Here is a blog post on how to make cities more resilient for short emergencies, and more liveable if the future brings us widespread resource scarcity. It's focused on and inspired by New Zealand, but it's relevant for anywhere. I'm proud to say that many of the recommendations (greywater and rainwater reuse, rooftop gardening) I've already incorporated into the house we're rehabbing.
I apologize for my not posting on my blog for the past few weeks. I am currently in Haiti, doing a consulting project, so I've been very busy. Stay tuned for some posts on Haiti.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Education in Colombia and elsewhere: a conversation with Alan
My friend Alan responded to my recent blog post on the merits (or lack thereof) of school gardens, and had much to say about different education systems. He felt that whatever we can do to get kids (and adults) off their butts and moving around is probably good for bodies and good for minds. If even he and I, attending elite Chicago public schools all our lives, often felt bored and unmotivated sitting in a classroom for hours every day, how much worse must the case be for kids in the more typical, beleaguered schools of Chicago and other underperforming systems? At times I've even wondered if it wouldn't be better for many kids to simply learn at home, from their everyday surroundings, rather than go to school. Alan stressed that much of official schooling seems to be more about promoting conformity and order, and less about real learning and critical thought. He has been teaching in Japan for the past few months, and has at times seen this rigid social molding in even starker evidence than in the States.
I'm a bit torn about this issue of promoting independence vs. promoting conformity and acculturation. On the one hand, I firmly believe that true intellectual development involves above all interpreting and critiquing the world around you. Especially in the humanities, the goal of education is to help us become unique, thinking individuals. But on the other hand, I believe in the importance of tradition and collective values. We are not islands unto ourselves, and those who act as such ruin life for the rest of society (as evidenced by the irresponsible behavior of bankers and other neoliberal ideologues in recent US history). I recently re-watched the film "The Dead Poets' Society", which essentially depicts the tension between freethinking nonconformity and stolid tradition, and unabashedly comes down on the side of nonconformity. The only problem is that the late 1950s, when the movie is set, were the most prosperous age in US history, and from them came some of the most intelligent and progressive ideas and culture (rock music, groundbreaking films, desegregation, JFK and Bobbie Kennedy). For the past twenty years, on the other hand, individualism and lack of a sense of the collective have run rampant, and what have they gotten us? Economic crisis, unyielding chasms between political and cultural extremes, mass-produced films and music, and uncontrolled consumerism. So maybe the 1950s weren't so bad, despite the generalized emphasis on conformity
On a more personal level, some of our friends here in Colombia have lately been fed up with their children's alternative schools. These parents sent their kids to experimental pedagogical schools precisely because they didn't believe in the rigid sort of butt-in-seat learning practiced by many traditional schools. But now they are sometimes frustrated with a lack of discipline or direction at their kids' alternative schools. So of late I've been mostly exposed to the extreme of very free-form teaching that stresses the child's individuality, which can have the negative effect of creating adults that have little sense of their forming part of a larger collective. My friend Alan, on the other hand, is currently in the thick of a Japanese school system that can stifle individual thinking and creativity, which can easily lead to a stifled, stagnant society with few new ideas.
I've mentioned recently that the government in Colombia is proposing a new education reform to privatize more aspects of higher education.
An important aspect of the Colombian education reform is a model whereby students pay little or nothing during their time in university, but thereafter they pay back to the school a portion of their salary for a set period of time, say ten years. To give a concrete example, if a Colombian student were to study graphic design and find a well-paying job after college, she'd pay something like ten percent of her monthly income to her alma mater, during ten years or so. If she didn't find a job, or didn't make above a certain income, she wouldn't pay anything. I think this is an interesting proposal; in a society like Colombia or the US where not everyone can go to college, I think it's appropriate that those who are lucky enough to get a degree should contribute to fund college for others. A college education represents a significant bump in one's earning potential, part of which should rightly go back to the university responsible for one's increased income. And if it doesn't pay out in better income, you're not obligated to repay.
This brings to light a question about whether education is a private good or a public good. As I've pointed out above, education obviously has some characteristics of a private good. The individual who has finished college receives a tool that favors him in the future, as compared to if he hadn't gone to college. In this way education is clearly a private good. But on the other hand, everyone in a society benefits from a well-educated populace. Even if I myself didn't study medicine, I benefit from the pool of well-trained doctors in my city or my country. I also benefit from the increased economic activity, jobs, and tax revenue created by these doctors and other educated people. So in this respect, education and the prosperity it creates are clearly a public good, too.
Because education has this double nature of public and private good, I feel it's appropriate that the costs and responsibilities of education fall on both public and private shoulders. Obviously the student and his or her parents must do their part to take advantage of the education offered them, and it is also perhaps reasonable to expect them to assume some of education's cost. On the other hand, the ideal is that the State works to ensure that everyone gets a good education, just as everyone should get police protection and decent roadways. This is the model common in most of Europe, where widespread, free access to higher education has created prosperous, egalitarian societies. So perhaps the government should gradually work towards a final goal of paying for higher education for all citizens, but in the meanwhile, if not everyone is receiving education, it's reasonable to ask those who do benefit from college to then pay for others to benefit from it too.
Anyway, the Colombian government's new education plan, as well as a private financing model for education recently profiled in the NYT, has elements of this dual idea of increased public support to education, paired with private contributions from high-earning college graduates. Unfortunately, I fear that the government proposal is heavily tilted towards involving large private enterprise in public universities, and even dedicating more public money to private universities. If this is so, the proposal of having college graduates reimburse part of their education costs may simply be a responsible-sounding smokescreen to cover up a generalized privatization of public education. As the last linked article points out, such a privatization might increase coverage in some profitable technical fields like computer programming, but it can't assure academic quality or integrity (meaning critical, independent thought and inquiry). A largely privatized higher education system won't produce innovative entrepreneurs, well-adjusted, cultured citizens, or important basic research, all of which are key factors in creating a more prosperous, just, peaceful, and healthy society. For this and other reasons, the government's proposed education law has been amply rejected by professors, students, researchers, and just about anyone else in Colombia who knows about education.
I'm a bit torn about this issue of promoting independence vs. promoting conformity and acculturation. On the one hand, I firmly believe that true intellectual development involves above all interpreting and critiquing the world around you. Especially in the humanities, the goal of education is to help us become unique, thinking individuals. But on the other hand, I believe in the importance of tradition and collective values. We are not islands unto ourselves, and those who act as such ruin life for the rest of society (as evidenced by the irresponsible behavior of bankers and other neoliberal ideologues in recent US history). I recently re-watched the film "The Dead Poets' Society", which essentially depicts the tension between freethinking nonconformity and stolid tradition, and unabashedly comes down on the side of nonconformity. The only problem is that the late 1950s, when the movie is set, were the most prosperous age in US history, and from them came some of the most intelligent and progressive ideas and culture (rock music, groundbreaking films, desegregation, JFK and Bobbie Kennedy). For the past twenty years, on the other hand, individualism and lack of a sense of the collective have run rampant, and what have they gotten us? Economic crisis, unyielding chasms between political and cultural extremes, mass-produced films and music, and uncontrolled consumerism. So maybe the 1950s weren't so bad, despite the generalized emphasis on conformity
On a more personal level, some of our friends here in Colombia have lately been fed up with their children's alternative schools. These parents sent their kids to experimental pedagogical schools precisely because they didn't believe in the rigid sort of butt-in-seat learning practiced by many traditional schools. But now they are sometimes frustrated with a lack of discipline or direction at their kids' alternative schools. So of late I've been mostly exposed to the extreme of very free-form teaching that stresses the child's individuality, which can have the negative effect of creating adults that have little sense of their forming part of a larger collective. My friend Alan, on the other hand, is currently in the thick of a Japanese school system that can stifle individual thinking and creativity, which can easily lead to a stifled, stagnant society with few new ideas.
I've mentioned recently that the government in Colombia is proposing a new education reform to privatize more aspects of higher education.
An important aspect of the Colombian education reform is a model whereby students pay little or nothing during their time in university, but thereafter they pay back to the school a portion of their salary for a set period of time, say ten years. To give a concrete example, if a Colombian student were to study graphic design and find a well-paying job after college, she'd pay something like ten percent of her monthly income to her alma mater, during ten years or so. If she didn't find a job, or didn't make above a certain income, she wouldn't pay anything. I think this is an interesting proposal; in a society like Colombia or the US where not everyone can go to college, I think it's appropriate that those who are lucky enough to get a degree should contribute to fund college for others. A college education represents a significant bump in one's earning potential, part of which should rightly go back to the university responsible for one's increased income. And if it doesn't pay out in better income, you're not obligated to repay.
This brings to light a question about whether education is a private good or a public good. As I've pointed out above, education obviously has some characteristics of a private good. The individual who has finished college receives a tool that favors him in the future, as compared to if he hadn't gone to college. In this way education is clearly a private good. But on the other hand, everyone in a society benefits from a well-educated populace. Even if I myself didn't study medicine, I benefit from the pool of well-trained doctors in my city or my country. I also benefit from the increased economic activity, jobs, and tax revenue created by these doctors and other educated people. So in this respect, education and the prosperity it creates are clearly a public good, too.
Because education has this double nature of public and private good, I feel it's appropriate that the costs and responsibilities of education fall on both public and private shoulders. Obviously the student and his or her parents must do their part to take advantage of the education offered them, and it is also perhaps reasonable to expect them to assume some of education's cost. On the other hand, the ideal is that the State works to ensure that everyone gets a good education, just as everyone should get police protection and decent roadways. This is the model common in most of Europe, where widespread, free access to higher education has created prosperous, egalitarian societies. So perhaps the government should gradually work towards a final goal of paying for higher education for all citizens, but in the meanwhile, if not everyone is receiving education, it's reasonable to ask those who do benefit from college to then pay for others to benefit from it too.
Anyway, the Colombian government's new education plan, as well as a private financing model for education recently profiled in the NYT, has elements of this dual idea of increased public support to education, paired with private contributions from high-earning college graduates. Unfortunately, I fear that the government proposal is heavily tilted towards involving large private enterprise in public universities, and even dedicating more public money to private universities. If this is so, the proposal of having college graduates reimburse part of their education costs may simply be a responsible-sounding smokescreen to cover up a generalized privatization of public education. As the last linked article points out, such a privatization might increase coverage in some profitable technical fields like computer programming, but it can't assure academic quality or integrity (meaning critical, independent thought and inquiry). A largely privatized higher education system won't produce innovative entrepreneurs, well-adjusted, cultured citizens, or important basic research, all of which are key factors in creating a more prosperous, just, peaceful, and healthy society. For this and other reasons, the government's proposed education law has been amply rejected by professors, students, researchers, and just about anyone else in Colombia who knows about education.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Pine Ridge
This is an impressive presentation about life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, which links present-day destitution to past treaty violations. It's a striking view of the poverty and disease suffered by the descendants of our continent's first inhabitants.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Hopi agricultural tours
This is a really cool article about agricultural heritage tours conducted by the Hopi people in their reservation near the Four Corners region of the US. I would love to go on one of these tours, and perhaps glean lessons from it in order to set up similar things here in Colombia. Such a tour combines many of my interests--agriculture, indigenous culture, archeology and history, economic development, and tourism, all in one endeavor.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Commuting: another drawback of a less-thought life
This is an interesting article about how commuting to work degrades quality of life. It cites numerous studies indicating that commuting makes us fatter and more nervous, and damages our marriages. In particular the article discusses the tradeoff that many people make, getting a bigger, cheaper house in exchange for longer, life-numbing commutes. It seems the extra, seldom-used bathroom or lounge is not at all worth the increased unhappiness from a longer commute. It's all one more casualty of what I call the "less-thought life". Decisions like living in the middle of nowhere and commuting to a city make no sense for someone who is thinking logically about things like quality of life, community vitality, or even the ecological effects of his lifestyle. Such a thoughtless lifestyle then has ill effects on personal happiness and health, as well as on collective wellbeing. Furthermore, at least in my city of Chicago, houses tend to stay around the same price for a huge belt extending from the mid-North Side well into the distant suburbs, so Chicago suburbanites are extra-screwed; they're paying the same price for the same small house, but with much longer commutes. It all makes me happy to work in large part from home, and happy that I'm in a small, dense Colombian town, where I can walk to almost everything I need.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Third World Green Daddy Part 19: Eating solid food
Our Sam is a big boy. After a recent checkup, I did my obsessive US parent thing and checked how his height and weight compared to other babies his age. According to the World Health Organization website, Sam was in the 97th percentile or something in terms of his height, but only in the 50th in terms of weight. So he is a long, lean young baby. This shouldn't surprise me, as he comes from a long line of tall, skinny men, on both sides of the family. But I had a moment of panic, wondering if he was somehow undernourished despite our diligent breast and bottle-feeding from my wife Caro's abundant milk supply.
Everyone knows by now that babies should ideally receive only mother's milk until they're six months old, after which you're supposed to gradually introduce solid foods. But even after starting "solid" foods (actually various mashes and purees of once-solid food), mother's milk should be the main calorie source until a year of age or so. I believe doctors everywhere stress the breastmilk-only-until-six-months line, but especially in developing countries it's important, because in lots of places the major formula companies carried out big publicity campaigns in the mid-20th century that left mothers with a mistaken view of breastfeeding as antiquated and synthetic formula as man's grand improvement on nature.
Nevertheless, in that recent doctor's appointment, the pediatrician saw how big and alert Sam was, and recommended we start feeding him solids then, at four months of age. Indeed, Sam by that point was apparently teething, biting everything in sight. He was also showing interest in our food when we'd eat at table, and we'd even offered him a taste of a few soups and juices. The doctor seemed to be recommending solid feeding as a way of satisfying Sam's voracious appetite, beyond what my wife's breastmilk could offer.
I filmed Sam's first non-milk meal of granadilla juice to send to friends and family (accompanied by Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra, the 2001 theme). Thus began an intensive campaign, led fanatically by me, of mixing a bunch of homemade baby foods and trying to fill our baby with them (which inevitably led to more formidable, solid shits to deal with). The need seemed all the more urgent after Sam got over a flu that had seen him eating little for a few days. Once he got better, he wanted to eat everything in sight, as if making up for lost time. When we would offer him puree of fruits like apple, mango, and pear, Sam got impatient with the slow pace of spoon-feeding, so I tried to give him these fruits or cooked rice in a sippy cup or a baby bottle. Of course these liquified foods were very thick, and hard to suck through the small holes of these drinking vessels. I began to make odd concoctions of sagu starch (extracted from the bulb we know as Canna in the US), cow's milk, mashed fruit, water, and soy or plantain powder. I thought that perhaps this way we might make up for any supposed shortfall in my wife's milk, in a form that Sam could suck down much faster than we could spoon-feed him.
Just the other day though, I had a revelation as I looked at a particularly watery bottle mix I'd made. As Sam drank about six ounces of it, I thought, "This can't possibly be anywhere near as nutritious as Caro's milk". It was just a clear, soupy mix of sagu starch and granadilla fruit juice. I began to do some calculations and saw that no mix I could make would have anywhere near the fat content of Caro's milk unless I loaded it with so much powdery, pasty soy flour as to make it inedible. If not, every ounce of watery mix I filled Sam's belly with was robbing space from nutritious, fatty breastmilk. Was I becoming one of those clueless parents who in the name of homemade, "natural" methods ends up starving their kids?
My wife and I did some research (among other sources, this Spanish website on natural childraising is really interesting) and found that my obsession with "improving" Sam's diet was dangerous and misled (though thankfully short-lived). As voracious as our baby's appetite might be, Caro's milk supply would adjust. Now we're back to the healthy viewpoint that solid foods will be simply a minor complement to breastmilk, serving mainly to stimulate Sam's senses and to introduce him to the social ritual of eating with the family. The above-linked Spanish website is less doctrinaire than many sources about solid feeding. Aside from avoiding excessive salt and certain hard-to-digest vegetables (mainly crucifers like broccoli), it has no recommendations as to whether to start with fruits or vegetables, soups or mashes, etc. If at this point solid food mainly serves a socialization function, the best thing is to blend up whatever the family is eating at a particular meal and serve a bit to the baby, with a spoon. This way the baby gets used to eating as the family does, and you don't create a precedent of always making something separate for the baby.
I'm excited about making new foods for Sam, and perhaps someday even expanding our family jam business into natural purees like guava, arracacha (another Andean root), and peas. I've even gotten some high-end baby food ideas from a recent Chicago Tribune article. But I'm not going to go overboard; for the next few months Sam's primary food source will be the same old mother's milk that's kept him big and healthy thus far.
Everyone knows by now that babies should ideally receive only mother's milk until they're six months old, after which you're supposed to gradually introduce solid foods. But even after starting "solid" foods (actually various mashes and purees of once-solid food), mother's milk should be the main calorie source until a year of age or so. I believe doctors everywhere stress the breastmilk-only-until-six-months line, but especially in developing countries it's important, because in lots of places the major formula companies carried out big publicity campaigns in the mid-20th century that left mothers with a mistaken view of breastfeeding as antiquated and synthetic formula as man's grand improvement on nature.
Nevertheless, in that recent doctor's appointment, the pediatrician saw how big and alert Sam was, and recommended we start feeding him solids then, at four months of age. Indeed, Sam by that point was apparently teething, biting everything in sight. He was also showing interest in our food when we'd eat at table, and we'd even offered him a taste of a few soups and juices. The doctor seemed to be recommending solid feeding as a way of satisfying Sam's voracious appetite, beyond what my wife's breastmilk could offer.
I filmed Sam's first non-milk meal of granadilla juice to send to friends and family (accompanied by Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra, the 2001 theme). Thus began an intensive campaign, led fanatically by me, of mixing a bunch of homemade baby foods and trying to fill our baby with them (which inevitably led to more formidable, solid shits to deal with). The need seemed all the more urgent after Sam got over a flu that had seen him eating little for a few days. Once he got better, he wanted to eat everything in sight, as if making up for lost time. When we would offer him puree of fruits like apple, mango, and pear, Sam got impatient with the slow pace of spoon-feeding, so I tried to give him these fruits or cooked rice in a sippy cup or a baby bottle. Of course these liquified foods were very thick, and hard to suck through the small holes of these drinking vessels. I began to make odd concoctions of sagu starch (extracted from the bulb we know as Canna in the US), cow's milk, mashed fruit, water, and soy or plantain powder. I thought that perhaps this way we might make up for any supposed shortfall in my wife's milk, in a form that Sam could suck down much faster than we could spoon-feed him.
Just the other day though, I had a revelation as I looked at a particularly watery bottle mix I'd made. As Sam drank about six ounces of it, I thought, "This can't possibly be anywhere near as nutritious as Caro's milk". It was just a clear, soupy mix of sagu starch and granadilla fruit juice. I began to do some calculations and saw that no mix I could make would have anywhere near the fat content of Caro's milk unless I loaded it with so much powdery, pasty soy flour as to make it inedible. If not, every ounce of watery mix I filled Sam's belly with was robbing space from nutritious, fatty breastmilk. Was I becoming one of those clueless parents who in the name of homemade, "natural" methods ends up starving their kids?
My wife and I did some research (among other sources, this Spanish website on natural childraising is really interesting) and found that my obsession with "improving" Sam's diet was dangerous and misled (though thankfully short-lived). As voracious as our baby's appetite might be, Caro's milk supply would adjust. Now we're back to the healthy viewpoint that solid foods will be simply a minor complement to breastmilk, serving mainly to stimulate Sam's senses and to introduce him to the social ritual of eating with the family. The above-linked Spanish website is less doctrinaire than many sources about solid feeding. Aside from avoiding excessive salt and certain hard-to-digest vegetables (mainly crucifers like broccoli), it has no recommendations as to whether to start with fruits or vegetables, soups or mashes, etc. If at this point solid food mainly serves a socialization function, the best thing is to blend up whatever the family is eating at a particular meal and serve a bit to the baby, with a spoon. This way the baby gets used to eating as the family does, and you don't create a precedent of always making something separate for the baby.
I'm excited about making new foods for Sam, and perhaps someday even expanding our family jam business into natural purees like guava, arracacha (another Andean root), and peas. I've even gotten some high-end baby food ideas from a recent Chicago Tribune article. But I'm not going to go overboard; for the next few months Sam's primary food source will be the same old mother's milk that's kept him big and healthy thus far.
Sam's favorite triumvirate--mango, pear, and apple (with a random squash that we haven't tried yet)
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Foreign Policy on food: Hire me as a writer!
Foreign Policy magazine recently released an issue dedicated to issues of food and agriculture. I of course welcome this interest in a field that is fascinating to me, and crucial for everyone on the planet. They have wide-ranging articles (though focusing particularly on food's role in the recent protests in the Middle East), and some great photo essays about things like street food. There is a great offering examining some unexpected realities about poverty and hunger, like the fact that a lot of people go hungry in order to buy things like TV sets and satellite dishes.
The writing and analysis is about what you would expect from accomplished international affairs reporters without a solid background in agronomy. There are some slips, like in the blurb on the Svalbard seed storage site, in which the author confuses a food bank (which is a pantry supplying donated canned goods to poor people) with a seed bank, which is a place to store diverse varieties of seeds for experimental use and crop improvement. It's sometimes hard to believe that such brilliant minds as Foreign Policy's contributors are relatively clueless about the food and farming that underlies all human endeavor. But the articles are generally well-written and well-investigated.
I was a bit pissed off at a fill-in-the-blank section in which the magazine proffered some food security terms for supposed experts to comment on. The so-called experts included Paul Collier, free-market demagogue that knows nothing about real food or farming (as I've shown in past blog posts), Hakan Altinay, a Washington think-tank researcher on governance issues, a few mainstream ag professors from big farm-state ag universities, a few economic (but not agrarian) development experts, Hank Cardello, an ex-food industry insider who still talks like he's drunk Kraft's Kool-Aid, Dickson Despommier, a medical ecology professor whose crank ideas on vertical farming I've deconstructed in the past, and an ex-Goldman Sachs bigwig (Mark Tercek). Not one systems or development agronomist among them, as far as I could tell (though I appreciate the international development know-how of Oxfam's Raymond C. Offenheiser). This clueless crew was particularly inane in its comments on "organic". There were no chemical or agronomic explanations, no reference to the recent IAASTD report signalling that organic approaches are among the most viable strategies for feeding the world. All Foreign Policy's supposed experts had to offer were snide, blase quips that seem to confuse organic farming with hippies or Manhattan food snobs.
This lack of informed agronomist and agrarian voices in the Foreign Policy food issue reminds me of a recent NYT article on India's agricultural stagnation. It is written by a non-farmer, non-agronomist economist who obviously knows little about how farming actually works. For instance, he bemoans the prevalence of manual labor in Indian farming, and implicitly prescribes "highly mechanized farms growing thousands of acres of food crops", the assembly of "large land holdings", and "corporations...farming land directly" as a way to improve total food production. If the author knew a bit about farm economy, he'd know that to raise per-acre productivity and hence total food production, the key is to intensify land use. Mechanization and consolidating landholdings does precisely the opposite, lowering per-acre yields and thus total food supply. Granted, mechanization and consolidation improve per-person income by allowing fewer people to farm more land, but this implies taking many farmers off the land. In India, with its scarce land, teeming slums, and lack of gainful non-farming employment opportunities, the goal should clearly be improving productivity to land, as opposed throwing people off the land so a few can expand and mechanize their farms.
Anyway, when I read articles like this, and to a lesser extent the Foreign Policy special issue, I wonder why I or an agronomist or farmer like me isn't getting paid big bucks to write on agrarian issues. Instead these prestigious publications sick uninformed hacks on topics they don't understand, who then churn out banal drivel. If the New York Times and Foreign Policy believe that there aren't literate, thoughtful agronomists out there to write well-researched copy, I'm here to tell them that we do exist. So to any big-name publications that may be reading, I'm here, and I'm willing to work cheap!
I want to close with perhaps the most well-done, pertinent features in the recent Foreign Policy. One was an analysis of world food trends by Lester Brown. He is an environmentalist who is perennially announcing the imminent end of the world. At any rate, he does a good job of discussing the major issues that are defining the future world landscape with regards to food production. He looks at recent years' rise in food prices as a consequence of hard new realities of resource scarcity and consumption, namely rising population, rising living standards, lowered and more erratic yields due to environmental degradation and climate change, and use of food crops for biofuel, among other things.
On the other hand, and somewhat buried in the magazine, comes an opposing analysis from Fred Kaufmann. He blames high food prices on long-position speculative investment from big capital. Essentially banks like Goldman Sachs have created investment products that invest in commodities. But because commodities don't naturally increase in value like stocks of growing companies, the investment product essentially creates a permanent appreciation in commodities by constantly buying, and never selling. This price inflation, and not real scarcity, is responsible for high food prices, according to Kauffman. It creates a bubble of permanent long positions (anticipation that prices will rise further), just as happened in the US's fantasy real-estate market when a plywood-and-drywall shell forty miles from Atlanta might be ascribed a value of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Here's my analysis on Brown vs. Kaufmann. The trends Brown discusses are real, and they will surely drive up food prices in the future. But at least the last years' food bubbles seem to me to be more a result of speculation, as Kaufmann claims. Below is my analysis of whether in 2011 we're really seeing a price hike due to true food scarcity.
One hectare of land can easily produce three tons of wheat. One person eating a kilogram of wheat daily would need about 400 kg of wheat per year, so this hypothetical hectare would support seven people for the year. Using these conservative figures, the world's 1.5 billion hectares of arable land could support a little over 10 billion people, which is about the max that any forecasts see our world population topping out at. This estimate is highly conservative, because wheat is a relatively low-yielding crop, and would yield more than the three tons I'm positing if it were grown on more prime, well-watered land (in France wheat yields about 7.5 tons per hectare). Crops like rice and corn yield more per hectare than wheat, and tubers like potatoes and cassava are head-and-shoulders above grain crops in per-hectare calorie yield. Furthermore, in much of the tropics multiple crop cycles are squeezed into one year, so for instance wheat grown in Colombia's highlands can give three harvests in a year.
So by this calculation, if we were to maintain current production levels, we'd have enough food to feed 1.5 times our current populace. Granted, my calculation is not taking into account the diversion of significant quantities of grain into production of biofuels and meat. In this blog post I'm not trying to argue that everyone should be eating only a kilogram of wheat daily, but merely using wheat yields to illustrate that even with biofuels and increasing meat consumption, high food prices today can't be explained very well by raw resource scarcity. Because of this, I tend to believe Kaufman's thesis that speculation on world food markets is mainly to blame for skyrocketing food prices, at least for now. Certainly the trends that Brown discusses (increasing demand for meat, harvest irregularities, soil and water degradation) are real and menacing, but the scarcity argument clearly does not hold for 2007 and 2008, which the FAO indicates were bumper years for world cereal supply (see below, reproduced from the FAOSTAT service). Trends are similar for coarse grains, which include corn and other animal feed crops.
World cereal supply in metric tons
2000
2.06 billion tons
2001
2.11 billion tons
2002
2.03 billion tons
2003
2.09 billion tons
2004
2.28 billion tons
2005
2.27 billion tons
2006
2.24 billion tons
2007
2.35 billion tons
2008
2.52 billion tons
The writing and analysis is about what you would expect from accomplished international affairs reporters without a solid background in agronomy. There are some slips, like in the blurb on the Svalbard seed storage site, in which the author confuses a food bank (which is a pantry supplying donated canned goods to poor people) with a seed bank, which is a place to store diverse varieties of seeds for experimental use and crop improvement. It's sometimes hard to believe that such brilliant minds as Foreign Policy's contributors are relatively clueless about the food and farming that underlies all human endeavor. But the articles are generally well-written and well-investigated.
I was a bit pissed off at a fill-in-the-blank section in which the magazine proffered some food security terms for supposed experts to comment on. The so-called experts included Paul Collier, free-market demagogue that knows nothing about real food or farming (as I've shown in past blog posts), Hakan Altinay, a Washington think-tank researcher on governance issues, a few mainstream ag professors from big farm-state ag universities, a few economic (but not agrarian) development experts, Hank Cardello, an ex-food industry insider who still talks like he's drunk Kraft's Kool-Aid, Dickson Despommier, a medical ecology professor whose crank ideas on vertical farming I've deconstructed in the past, and an ex-Goldman Sachs bigwig (Mark Tercek). Not one systems or development agronomist among them, as far as I could tell (though I appreciate the international development know-how of Oxfam's Raymond C. Offenheiser). This clueless crew was particularly inane in its comments on "organic". There were no chemical or agronomic explanations, no reference to the recent IAASTD report signalling that organic approaches are among the most viable strategies for feeding the world. All Foreign Policy's supposed experts had to offer were snide, blase quips that seem to confuse organic farming with hippies or Manhattan food snobs.
This lack of informed agronomist and agrarian voices in the Foreign Policy food issue reminds me of a recent NYT article on India's agricultural stagnation. It is written by a non-farmer, non-agronomist economist who obviously knows little about how farming actually works. For instance, he bemoans the prevalence of manual labor in Indian farming, and implicitly prescribes "highly mechanized farms growing thousands of acres of food crops", the assembly of "large land holdings", and "corporations...farming land directly" as a way to improve total food production. If the author knew a bit about farm economy, he'd know that to raise per-acre productivity and hence total food production, the key is to intensify land use. Mechanization and consolidating landholdings does precisely the opposite, lowering per-acre yields and thus total food supply. Granted, mechanization and consolidation improve per-person income by allowing fewer people to farm more land, but this implies taking many farmers off the land. In India, with its scarce land, teeming slums, and lack of gainful non-farming employment opportunities, the goal should clearly be improving productivity to land, as opposed throwing people off the land so a few can expand and mechanize their farms.
Anyway, when I read articles like this, and to a lesser extent the Foreign Policy special issue, I wonder why I or an agronomist or farmer like me isn't getting paid big bucks to write on agrarian issues. Instead these prestigious publications sick uninformed hacks on topics they don't understand, who then churn out banal drivel. If the New York Times and Foreign Policy believe that there aren't literate, thoughtful agronomists out there to write well-researched copy, I'm here to tell them that we do exist. So to any big-name publications that may be reading, I'm here, and I'm willing to work cheap!
I want to close with perhaps the most well-done, pertinent features in the recent Foreign Policy. One was an analysis of world food trends by Lester Brown. He is an environmentalist who is perennially announcing the imminent end of the world. At any rate, he does a good job of discussing the major issues that are defining the future world landscape with regards to food production. He looks at recent years' rise in food prices as a consequence of hard new realities of resource scarcity and consumption, namely rising population, rising living standards, lowered and more erratic yields due to environmental degradation and climate change, and use of food crops for biofuel, among other things.
On the other hand, and somewhat buried in the magazine, comes an opposing analysis from Fred Kaufmann. He blames high food prices on long-position speculative investment from big capital. Essentially banks like Goldman Sachs have created investment products that invest in commodities. But because commodities don't naturally increase in value like stocks of growing companies, the investment product essentially creates a permanent appreciation in commodities by constantly buying, and never selling. This price inflation, and not real scarcity, is responsible for high food prices, according to Kauffman. It creates a bubble of permanent long positions (anticipation that prices will rise further), just as happened in the US's fantasy real-estate market when a plywood-and-drywall shell forty miles from Atlanta might be ascribed a value of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Here's my analysis on Brown vs. Kaufmann. The trends Brown discusses are real, and they will surely drive up food prices in the future. But at least the last years' food bubbles seem to me to be more a result of speculation, as Kaufmann claims. Below is my analysis of whether in 2011 we're really seeing a price hike due to true food scarcity.
One hectare of land can easily produce three tons of wheat. One person eating a kilogram of wheat daily would need about 400 kg of wheat per year, so this hypothetical hectare would support seven people for the year. Using these conservative figures, the world's 1.5 billion hectares of arable land could support a little over 10 billion people, which is about the max that any forecasts see our world population topping out at. This estimate is highly conservative, because wheat is a relatively low-yielding crop, and would yield more than the three tons I'm positing if it were grown on more prime, well-watered land (in France wheat yields about 7.5 tons per hectare). Crops like rice and corn yield more per hectare than wheat, and tubers like potatoes and cassava are head-and-shoulders above grain crops in per-hectare calorie yield. Furthermore, in much of the tropics multiple crop cycles are squeezed into one year, so for instance wheat grown in Colombia's highlands can give three harvests in a year.
So by this calculation, if we were to maintain current production levels, we'd have enough food to feed 1.5 times our current populace. Granted, my calculation is not taking into account the diversion of significant quantities of grain into production of biofuels and meat. In this blog post I'm not trying to argue that everyone should be eating only a kilogram of wheat daily, but merely using wheat yields to illustrate that even with biofuels and increasing meat consumption, high food prices today can't be explained very well by raw resource scarcity. Because of this, I tend to believe Kaufman's thesis that speculation on world food markets is mainly to blame for skyrocketing food prices, at least for now. Certainly the trends that Brown discusses (increasing demand for meat, harvest irregularities, soil and water degradation) are real and menacing, but the scarcity argument clearly does not hold for 2007 and 2008, which the FAO indicates were bumper years for world cereal supply (see below, reproduced from the FAOSTAT service). Trends are similar for coarse grains, which include corn and other animal feed crops.
World cereal supply in metric tons
2000
2.06 billion tons
2001
2.11 billion tons
2002
2.03 billion tons
2003
2.09 billion tons
2004
2.28 billion tons
2005
2.27 billion tons
2006
2.24 billion tons
2007
2.35 billion tons
2008
2.52 billion tons