GMOs and Waste

Waste is another red herring in the GMO debate that often comes up. That's not to say that food waste is not a huge global problem. It is. As Rebecca Smithers writes in The Guardian,

In the face of United Nations predictions that there could be about an extra 3 billion people to feed by the end of the century and growing pressure on the resources needed to produce food, including land, water and energy, the IME is calling for urgent action to tackle this waste.

Their report, Global Food; Waste Not, Want Not, found that between 30% and 50% or 1.2-2bn tonnes of food produced around the world never makes it on to a plate.

In the UK as much as 30% of vegetable crops are not harvested due to their failure to meet retailers' exacting standards on physical appearance, it says, while up to half of the food that is bought in Europe and the US is thrown away by consumers.

And about 550bn cubic metres of water is wasted globally in growing crops that never reach the consumer. Carnivorous diets add extra pressure as it takes 20-50 times the amount of water to produce 1 kilogramme of meat than 1kg of vegetables; the demand for water in food production could reach 10–13 trillion cubic metres a year by 2050.

It would be really nice if we could solve of the problems in the global food system using only waste reduction policies. And I would love to see more food saved as it would lead to more environmentally sustainable outcomes in general.

Unfortunately, there's a couple of problems with ending food waste as a perfect panacea. Both are economic in nature. A good portion of the food wasted was purchased and then spoiled, so there is no way to stop that. The food wasted due to farming practices might not have any use since you would expect farmers to sell this at any available market if they could.

Expanding the market is an option, but understand that this is hard with perishable things like food products. (Non-perishable food items, by definition, are not easily wasted so they have to be ruled out of this issue). Without expanding the market, you need to somehow alter behavior in the West. This would also be hard, since they derive no direct benefit from this (you're doing this to feed the poor). Look, for example, how hard it is just to make Americans recycle.

There is a second economic issue. It does not benefit people in poor countries much to have Westerners flood their markets with cheap food. This reduces their GDP, for example, and it probably ensures that they continue to suffer from poverty. Instead, you would want them to adopt farming practices that increase yields, as this leads directly to economic benefits for poor farmers. This is the primary benefit of using GM products, and we have seen this happen across a range of technologies. A report from PG economics has some of the impressive conclusions,*

• Mexico - yield increases with herbicide tolerant soybean of 9 percent.
• Romania – yield increases with herbicide tolerant soybeans have averaged 31 percent.
• Philippines – average yield increase of 15 percent with herbicide tolerant corn.
• Philippines – average yield increase of 24 percent with insect resistant corn.
• Hawaii – virus resistant papaya has increased yields by an average of 40 percent.
• India – insect resistant cotton has led to yield increases on average more than 50 percent.

This isn't to say that people concerned with food waste are wrong, per se. The West would benefit enormously from saving more of its food, as it would allow us to grow enough food to feed ourselves with the minimum amount of inputs (the very definition of sustainability). Sustainability will also be important in poorer countries too, since they will want to preserve as many of their resources and natural places as possible.

But most importantly, if you care about malnutrition in poor countries, you want to help them develop. GMOs are not the exclusive cure to this issue (institutions, trade and capital expansion are also crucial too), but it is a technology that helps provide that possibility.

*Although being in the biotech industry themselves, PG Economics has incentives to overstate the benefits of its products. Buyer beware.

Politics Influence Economic Outcomes More than We'd Like to Admit

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
New York: Crown Publishers, 2012

Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
Douglass C. North
London: Cambridge University Press, 1990

Several theories of economic development have received attention in the popular press in recent years, even though many of these are based on non-economic foundations. For example, in Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2005) Diamond presents a largely economic history of the world as determined by geographic and ecological factors. According to Diamond, Western Europe’s dominant role in global affairs, from the 17th century on, can largely be attributed to East-West trade routes, the domestication of certain species, resistances to certain diseases and balkanization. Diamond believes that the latter encouraged greater competition and, eventually, served as the catalyst of European Imperialism.

Another theory was advocated by Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998). Close followers of American politics are probably most familiar with (an incredibly simplified version of) this theory thanks to comments from Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He tried to explain the differences in wealth between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as the result of Israel’s “superior culture.” The ideas that largely cultural factors – like punctuality, industriousness and the willingness to embrace entrepreneurial risk – determine national success is quite old. Weber, for example, wrote about them in The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2009).

These two theories, along with several others, are decisively dispelled in Acemoglu and Robinson’s new book, Why Nations Fail (2012). By analyzing a series of natural experiments, the authors show the extreme limitations of theories about geography and culture. One of their most famous cases involves the city of Nogales, which lies on the US/Mexico border, between the states of Arizona (US) and Sonora (Mexico). The two sides of the border share similar heritage, culture, geography and climate. Many people living on one side frequently visit friends and relatives on the other. The only substantial difference between the two sides is national affiliation.