces less per unit of *labor*, but a labor shortage really isn’t the problem in the Third World; in fact the slums of the Third World are filled with former peasant subsistence farmers who were evicted from the land against their will. People who would have been better off being allowed to produce *any* food on their own land are now unable to buy the food produced by cash crop agribusiness at *any* price, because they’re living in tin-roof shantytowns with no source of income. Any form of farming that produces more per acre and puts them back on the land is a net plus.
The kinds of blanket assertions Federoff makes are based on an intellectually dishonest comparison that assumes organic farmers *don’t* adopt the best available techniques. In fact there are avaiable techniques for increasing organic output far beyond the prevailing model of traditional peasant farming. The techniques developed by Rodale and Bromfield in the mid-20th century were a radical improvement on the typical pre-chemical techniques of fifty years before; and the intensive raised bed farming of John Jeavons is a quantum increase on that. Jeavons, using double-digging in raised beds, composts all agricultural and human waste, and used leguminous cover crops to increase soil fertility, can produce a subsistence diet for one person on 4000 sq. ft.–one tenth of an acre. I see no evidence whatever that Federoff is even aware of such techniques as green manuring with leguminous cover crops, etc., let alone taking them into account in her “the world would starve” hyperbole. [EDIT: Sentence completed by JLS.]
So there are actually two *alternative* models for increasing food output beyond the present techniques prevailing among peasant subsistence farmers. One of them, the path not taken, leaves peasants on their land and involves increasing productivity through careful conservation of soil and rainwater. The second, which involves mass peasant evictions and the large-scale use of chemicals affordable only by rich agribusiness interests and subsidized irrigation inputs provided preferentially by the state to big operators, has crowded out the first.
I meant to include, regarding all such bullshit assertions emanating from the USDA/agribusiness/university complex, the old quote about it being hard for a man (or woman) to see something when his paycheck depends on not seeing it.
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Don’t you mean that the suburbs of the developing world are filled with former starving serfs who should be happy that they have the privilege of being a part of the cities of tomorrow?
Sorry, John, I forgot to translate it into Cato-speak.
I keep seeing the usual suspects repeat that “best available alternative” crap about people choosing Dark Satanic Mills or sweatshops out of hatred for the hard work of farming, when in fact the main reason for the Enclosures was that people would only accept wage labor on the bosses’ terms when they were deprived of any alternative and driven into the factories like beasts.
And in Cato-speak, BTW, all those people *chose* to die in the Irish potato famine because it was the “best available alternative.”
It’s even more disgusting to see the Misoids engage in that kind of thing, because they at least claim to be disciples of Rothbard–a man who gave hell to the Enclosures, the hacienda system, etc.