We Can Feed the World!

Foreign Policy magazine: Hawking technocratic dumbassery on a global scale, one heart-felt subsidy at a time.

I am going to do some heavy editorializing.  The reader, of course, does not have to agree with any of it.  I am just putting some ideas out there.

I am not putting out new ideas.  I am putting out classic ideas that routinely get buried in policy dumbassery unwittingly passed off as enlightened expert policy wonkery.  That said, these classic ideas yet seem novel to the wonks who perceive technocratic solutions to all problems, including problems that don’t even exist.

The basic theme is that we don’t live in a Nirvana of unlimited abundance.  A few things come of this.  First, we may fall into the trap of perceiving scarcity as a problem that has to be relieved rather than just as a condition we have to work with.  We may perceive it as a problem demanding an urgent public policy response.  Second, and worse, we may fall into the trap of perceiving that a finely-engineered public policy response can create abundance (and thus remedy scarcity) without exacerbating that same scarcity or creating scarcity somewhere else. 

Ultimately we end up seeing problems where they don’t exist and demanding that we throw other people’s money at these same non-problems.

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October 10, 2022. 

“We can feed the world!”

Thus our friends at Foreign Policy declare.

That’s the message we want to send with the latest [Fall 2022] issue of Foreign Policy magazine: a collection of practical ideas for getting smarter about food production, making supply chains more efficient, and wasting less. Here are some of the solutions we spotlight:

Sarah Taber argues that the status quo has to change. Industrialized agriculture, Taber writes, actually benefits only a select few. Instead, we must invest in fisheries and forests and, crucially, treat food policy as a public utility rather than as a corporate endeavor.

One way to produce more food would be to improve access to fertilizer, according to Saloni Shah. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa use only 20 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare of land—less than 15 percent of the global average. As a result, those countries produce fewer crops and are forced to spend money on expensive imports.

Ancient grains such as millet are nutrient-rich, need less water, and are more resistant to pests. Dan Saladino traveled to Nongtraw in northeastern India to discover how one community is pioneering its return and transforming their diet in the process.

Why is the Impossible Burger more expensive than a regular beef burger? Nigel Purvis and Bruce Friedrich make the case for targeted tax credits and subsidies to attract investment in plant-based proteins. After all, it worked for renewable energy.

Alicia Kennedy reports from Puerto Rico on how local entrepreneurs are betting big on mushrooms to achieve food sovereignty in a part of the world already hit hard by climate change.

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Bless these people.  They mean well.  But, proactively doing good in the world is hard.  But that’s not how technocrats see things. From their perspective: Put the experts in charge, and allow them to identify the right policies and then to implement those policies.  It’s really very simple.  Just get out of the way of the experts.

That’s the kind of lesson that comes explicitly out of tomes like The Administrative Process (1938): Let the experts rule.  Insulate them and their policies from judicial review, and keep politics out of it.  Elected officials should not be able to come in and change policy.  Just leave it to the experts to figure out what to do, and let them get on with it.

So, what do the experts at Foreign Policy have in mind in their Fall 2022 issue?  Let’s examine each of the five items listed above.

“Sarah Taber is a crop scientist, author, and ex-farm worker with 25 years’ experience in the food system.”  In a piece titled “The Solution to the Global Food Crisis Isn’t More Food,” Sarah tells us that we need “to build a functioning regional food system that moves us away from agribusiness…”

Basically, “agribusiness” operates for hits own benefit, and not for the benefit of everyone else. 

That makes for a familiar, old school, Marxist refrain: the “exploiters,” as Lenin would call them, operate enterprises for their own benefit.  But, placing those same enterprises under the control of the state would enable the state to operate those enterprises for the benefit of everyone.  The author glibly elaborates on that point.  We need to get away from agribusiness, “particularly as climate change deepens, we need to stay focused on what matters: not saving the players in our current food system but feeding the public.”  There is some suggestion there of operating enterprises for the benefit of everyone (“feeding the public”), but also Climate Change™ is in the mix.

That can mean investing in fisheries and forests, which could require regulating or banning certain types of farming. It can mean approaching food as a public utility—the way many jurisdictions already handle water, electricity, and other services—rather than as a private business. It can mean investing in traditional farmers and farm workers and recognizing their rights to land. In short, to get to a resilient food system, we need political leadership that responds to the needs of the public.

One way to think of this is that the author advocates for forceful application of the visible hand of heavy-handed centralized, administrative process in place of the light touch of the invisible hand.  Centralization should dominate decentralization.  It’s an old and tired argument.

In the next piece, titled “To Achieve Food Security, Africa Must Increase Fertilizer Production,” Saloni Shah tells us that we should subsidize the efforts of African countries to develop fertilizer production capacity.  He seems to be telling us that there is problem of underinvestment, but he also tells us that, notwithstanding his own reporting, “African institutions are already channeling funding toward a food-secure future: African banks, for instance, have backed capital-intensive projects … but they need greater support.”

Do they?  Much research in economics is motivated by hypothetical problems of underinvestment, but, even if such problems exist, a question is what to do about it?  More fundamental question are: How do we compute the optimal level of investment, and why is there underinvestment?  If there would be so much value to be realized by investing in fertilizer production capacity, then why isn’t anyone already doing it?  Or, as the author himself reports, others are doing it.  For example:

Nigeria, which exports urea—a low-cost nitrogen-based fertilizer—to Brazil, India, and the United States, presents a model that could be replicated elsewhere. The Dangote Group, a Nigerian conglomerate, opened the world’s second-largest fertilizer production facility on the outskirts of Lagos in March. It shares a complex with the world’s largest petroleum refining operation and can produce an annual 3 million metric tons of urea fertilizer. To put that into perspective, Africa consumes just over 5 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer annually.

So, private parties have invested and do invest in fertilizer production capacity.  Is the problem of underinvestment an illusion?  If not, then the matter requires a lot more motivation.  Just citing the fact that investment in production facilities is costly means nothing.

The third piece, “The Ancient Super Grain That Could Help Feed the World,” talks about how “The U.N. hopes to encourage more parts of Asia and Africa to replace the ‘big three’—rice, wheat, and maize (corn), which combined provide the world with more than 50 percent of its calories—with millets.”

“For too long, millets have been seen as a food of poor farmers,” said Jacqueline d’Arros Hughes, the director-general of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, or Icrisat. “Urbanization and poor land management is resulting in the loss of agricultural land. With millets, it’s possible to reclaim degraded dry lands. This makes millets critical in feeding a growing world.”

Recall the story of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954).  Some villagers hire a cluster of ronin (masterless samurai) to defend their village against a sizable band of marauders (also ronin) who they expect at the end of the harvest season to descend on their village and abscond with their harvests of rice and millet.  One older, wise samurai takes charge of the project of recruiting the other samurai.  The offer he is equipped to make is “three bowls of rice a day, and the fun and glory of it”—“it” being the defense of the village.

The offer is attractive, because people value rice over the alternatives like millet.  Millet may be more nutritious (I have no idea), but people prefer rice. 

People in India seem to prefer rice, too:

Until the 1960s and the arrival of the Green Revolution and its wheat and rice cultivation, millet was a main staple in India; however, between 1962 and 2010, per capita consumption of the grain fell by almost 90 percent, from 33 kilograms per year to just 4.  During the same period, wheat consumption almost doubled, from 27 to 52 kilograms.

So, as people became wealthier, they substituted out of millet into rice.  Is that what we should understand?

But replacing native cultivated millets with new water- and fertilizer-hungry, high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice has had its consequences: Water resources have been depleted, soils decimated, and farmers have become dependent on expensive inputs, particularly fertilizers.

Rice cultivation may be more demanding than millet cultivation is some sense.  (Is it?)  But, so what?  Growers always have the option of reverting to millet cultivation. But:  

Indians now depend on modern varieties of white rice and refined wheat flour for much of their diet: As a result, 1 in 6 people are undernourished , nearly 1 in 4 adults are considered overweight, and large numbers of preschool children and adolescents are affected by some form of micronutrient deficiency.

It is hard not to think that more than 1 in 6 Indians were undernourished before the 1960’s and before the Green Revolution.  That said, one can imagine that millet is both more nutritious than rice and less costly to cultivate.  And, maybe there already is a market for millet.  Or maybe we should contemplate a market for grains in which, say, rice and millet compete with each other.  Either way, what is the compelling argument for a public policy intervention here?  People should eat more healthily?  And we should force them to do it?

The fourth piece, “How to Make Plant-Based Proteins Less Expensive,” involves another tale of underinvestment.  The basic proposition is that animal protein is bad for the environment (because Climate Change™) and constitutes an inefficient way of delivering protein to people.  Plant-based protein could deliver that same protein while tying up fewer resources.  But people don’t like plant-based protein. 

Right now, the primary obstacles to wider uptake of alternative proteins are that they cost too much and don’t taste as good as conventional meat. Importantly, the key to scaling these innovative protein technologies is emphatically not government action to replace, restrict, or disincentivize animal products in the marketplace. Nor is it browbeating and moralizing to consumers. Rather, what’s needed is concerted government action to accelerate the innovations needed to reduce costs and improve how these proteins taste.

So, we need government to subsidize research on how to reduce costs.  Hmm …

I will say that this idea of research on how to reduce costs does tie into a few bodies of research in the economics of innovation.  The most important of these ideas can motivate the idea of underinvestment.  Specifically, a given body of research might yield great benefits to society as a whole, but the researcher might only secure very small private benefits.  Basically, if people can’t profit from their research, they may not do much or any research.

They might not profit from research if that same research were to be susceptible to severe “knowledge spillovers.”  Coming up with great ideas is great, but if someone learns of your great idea, then they might go out and commercialize it, leaving you out in the cold.  Or, maybe you can make some headway toward commercializing a good idea, but the act of commercializing it may tip off other parties about what you’re up to.  They may, for example, be able to reverse engineer your work, and that could amount to redoing your costly research at very low cost.  They then may commercialize that same idea, and you may find yourself in stiff competition.  All that competition may be good for society as a whole, but you might not be able to recover enough profits to cover the costs of your earlier research.  And, anticipating that, you might not do the research at all.  Society as a whole ends up losing out.

To remedy this problem of underinvestment, government may get in to the business of subsidizing research or even setting up its own labs and doing research itself. 

One can argue (and should argue) about whether government should subsidize research, but a good thing about this business of “knowledge spillovers” is that it at least motivates a problem of underinvestment.  And that motivates a question: Is there really a problem of underinvestment in the plant-based meat business, and should we really demand that government get involved?  Perhaps the market for plant-based meat is (a) doing just fine on its own—no one said that research, development and commercialization is easy—or (b) plant-based meat makes for an interesting idea, but society really doesn’t value it that much, anyway.  Just because Foreign Policy magazine can convince itself that an idea would generate value to society doesn’t mean it would actually generate value to society.

Finally, the fifth piece, “In Puerto Rico, Seeking Food Sovereignty Through Mushrooms,” the author observes that “Puerto Rico’s mushroom business has seen a mini-boom,” and that “mushrooms could provide one step toward food sovereignty, or the ability of a region or nation to produce all of its own food.” 

So, what is the problem?  The problem is that “Kurt Miller, a fungal parataxonomist who is documenting the archipelago’s native mushrooms” perceives that there is “a lot of potential in Puerto Rico’s under-researched fungal ecosystem.” 

Ah, well.  Let’s give Kurt and his friends some big grants to sort out something or other about the fungal ecosystem…  But, again, what is the underinvestment problem?  If there is so much value to be realized here, then why isn’t there already more investment in it?  Or, maybe there is, hence, “mini-boom.”  Private parties in Puerto Rico are already placing their bets and making investments.

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What to make of all of this? 

A motivation common to the authors’ policy prescriptions seems to be that they perceive something good, and “good” is a sufficient basis for demanding subsidies. Mushrooms are good, therefore we must subsidize mushroom production. Plant-based proteins are good, therefore we must force everyone in to substituting animal proteins with alternative sources of protein. Millet grains are good; everyone should eat more of those. It goes on and on, and we should channel other people’s money into subsidies of the good things.

Governance-by-subsidy may have a lot of intuitive appeal, but it puts us on the road to serfdom.

The authors decry the fact that investment (in production facilities, in research and development) is costly.  But that alone is not a justification for subsidies.  At the very least, the authors should make an argument about underinvestment while keeping in mind that, just because the author may think an idea is really good, society as a whole may not place much value on it, in which case there really may not be an underinvestment problem.

The authors often illuminate private initiatives to develop technologies or develop production facilities.  Is that evidence that private initiatives are working and that, maybe, we don’t need government subsidies?  Again, the authors need to take care to motivate their implicit claims of underinvestment.

The biggest point is that all of the authors make demands to impose technocratic, centralized solutions to problems that may not exist.  They do this while, ironically, citing evidence of private solutions to the same problems that they purport to have illuminated.  They have not demonstrated that doing nothing, in place of optimistically imposing over-engineered policies, would not itself amount to the most pro-social policy of all.