Meatconomy

Ok, so Monsanto and BASF just announced that they have successfully isolated a naturally occurring gene that enables corn to better tolerate drought conditions. Hooray! Um, not quite. The impacts of drought are certainly incredibly destructive across the world and drought-resistant corn could certainly help many farmers in the developing world, but there are some big ifs to think about here.

First, both BASF and Monsanto are contributing $1.5 billion to the project. So drought-resistant corn needs to turn a profit well in excess of $3 billion. This will of course dictate some creative price structuring and probably isn’t going to help those farmers who are in most need of this trait.

Second, the press release notes that 10 to 13 million acres of farmland planted to corn in the US is prone to drought and that test plots achieved gains of 7 to 10 bushels per acre. So in a country that has historically overproduced corn we will now have somewhere between 70 and 130 million additional bushels of corn to subsidize and dispose. 

Depending on how you cut the numbers it is pretty clear that we already produce more than enough calories per person across the world thus hunger is a problem of distribution and NOT production. One of the key tropes that biotech proponents repeat is that we need GM to feed the world. In the US this takes the form of seeing the US (and the Midwest in particular as the breadbasket of the world). But we already have more than enough calories, we just don’t distribute them properly. However, there is a perverse twist to this logic and the implications of believing it. If American crop yields do continue to increase and if subsidy policies do not change significantly, those parts of the world that are most likely to experience chronic hunger and food insecurity will be LESS secure.

How can this be you ask? Well, if there is an increase in the quantity of subsidized US grain with no comparable increase in demand (I’ll get to this later) the logical result is that those farmers who cannot produce grain crops as cheaply will be forced out of the market. The widely-documented long term effects of structural adjustment policies  (SAPs) in Africa and other parts of the no-longer-developing world (sorry for the cynicism) has been to remove domestic subsidy programs, while US subsidy policies have remained in place of course. The other effect of SAPs has been to encourage farmers to produce for export market rather than for subsitence, forcing them to rely on market exchange for the food they need to survive. So, when the Monsanto-aided crop yields in the government subsidized US corn belt rise, African farmers (and many others) who are not subsidized and who are now dependent upon market exchange for food will be even more vulnerable to events like drought as any subsistence crops that they are able to plant will be their only non-exchange option for food. They will thus be in  position to plead for “International” food aid, which of course is provided largely by the US, and which serves as an important component of crop subsidization. And thus the circle is complete. Biotech advocate’s claim that we need their enhanced products to feed the world will be made real but only if we follow their advise and accept their tropes about hunger, yields and the necessary course of action. 

One possible alternative here is that demand for grain crops will increase, but the only likely sources for this increased demand are from biofuel systems and from grain-based meat producers, two industries which are coming under HEAVY criticism for their contribution to climate change; the very condition which purportedly requires drought-resistent crops in the first place! Ugh…

There is a fascinating article over on Seed discussing the potential impacts of sequencing the cow genome. The article discusses a few issues that I find particularly important to highlight. First, livestock is really important! Duh! When well managed, livestock plays a key role in ensuring that agricultural systems function sustainably. The importance of Joel Salatin’s writings on pasture rotation to many greenhorns is highlighting something that is in many ways, knowledge that has been circulating for a long time. Livestock provide traction, fertilizers and functions as a de facto bank when farmers interact with markets. At the same time, research on livestock is remarkably underfunded these days. I wonder why? Let’s speculate for a moment.

As Boustead points out, with animal breeding knowledge (progeny testing), has doubled milk output over the last 50 years (what are the comparable numbers  on rBST?) Yet, progency testing is in many ways a revised, formalized, and statistically-enhanced version of fairly conventionally animal breeding techniques. The information provided by genomic sequencing supposedly promises to bring forth a “new era of genome-enabled livestock models” which given recent trends in intellectual property promises to be accompanied by a new wave of patent filings on animal genes by large biotech firms. Monsanto already has a number of animal patents in the pipeline. My guess is that Harris Lewin’s lament about the proportions of funding directed towards animal science will be addressed in the next few years (Note: Lewin is a Prof. at UIUC where I’m doing my doctoral work, but I have no connections to him), although my guess is that funding will not come directly from the Department of Ag, but from NIH. The biomedical implications of animal genome sequencing are tremendous. Already research is being conducted on pigs using them as human models for Alzheimer’s disease and Ossabaw Island Hogs are being brought to Central Indiana as part of Eli Lily’s efforts to develop the next generation of Type II Diabetes drugs. 

What is interesting to me about the potential of livestock genome sequencing and the connections to IP law is that if livestock are increasingly seen as machines that can produce heart valves, livers, and perhaps other organs for use in humans what is going to change in terms of the philosophical and legal justification for allowing patents on life, but not humans? If we can engineer pigs to produce livers that are genetically-equivalent to human livers, or perhaps custom kidneys for transplant into diabetics then what is the distinction between a patent covering a liver in a human and a liver in a pig? The ability to clone human parts, using GM livestock is very much something of interest but it is going to take some very fine legal wrangling to make it happen without disrupting the legal basis of patents on other forms “life” and I predict that there will be significant opportunities to challenge the relationships between science, government and industry.

Bonnie P. at Ethicurian wrote a great post on a set of new articles which take to task the conduct of academic science and the ways in which it has become intertwined with the interests of companies such as Monsanto, ADM, etc. It’s an important topic and I’m glad Ethicurian, which is one of my favorite blogs, is tackling this issue. However I have a few issues with the logic of the argument particularly the way in which science, as a collective endeavor, is connected to democratic governance and society in both the original articles and Bonnie’s commentary. I wrote a response over at Ethicurian but I thought I would replicate it here:

Hello Bonnie, Thanks for posting this summary and the links to the papers. I’ve taken a quick glance at both articles and I just wanted to offer a few comments and a few additional reading suggestions.

 

First, I agree with calls for a massive change in the way that research on transgenic organisms is conducted and regulated, particularly when it comes to food and fiber crops. The current model is not working well. At the same time there is a lot about the way that Lotter frames his argument and how you reproduce it that I feel is problematic. Let me explain.

 

First is the call for a return to a type of science ruled by Mertonian principles. This sounds great. Science as objective. Science as responsive to `society’, particularly a democratic one, etc. However, this is a pipe dream. Not because we’ve gone so far that we can’t go back, but because Merton was putting for an abstract set of principles that never really were very accurate in the first place. 

 

Second, Lotter claims that many countries have modeled their regulatory approach to GMOs and transgenics after the US. Which countries? Shelia Jasanoff has an excellent book, Designs on Nature, which details how the emergence of GMOs in the 1980s and 1990s was dealt with in the US, Germany and the UK. While she concedes that effort have been made to harmonize regulatory frameworks each of the three countries framed the issues around GMOs very differently with science being evaluated in very different ways. In fact the precautionary principle in European science policy pre-dates mad-cow, but only barely (it was an event which settled some debates over various options).

 

I find it interesting that on the one hand Lotter, and by proxy you, declare that the science apparatus is broken with corruption and other ills plaguing the emerging sphere of academic capitalism, yet you tout Lotter’s academic credentials. I’m not necessarily contesting either of these two claims. Yes, academic science is highly conditioned by funding streams, publication protocols, and a whole lot of other “social” factors that seemingly have no place in Merton’s framework. Yet, as you seem to suggest Lotter is `qualified’ to speak on these issues because he went through the same hoops to get credentialed (although unfortunately this has not led to the tenure track for him). 

 

This reminds me a lot of the debate that circulated following the McWilliams op-ed a few months back. Science was questioned for its ties to Big Pork but this time McWilliams was critiqued for being a PhD but in the wrong discipline, history. Comments were made that as a historian how was he `qualified’ to talk about science. In both cases we have claims being made about what constitutes appropriate expertise in judging science. Is the problem with GMOs that the science is bad or that the science has been tied into a system of funding and IP law that almost necessarily leads to outcomes that `we’ don’t like. It could be both, but it could also be that the issue is not with the science per se, but with the culture that surounds the evaluation of science. I would argue that as long as we make arguments where we take certain types of academic endeavors to task (genetic science here, history in the McWilliams case) while propping up other types of science we aren’t going to make a lot of progress in terms of devising cultural and political framework to adequately deal with a world that now offers the possibility to intervene in life at previously unknown levels. I’m not sure what adequate is in this case, but it is just as important as anything else.

 

I should confess that I myself am a graduate student (in social geography) at a university that has had as much to do with big ag as any in this country (we have a library lecture hall called the Monsanto Lecture Hall, woohoo!). But I think that this gives me a slightly different perspective on these debates. On the one hand I feel that academic training is incredibly limited and thus we are 100% justified in saying that certain people are more or less qualified to speak on particular topics. But I’m also wary of approaches which prop up certain types of expertise over others depending on the circumstances. In other words, the letters PhD don’t mean that you are somehow expert in all things. Nor do they mean that your expertise in a particular area means you are somehow the person to be most qualified to make a decision. Appeals to Mertonian ideals actually reinforce a model of science and policy that is highly technocratic and thus authoritarian in many ways. We need to recognize that ultimately knowledge is a collective endeavor constituted by people acting in ways that are contingent, situated and uncertain. That we’ve reached a point where science is being uniquely harnessed to serve particular interests is less a failure of science or a breakdown in scientific norms than it is a failure of the collective project of generating knowledge which falls on the shoulders of policy makers, business people, media, and everyone else that constitutes our society. And this includes activists who offer highly specific representations of the problem and the solution in order to advance their own agendas and to shift the framing of the debate. So to conclude I agree with you that we need to take some responsibility to learn about what is going on, but we can’t appeal to nostalgia about life pre-GMO to get that to happen. Pandora’s box is open and we need to rethink the problem of governing in a world with transgenic potentialities.

I just realized that I never actually offered my reading suggestions. Here are only a few:

Ok, so this isn’t exactly new news but I haven’t seen a whole of press coverage or even blog coverage so it’s worth getting out there. I came across the web site No Patents On Seeds today and followed a link to the Pig Patent case. Their summary is pretty spot on as far as I can tell. Monsanto appears to be “improving” standard and time tested livestock breed techniques and patenting them. More importantly their patents indicate that animals produced using these techniques or variations. Here is the money “disclaimer” so to speak:

“While the compositions and methods of this invention have been described in terms of preferred embodiments, it will be apparent to those of skill in the art that variations may be applied to the methods and in the steps or in the sequence of steps of the methods described herein without departing from the concept and scope of the invention. More specifically, it will be apparent that certain agents which are both chemically and physiologically related may be substituted for the agents described herein while the same or similar results would be achieved. All such similar substitutes and modifications apparent to those skilled in the art are deemed to be within the scope and concept of the invention as defined by the appended claims.”

I’m not a patent lawyer but I think it is pretty clear what is being said here. This patent is generally inclusive to animal breeding writ large and not just for livestock. I’m still trying to dig up some more information on this case, but this is pretty frightening. It makes me wonder, is there an “open source” movement for things like this? It’s pretty clear that all sorts of large corporations are heavily invested in patenting almost anything that they can and clearly what is considered Intellectual Property is being very loosely defined and interpreted by government regulators and courts.

There is an interesting article today in the NYTimes about food safety. It is a fairly straightforward discussion of the various risks endemic to our modern food system (raw milk causing paralysis, botchulism in factory produced chilli dogs, e. coli in salad mix, etc.). What I find frustrating about the article is in particular a parenthetical stating that “Swine flu, despite its name is not contracted from food.” I actually have no problem with that statemet. It’s actually 100% true. What is troubling is the context. The authors insert the comment between discussions of processed food inspection and the data on food safety outbreaks but the effect is to suggest that “agricultural” production and “food” production are somehow different.

This is technically more true than false, at least in the US. With inspections divided between the USDA and FDA the effect is that food safety and agricultural safety are considered as seperate issues within the policy world. Solutions to food safety are couched largely in terms which reinforce many of the underlying causes. Namely, they are technological. Irradiate, surveil, track, etc. This approach fails to recognize that many of the underlying causes of un-safe food emerge from the economics of agricultural production itself. The production of poor quality ingrediants, or ingriedients produced at massive scales that not only amplify biological contamination but also preclude inspection is largely what allows for a processed food economy to exist. An agricultural system which generates incentives to maximize efficiency and generates opportunities to do so by providing a vast reserve of cheap and unprotected labor is almost logically predesposed to generating contamination. Of course technology like irradiation does work but it does so in ways that generate the most economic advantage for he very producers who generate high-risk products.

The raw milk issues is a bit different and I admit that I am neither a raw milk drinker nor someone who really knows all that much about the history of milk production (see this book for a great examination of milk). However, the comments to the article seem to fall in to two camps around milk and the article itself seems to argue that the safety of milk can be simply explained by the presence or absence of pasturization. Similarly the proponents of raw milk seem to suggest that what makes it healthy and safe is it’s “rawness.” Both of these arguments seem to ignore most of the critical issues, namely that milk has to travel through a number of hands and that health and safety are largely going to be determined by what happens along the way. So raw milk is probably not going to be very safe or healthy if it is shipped long distances, or mixed in with other batches of milk. The knowledge of the effects of pasturization actually paradoxically probably made drinking raw milk safer. Once it became clear that milk-induced sickness was caused by things (bacteria, toxins, etc.) people could begin examining how they were produced. The work of the cheese nun / microbiologist comes to mind here in terms of the synergestic effects of bacterial colonies and the seemingly paradoxicaly outcome that producing certain cheese in “clean” stainless environments actually caused outbreaks of “bad” bacteria.

In any case, the debates that are playing out in the comments section are very similar to the debates that occured following the McWilliams article on free-range pigs. People who support pasture-raised meat and the local food movement more broadly generally seem to argue that a particlar scale of production (local) or a particular technique (organic) is necessarily better. People who oppose such arguments and instead advocate for techno-industrial agriculture similarly argue that the application of advances in scientific knowledge in the form of new technology is inherrantly the best approach. Both “sides” take a problem (food safety or hunger or whatever) and explain the sollution to lie in one easily encapsulated concept. This sort of reductionism is of course an artifact of a particular information environment as well as a political climate where the soundbite dominates (although this is waaay to simple an explanaion) but the effect of such an approach is to polarize, politicize and otherwise fail to explain anything. What’s the sollution? Well, I’m not sure. The capacity and willingness of people to engaging in complex reasoning seems pretty limited. Linear, reductionist thinking is a norm embedded in a wide range of social and technical processes. My own personal approach is to engage in activities where the complexity of the world is amplified and not erased. By attempting to disrupt the categories that I hold on to I feel that I’m able to think a bit differently. I don’t know if it makes me more effective but I feel that it makes me more modest and more humble about my ability to figure the world out. Things like gardening or riding a bike in the city achieve this for me. Because biking in Chicago is generally so unpleasant I’m forced to reflect upon how the city has been put together in particular ways and how our ability to think it shaped by this. It’s funny because this is exactly what I wrote my application essay for grad school about (for my Masters in Urban Planning). It’s still true.