Pandemic Reads 2 and 3
Uncertain Harvest on the future of food
I hadn’t read about food supply before, so Uncertain Harvest (2020, 180 pg) is a good introduction. Three expert authors discuss the failure of overpopulation predictions to-date, and their differing views on the future of food. In an unsettling section, they compare our food supply chain to the 2008 market, warning that an unexpected crisis could bring it all down 😬
One thing that I noticed is that scientists consolidate various foods around the world into percentages of all grains or even global calories. What percentage of calories are traded in Singapore, pass through the Suez Canal, etc. It reminded me a little of the running bit (is it a joke?) on SwiftOnSecurity where we’re told that every product in the US is actually a form of corn.
The book covers the debate on the new fertilizers, seed varieties, and agricultural market caused by the Green Revolution. If this controversy is entirely new to you, or confuses you, check out the recent PBS documentary:
Insights from other sections, super-summarized:
- Starting a new grain farm requires ~5 million in capital, so many are inherited or used as side businesses.
- American and Canadian ‘farm families’ (not defined clearly) make only 23% of their income from farm operations, and the share is even less for smaller farms. This fits with stuff that I’ve read on Food Twitter about these family farms being ‘cosplay’ or sometimes on tourist activities like country stores, hay rides, and pumpkin patches.
- Getting into the weeds of organic certification, when Canada doesn’t allow some treatments, but accepts organic labels from US farms without those restrictions.
- Compared to the US and Canada, the EU has twice as much government intervention in agriculture (Producer Support Estimate), while Australia and NZ have much less (1/5th or 1/10th as much).
- GMOs such as Golden Rice have not been taken up as the saviors expected 10–20 years ago, with four GMO crops taking 99% of the market, concentrated in industrial farming. I remember reading about this in 2010 and puzzling over whatever happened to this potential future. The authors mentioned 2009 book “Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa”, which I’ve added to my wishlist.
- DNA fingerprinting to detect ‘food fraud’, which I’d always seen as an elite issue, being considered as a public health and environmental issue.
The authors have heard about and considered blockchain — it seems good for sushi at first, but is it technically sound? — is this solely buyer-beware territory? — and considering whether some foods (a frozen pizza) could be practically traced.
Overall, the tilt of this book is toward small-scale organic farms which research renewing old practices, collecting any evidence that it can be just as profitable or productive (reminding me of this February New Yorker article), and reducing meat and fish consumption in North America.
High-tech solutions, which appeal to outsiders and inspired the book’s authors, may improve industrial farming. In the developing world families who grow their own food cannot afford the capital or risk from these new products. The processes which help them most change how they organize their planting, or offer time-saving tools, simple nudges which can make a real difference.
Bonus Read
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration is a graphic-novel-style exploration of immigration by economics professor Bryan Caplan. The initial argument is interestingly libertarian — people should be free to get employed or study courses or to buy property wherever they are accepted in the free market. Moreover, our current restrictive system poses an ethical crisis. Each chapter addresses different political and economic arguments against immigration, seemingly debunking all of them with numbers and charts. Toward the end, Caplan moves on to options to restrict immigration in simpler ways.
As a liberal with an ‘All Are Welcome’ T-shirt, I thought this book would rehash my own politics, to the point I was on the fence about reading it. There were two surprises: one in exploring different philosophers and economists’ arguments on immigration, and the other in its calculated language. In this world, immigrants can be easily divided into skilled or unskilled, and we can consider studies of which region’s immigrants assimilate best, and score highest in American values or ‘trust’ or IQ.
You should only discuss populations with appropriate context — how much do results vary within families and communities, who do we consider skilled when we don’t recognize their diplomas, how do you measure ‘assimilation’ in cities which have spoken Spanish for centuries… A cartoon-ified book can’t cover this with the nuance it deserves.
To disarm specific political arguments against immigration, Caplan suggests we could limit access to social programs, impose taxes to balance ‘taken’ jobs, add time and complexity to English-only citizenship tests, or ban ‘unskilled’ immigrants altogether. What makes these solutions so frustrating is that earlier parts of the book argued that open immigration was manageable and beneficial on its own. If that’s true, we’re considering these restrictions to appear tough, or dehumanizing people for a neoliberal, all-ok-if-you-pay future. A comparison is made, favorably, to taxing pollution rather than regulating it.
tl;dr; not putting this book in my Zoom background anytime soon.
