Publications by Author: Paarlberg, Robert L.

The politics of food is changing fast. In rich countries, obesity is now a more serious problem than hunger. Consumers once satisfied with cheap and convenient food now want food that is also safe, nutritious, fresh, and grown by local farmers using fewer chemicals. Heavily subsidized and under-regulated commercial farmers are facing stronger push-back from environmentalists and consumer activists, and food companies are under the microscope. Meanwhile in developing countries, agricultural success in Asia has spurred income growth and dietary enrichment, but agricultural failure in Africa has left one third of all citizens undernourished. The international markets that link these diverse regions together are subject to sudden disruption, as noted when an unexpected spike in international food prices in 2008 caused street riots in a dozen or more countries.

In an easy-to-navigate, question-and-answer format, Food Politics carefully examines and explains the most important issues on today's global food landscape, including the food crisis of 2008, famines, the politics of chronic hunger, the Malthusian race between food production and population growth, international food aid, controversies surrounding "green revolution" farming, the politics of obesity, farm subsidies and trade, agriculture and the environment, agribusiness, supermarkets, food safety, fast food, slow food, organic food, local food, and genetically engineered food.

Politics in each of these areas has become polarized over the past decade by conflicting claims and accusations from advocates on all sides. Paarlberg's book maps this contested terrain through the eyes of an independent scholar not afraid to unmask myths and name names. More than a few of today's fashionable beliefs about farming and food are brought down a notch under this critical scrutiny. For those ready to have their thinking about food politics informed and also challenged, this is the book to read.

Features

• Concise, straightforward introduction to the range of phenomena the media has dubbed nullfood politicsnull.
• Will act as a counterpoint to the overwhelmingly alarmist literature on the food crisis.
• Paarlberg is an expert on food policy, a viewpoint underrepresented in the current popular literature.
• Lively writing, highly readable Q&A format; part of the popular What Everyone Needs to Know series.

Providing international leadership to alleviate global hunger requires our Government to have strong policies in two separate areas:

• Responding to short-term food emergencies, such as the international food price spike we saw in 2008, which temporarily put up to 100 million more people at risk.
• Attacking the persistent poverty that keeps more than 850 million people hungry even when international food prices are low.

In the first of these areas, the United States Government has done a good job, at least a B+. But in the second area the U.S. has done a poor job over the past 25 years, something close to an F. In 2009 America has a chance to correct this second failing grade by directing more development assistance support to help small farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Until the productivity of these small farmers goes up, poverty and hunger will not go down.

International prices of rice, wheat and corn have risen sharply, setting off violent urban protests in roughly a dozen countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But is this a "world food crisis?"

It is certainly a troubling instance of price instability in international commodity markets, leading to social unrest among urban food-buyers. But we must be careful not to equate high crop prices with hunger around the world. Most of the world's hungry people do not use international food markets, and most of those who use these markets are not hungry. International food markets, like international markets for everything else, are used primarily by the prosperous and secure, not the poor and vulnerable. In world corn markets, the biggest importer by far is Japan. Next comes the European Union. Next comes South Korea. Citizens in these countries are not underfed.

In the poor countries of Asia, rice is the most important staple, yet most Asian countries import very little rice. As recently as March, India was keeping imported rice out of the country by imposing a 70 percent duty.

Data on the actual incidence of malnutrition reveal that the regions of the world where people are most hungry, in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, are those that depend least on imports from the world market. Hunger is caused in these countries not by high international food prices, but by local conditions, especially rural poverty linked to low productivity in farming.

When international prices are go up, the disposable income of some import-dependent urban dwellers is squeezed. But most of the actual hunger takes place in the villages and in the countryside, and it persists even when international prices are low.

When hunger is measured as a balanced index of calorie deficiency, prevalence of underweight children and mortality rates for children under five, we find that South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in 2007 had hunger levels two times as high as in the developing countries of East Asia, four times as high as in Latin America, North Africa or the Middle East, and five times as high as in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The poor in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are hungry even though their connections to high-priced international food markets are quite weak.

In the poorest developing countries of Asia, where nearly 400 million people are hungry, international grain prices are hardly a factor, since imports supply only 4 percent of total consumption—even when world prices are low.

Similarly in sub-Saharan Africa, only about 16 percent of grain supplies have recently been imported, going mostly into the more prosperous cities rather than the impoverished countryside, with part arriving in the form of donated food aid rather than commercial purchases at world prices. The region in Africa that depends on world markets most heavily is North Africa, where 50 percent of grain supplies are imported. Yet food consumption in North Africa is so high (average per capita energy consumption there is about 3,000 calories per day, comparable to most rich countries) that increased import prices may cause economic stress for urban consumers (and perhaps even street demonstrations) but little real hunger.

Import dependence is also high in Latin America (50 percent for some countries) but again high world prices will not mean large numbers of hungry people, because per capita GDP in this region is five times higher than in sub-Saharan Africa. There is a severe food crisis among the poor in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but it does not come from high world prices. Even in 2005 in sub-Saharan Africa, a year of low international crop prices, 23 out of 37 countries in the region consumed less than their nutritional requirements.

Africa's food crisis grows primarily out of the low productivity, year in and year out, of the 60 percent of all Africans who plant crops and graze animals for a living. The average African smallholder farmer is a woman who has no improved seeds, no nitrogen fertilizers, no irrigation and no veterinary medicine for her animals. Her crop yields are only one third as high as in the developing countries of Asia, and her average income is only $1 a day.

One third of these poor African farmers are malnourished. In part because of the added burden of climate change, the number of undernourished people in Africa is now expected to triple by 2080, whatever the level of prices on the world market.

The long-term solution to such problems is not lower international prices or more food aid, but larger investments in the productivity of farmers in Africa.

African governments essentially stopped making these investments 25 years ago, when the international donor community pulled back from supporting agricultural modernization in the developing world.

Over the past two decades the U.S. Agency for International Development has cut its support for agricultural science in Africa by 75 percent.

World Bank lending for agriculture has dropped from 30 percent of bank lending in 1978 to just 8 percent. In 2005, the World Bank president at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, told a business forum: "My institution has largely gotten out of the business of agriculture."

This may be changing, and if high world food prices help speed the change, so much the better.

In a recent interview, the new World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, said he planned to raise agricultural lending to Africa next year from $450 million to $800 million. Since 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also begun to focus more of its grant-making on the needs of poor smallholder farmers in Africa through an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) chaired by Kofi Annan.

These are encouraging initiatives, because the productivity of farms in Africa—not food prices on the world market—should be the long-term focus.

Robert Paarlberg, professor of political science at Wellesley College, is the author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa.

Heading upcountry in Africa to visit small farms is absolutely exhilarating given the dramatic beauty of big skies, red soil, and arid vistas, but eventually the two-lane tarmac narrows to rutted dirt, and the journey must continue on foot. The farmers you eventually meet are mostly women, hardworking but visibly poor. They have no improved seeds, no chemical fertilizers, no irrigation, and with their meager crops they earn less than a dollar a day. Many are malnourished.

Nearly two-thirds of Africans are employed in agriculture, yet on a per-capita basis they produce roughly 20 percent less than they did in 1970. Although modern agricultural science was the key to reducing rural poverty in Asia, modern farm science—including biotechnology—has recently been kept out of Africa.

In Starved for Science Robert Paarlberg explains why poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies, particularly genetically engineered seeds with improved resistance to insects and drought. He traces this obstacle to the current opposition to farm science in prosperous countries. Having embraced agricultural science to become well-fed themselves, those in wealthy countries are now instructing Africans—on the most dubious grounds—not to do the same.

In a book sure to generate intense debate, Paarlberg details how this cultural turn against agricultural science among affluent societies is now being exported, inappropriately, to Africa. Those who are opposed to the use of agricultural technologies are telling African farmers that, in effect, it would be just as well for them to remain poor.

Approach any serious-looking college student in the Boston area, where I teach, and ask them what kind of food and farming system they would like to see. Most will say they don't want food from factory farms with a large carbon footprint. They want foods locally grown on small family farms. They don't want crops grown using synthetic chemical fertilizers or pesticides; they want crops grown "organically." They want farm animals to be able to range freely. They want "slow" food rather than fast food. And they don't want "Frankenfoods"—crops developed through genetic engineering.

What might such an idealized food system actually look like? Take a trip to Africa. The small farmers who populate the continent's impoverished countryside are living out something close to this post-materialist fantasy. Two-thirds of all Africans depend on farming or animal grazing for their food and income, and nearly all of their operations are small-scale.

Eighty percent of the labor on these farms is done by women and children, in part because it provides so little income for working-age men. There is no power machinery (only two tractors for every thousand agricultural workers) and only 4 percent of crops are irrigated. More than two thirds of all cropland is still planted with traditional crop varieties rather than with scientifically improved varieties. The animals—mostly cattle and goats—for age for their own food.

Agribusiness firms are nowhere to be seen, and chemical fertilizer applications per hectare are less than one-tenth the industrial world average. Insecticides and herbicides are not affordable, so crops suffer pest damage, and the weeding is done by children who would be better off in school. Nobody grows genetically engineered crops because governments in Africa—following Europe's lead—have not approved such crops for use.

Nearly all of Africa's farms are thus de facto "organic." Poor and non-productive, but organic.

Africa's traditional rural food systems are definitely "slow." To serve maize meal (called nsima) to her family, an African woman must first spend a season planting, weeding, harvesting and storing her corn, then she must strip it, winnow it, soak it, lay it out to dry, carry it to a grinder or pound it by hand, dry it again, and finally—after walking to gather enough fuel wood—cook it over a fire.

Cereal crop yields in Africa are only one-third as high as in developing Asia, and only one-tenth as high as the United States. Average income from this kind of farming amounts to only a dollar a day, which is why nearly 80 percent of all those officially classified as poor in Africa are farmers, and why one third of all farmers are chronically malnourished.

Without modern agricultural science, food production in Africa has fallen ominously behind population growth. Total agricultural production per capita today has fallen 19 percent below the level of 1970. Increasingly, Africans must depend on imported food aid.

Africa's urgent need for agricultural modernization is being rudely ignored. When elite urbanites in rich countries began turning away from science-based farming in the 1980s, external assistance for agriculture in poor countries was cut sharply. As late as 1980 the U.S. Agency for International Development was still devoting 25 percent of its official development assistance to the modernization of farming, but today it is just 1 percent. Nearly 30 percent of World Bank lending once went to agricultural modernization, but now it is just 8 percent.

In Europe, meanwhile, some official donors and nongovernmental agencies are working to block farm modernization in Africa. Despite Africa's worsening soil nutrient deficits, European donors like to promote costly organic farming techniques as the alternative to chemical fertilizer use. This is not how European farmers escaped poverty. Only 4 percent of cropland in Europe is currently being farmed organically (and less than 1 percent in America), but European NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace tell Africa's poor this is the path they should follow.

European governments and NGOs also promote regulatory systems that block the use of genetically engineered crops, including crops capable of resisting insects without pesticide sprays. Europe's own science academies have found no new risks to human health or the environment from any of the genetically engineered crops placed on the market so far, but since overfed Europe can do without this technology, underfed Africa is told to do the same.

In this fashion, and perhaps without realizing it, wealthy countries are imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people. The rich are, in effect, telling Africa's farmers they should just as well remain poor.

Robert Paarlberg is a professor of political science at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the author of "Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa" (Harvard University Press, March 2008).

Southern Africa is suffering its worst drought in a decade. The U.N. World Food Program estimates some 13 million people in six countries will need 1.2 million tons of food aid till March 2003 to avoid famine. Yet two countries, Zimbabwe and Zambia, have spent most of the summer rejecting food aid shipments of corn from the U.S. because some varieties of U.S. corn are "genetically modified" (GM). Incredibly, African leaders facing famine are rejecting perfectly safe food. What is going on here?

Regulatory Authorities

Farmers in the U.S. have been planting (and Americans have been consuming) genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton since 1995. Regulatory authorities in the EU and Japan have also approved such GM crops, but in Europe food safety regulators have been mistrusted by consumers ever since the unrelated but traumatizing mad cow disease crisis of 1996. EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Affairs David Byrne repeatedly states there is no scientific evidence of added risk to human health or the environment from any of the GM products approved for the market so far, and he can point to 81 separate scientific studies, all EU-funded, that bolster this conclusion.

But greens and GM critics in Europe say this absence of expected or known risks is no longer a sufficient regulatory standard. Touting the "precautionary principle," they argue that powerful new technologies should be kept under wraps until tested for unexpected or unknown risks as well. Never mind that testing for something unknown is logically impossible (the only way to avoid a completely unknown risk is never to do anything for the first time).

Europeans can perhaps afford hyper-caution regarding new crop technologies. Even without planting any GM seeds, European farmers will continue to prosper—thanks to lavish subsidies—and consumers will remain well fed. The same is not true in the developing world, especially in Africa, where hunger is worsening in part because farmers are not yet productive.

Two-thirds of all Africans are farmers, most are women, and they are poor and hungry in part because they lack improved crop technologies to battle against drought, poor soil fertility, crop disease, weeds and endemic insect problems. The productivity of African agriculture, per farm worker, has actually declined by 9% over the past two decades, which helps explain why one-third of all Africans are malnourished.

This ought to change the calculus of precaution. If GM-improved crops are kept out of the hands of African farmers, pending tests for the "nth" hypothetical risk, or the "nth" year of exposure to that risk, the misery of millions will be needlessly prolonged.

But now we are seeing an even less justified application of regulatory caution toward GM foods. Governments in Africa that are facing an actual famine have been rejecting some food aid shipments because they contain GM seeds. In May 2002, the government of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe rejected 10,000 tons of corn shipped from the U.S. because it was not certified as GM-free. This at a time when four to six million Zimbabweans approached a risk of starvation.

Next, the government of Zambia banned all imports of GM corn, including food-aid imports, even though some 2.3 million people in the country were at risk. On Aug. 16, Zambian Information Minister Newstead Zimba announced on state TV that the government had decided, in light of the uncertainties surrounding GM foods, that it would be best to "take the precautionary principle on this matter" and not accept or distribute GM food aid. Silumelume Mubukwanu, Zambia`s High Commissioner to London, explained that food aid was being rejected because "too much is unknown about GM foods yet."

Precautionary European policies toward the environment are also keeping Africans from growing their own food. The EU has been insisting that governments in Africa treat GM crops as a potentially serious threat to rural "biological safety." This helps explain why there are no GM crops yet being planted commercially anywhere on the continent, except in the nation of South Africa. Instead of helping Africa`s hungry to grow more food, European donors are helping them grow more regulations.

African governments also must worry that accepting GM food aid will cost them commercial export sales to Europe. The EU has not been importing any U.S. corn since 1998, because U.S. shipments can contain some GM varieties not yet approved in Europe. African governments now worry that any illicit planting of U.S. corn by farmers could jeopardize their own exports to Europe. Trying to remain GM-free for commercial export reasons is a policy that does not help poor subsistence farmers, but it may soon become the norm in Africa, once the EU moves next year toward much tighter labeling and traceability regulations on all imported GM foods and animal feeds.

Documentary Records

Even while professing that GM foods are safe, EU officials will soon require that they be traced individually through the marketing chain, with legal documentary records to be saved by all producers and handlers for five years. African countries won't have the institutional capacity to implement this traceability regulation, so they will have to remain GM-free to retain their access to the EU market. Meat products raised with GM feed are not yet covered by this new EU regulation, but Zambia's initial rejection of GM corn in food aid shipments was partly based on a fear that if the country lost its GM-free animal feed status, poultry and dairy exports to the UK would slump.

By inducing African governments to embrace excessively cautious biosafety regulations and by requiring stigmatizing labels and costly traceability certificates for all imported GM foods and feeds, wealthy and comfortable officials in Europe have made it harder for drought-stricken societies in Africa to accept food aid from the U.S. European critics of GM foods did not foresee this potentially deadly misapplication of their precautionary principle. Yet here it is.

Genetically modified (GM) foods are widely produced in the United States and in two other Western Hemisphere countries (Argentina and Canada) but almost nowhere else. In most other wealthy industrial countries, including Europe and Japan, it is legal for farmers to plant these crops, but they voluntarily refrain from doing so because consumers are averse to eating GM. In most developing countries it is not yet legal for farmers to grow GM foods, on biological safety grounds. Yet biosafety is not the real issue. Poor countries are now trying to stay "GM–free" so as to retain the option of exporting food to Europe and Japan.

New regulations in the EU on the labeling and traceability of imported GM foods and feeds will only increase the potential cost to exporters of planting GM seeds. The United States has considered challenging EU regulations as illegal under the WTO, and a serious trade conflict now looms. The EU, not the United States, is better positioned to prevail in this conflict. In international food markets, safety and labeling standards tend to be set by big importers rather than big exporters.

Genetically modified (GM) food crops have inspired increasing controversy over the past decade. By the mid-1990s they were widely grown in the U.S., Canada, and Argentina, but precautionary regulations continue to limit their use elsewhere. The restrictive policies of Europe and Japan toward GM crops have been much discussed. Less attention has been paid to the policies affecting the adoption of GM crops in the developing world, where their potential impact on the availability and quality of food is even greater.

In this book Robert Paarlberg looks at the policy choices regarding GM food made by four important developing countries: Kenya, Brazil, India, and China. Of these, so far only China has approved the planting of GM crops. Paarlberg identifies five policy areas in which governments of developing countries can either support or discourage GM crops: intellectual property rights, biosafety, trade, food safety, and public research and investment. He notes that highly cautious biosafety policies have so far been the key reason that Kenya, Brazil, and India have hesitated to plant GM crops. These cautious policies have been strongly reinforced by international market forces and international diplomatic and NGO pressures. China has been less cautious toward GM crops, in part because there is less opportunity in China for international organizations or independent critics of GM crops to challenge official policy.

Transitory food insecurity in poor countries is not directly or significantly linked to changing conditions in world grain markets. Per capita grain consumption in the developing countries did not generally worsen when grain export prices increased in 1973–74, or when they increased again briefly in 1995–96, and consumption generally grew more rapidly during the decade of the 1970s (when prices were high) than during the decade of the 1980s (when prices were low). This is partly because reliance on grain imports by genuinely poor developing countries is low, and lower today than several decades ago even when food aid is taken into account. This low dependence cannot be explained as a response to the instability of world grain markets or as a justifiable response to unreliable supplier concerns; it reflects instead a more general aversion by poor countries to all freely operating food markets, domestic as well as foreign. Transitory food insecurity thus seldom results from the malfunction of food markets. Its most conspicuous cause is violent internal conflict, plus non–accountable governments and natural disasters such as drought.

Domestic agricultural subsidy policies, both in the U.S. and in the European Union, underwent modest liberal reforms early in the decade of the 1990s. Such reforms had been one key objective sought by negotiators (especially U.S. negotiators) in the 1986–93 Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations. Two-level game theory suggests that a prior agreement abroad can speed the pace of reform at home. Yet a close examination of the timing and content of the 1993 GATT agreement on agriculture indicates that the international negotiation added little to the pace or content of reform, and in the U.S. may have even slowed reform. In the EU, internal policy reform was triggered more by the binding effects of a much earlier (Dillon Round) international agreement, than by the two–level game dynamic of the Uruguay Round. U.S. and EU farm sector reform policies were little altered by the Uruguay Round, while the Round itself was slowed down by agriculture, with adverse effects for other sectors.