Ezra Klein, in a post titled "Industrial Farms are the Future" links and approvingly quotes The Guardian's Jay Rayner's facile and straw-manning argument in defense of industrial agriculture:
Jay Rayner offers some real talk on food production:
If we are to survive the coming food security storm, we will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming. We need to abandon the mythologies around agriculture, which take the wholesome marketing of high-end food brands at face value – farmer in smock, ear of corn, happy pig – and recognise that farming really is an industry, much like car manufacturing or steel forging, one which always works better on a mass scale, but which can still be managed sustainably.
Despite the dreams of many foodies, I can't think of a major industry that went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production -- and then back again. Are there any examples I'm missing? Maybe so. But for now, I think of the preference for farmers markets and small producers as being mainly important in sending certain signals about production methods and branding preferences to Big Ag than in actually creating some sort of viable alternative.
Oh, Ezra, it's true; you hurt the ones you love.
There are a number of things very wrong about Klein and Rayner's argument here. To begin with is the dismissive straw-manning of opponents of industrial agriculture.
Look, I like hippie-punching as much as the next guy, and Raynor gets in some good hits. In addition to the knock that opponents of industrial agriculture are in the thrall of a "mythology" of "the wholesome marketing of high-end food brands at face value – farmer in smock, ear of corn, happy pig," a beautiful turn of phrase, by the by. He adds to this:
Any consumer of gastroporn in print, online and on our TV screens would imagine we were already having this debate. Words such as local, seasonal and organic have become a holy trinity. But these are merely lifestyle choices for the affluent middle-classes, a matter of aesthetics, and nothing to do with the real issues. [emphasis mine]
And,
An elitist, belly-obsessed minority, the ones who think the colour plates in the Sunday supplements are a true reflection of real lives if only we all made the effort, may rage against big agriculture and refuse to engage with it. [emphasis mine]
It's all delightfully well written, and it mirrors a lot of the complaints I have with particular people at Oberlin. That said, it's beyond ridiculous to claim that the driving force behind the anti-industrial agriculture movement are "elitist" and concerned only with "lifestyle choices for the affluent middle-classes" and are fighting over "a matter of aesthetics, and nothing to do with the real issues."
The argument isn't aesthetic. In general, the argument is health and culture-related. I'm not going to rehash the health arguments here, granting that some of them are unproven (and understanding that many of them are very well documented). I will point out that the culture-related arguments are, in general, not related to aesthetics; they're things like a heightened interest in food can lead to more family meals [a social good, despite what I tell my parents]. And let's not forget the environmental implications of a more holistic agriculture. In addition to, as I understand it, a general reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, non-industrial agriculture puts out fewer toxins and does not sap farmland of nutrients.
That last paragraph--inartfully stated as it may be--is what Rayner should be arguing against. Instead, he casts opponents as a bunch of rich hippies who want to their corn to sing a pastor song as they are gently plucked. Or something.
Fortunately, Rayner doesn't only bitch-slap hippies; he also provides a more substative argument, and while it's still flawed, it isn't mean-spirited (congrats!):
[Britain] need[s] to look seriously at how we produce our food and how we eat it. Our self-sufficiency has dropped in the past decade from north of 70% to around 60%, according to official figures. Many experts think it may actually be nearer to just 50%. We import 60% of our vegetables. If this drift continues, we will be left exposed to the sort of events that triggered the riots in Africa. We need to make difficult decisions which a lot of people who regard themselves as serious foodies may find deeply unappetising. And we need to make them fast. ...
If we are to survive the coming food security storm, we will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming.
No obvious fallacies here, just the tacit (and facile) premise that nonindustrial agrigculture cannot, in any substantive way, provide enough food for the future.
Frankly, I don't know if it can. But it's awfully easy to assume 'no,' and just move on. It's a positive, not a normative question, and it's one that deserves a close examination. Certainly it's the case that many people could spend more on food then they do now. As Raynar himself points out,
In the early 90s, we spent roughly 20% of our wages on our shopping bill. Today, it's nearer 10%, even allowing for recent inflation, and we assume these low prices to be a right.
To be clear, I'm all for inexpensive food. Seriously. I'm not going to say that people who can't afford to should be spending $4 a carton on eggs. I will, however, say that I can spend $4 on eggs, if I'm willing to go without one of the X-Men titles I read. So, there's that.
All of this, though, does little to support or undermine the claim that we have enough land and farmers to support a large nonindustrial agriculture. I don't have much in the way of empirical data for either argument. I can say that, in the case of farmers, perhaps more people would be willing to farm if they didn't have to do it in dark, shit-filled enclosures (literally), where industrial-like monotony is encouraged. I know of many Oberlin students who have taken their $200,000 piece of paper and gone to work on organic farms, some of whom are actually starting farms. Anecdotal though it may be, I think it's an interesting fact that people of my generation and cultural cohort would become farmers--when farming isn't limited to spraying petrochemicals on swaths of corn.
The point of all of this is that Rayner is going to have to do a lot more to support his argument then point to food riots and say "see, we need industrialization! [or in his case, industrialisation!]" Nothing in his column supports the tacit, and essential premise, that nonindustrial agriculture is unsupportable.
I hesitate to point to this again, but there is an interesting, if problematic, argument out there that the intervention of Wall Street in food markets was and is responsible (at least in part) for the rising food prices. From Fredrick Kaufman's "The Food Bubble" in October's Harper's:
Grain trading was not always brainless. Joseph parsed Pharaoh’s dream of cattle and crops, discerned that drought loomed, and diligently went about storing immense amounts of grain. By the time famine descended, Joseph had cornered the market—an accomplishment that brought nations to their knees and made Joseph an extremely rich man.
In 1730, enlightened bureaucrats of Japan’s Edo shogunate perceived that a stable rice price would protect those who produced their country’s sacred grain. Up to that time, all the farmers in Japan would bring their rice to market after the September harvest, at which point warehouses would overflow, prices would plummet, and, for all their hard work, Japan’s rice farmers would remain impoverished. Instead of suffering through the Osaka market’s perennial volatility, the bureaucrats preferred to set a price that would ensure a living for farmers, grain warehousemen, the samurai (who were paid in rice), and the general population—a price not at the mercy of the annual cycle of scarcity and plenty but a smooth line, gently fluctuating within a reasonable range.
While Japan had relied on the authority of the government to avoid deadly volatility, the United States trusted in free enterprise. After the combined credit crunch, real estate wreck, and stock-market meltdown now known as the Panic of 1857, U.S. grain merchants conceived a new stabilizing force: In return for a cash commitment today, farmers would sign a forward contract to deliver grain a few months down the line, on the expiration date of the contract. Since buyers could never be certain what the price of wheat would be on the date of delivery, the price of a future bushel of wheat was usually a few cents less than that of a present bushel of wheat. And while farmers had to accept less for future wheat than for real and present wheat, the guaranteed future sale protected them from plummeting prices and enabled them to use the promised payment as, say, collateral for a bank loan. These contracts let both producers and consumers hedge their risks, and in so doing reduced volatility.
But the forward contract was a primitive financial tool, and when demand for wheat exploded after the Civil War, and ever more grain merchants took to reselling and trading these agreements on a fast-growing secondary market, it became impossible to figure out who owed whom what and when. At which point the great grain merchants of Chicago, Kansas City, and Minneapolis set about creating a new kind of institution less like a medieval county fair and more like a modern clearinghouse. In place of myriad individually negotiated and fulfilled forward contracts, the merchants established exchanges that would regulate both the quality of grain and the expiration dates of all forward contracts—eventually limiting those dates to five each year, in March, May, July, September, and December. Whereas under the old system each buyer and each seller vetted whoever might stand at the opposite end of each deal, the grain exchange now served as the counterparty for everyone.
...
The decline of volatility, good news for the rest of us, drove bankers up the wall. I put in a call to Steven Rothbart, who traded commodities for Cargill way back in the 1980s. I asked him what he knew about the birth of commodity index funds, and he began to laugh. “Commodities had died,” he told me. “We sat there every day and the market wouldn’t move. People left. They couldn’t make a living anymore.”
Clearly, some innovation was in order. In the midst of this dead market, Goldman Sachs envisioned a new form of commodities investment, a product for investors who had no taste for the complexities of corn or soy or wheat, no interest in weather and weevils, and no desire for getting into and out of shorts and longs—investors who wanted nothing more than to park a great deal of money somewhere, then sit back and watch that pile grow. The managers of this new product would acquire and hold long positions, and nothing but long positions, on a range of commodities futures. They would not hedge their futures with the actual sale or purchase of real wheat (like a bona-fide hedger), nor would they cover their positions by buying low and selling high (in the grand old fashion of commodities speculators). In fact, the structure of commodity index funds ran counter to our normal understanding of economic theory, requiring that index-fund managers not buy low and sell high but buy at any price and keep buying at any price. No matter what lofty highs long wheat futures might attain, the managers would transfer their long positions into the next long futures contract, due to expire a few months later, and repeat the roll when that contract, in turn, was about to expire—thus accumulating an everlasting, ever-growing long position, unremittingly regenerated.
It's important to note that Rayner's claim is a little more extreme then Klein's. Rayner is making the normative argument that we should embrace the industrialization of agriculture. Klein is saying, positively, there will be greater industrialization of agriculture.
Rayner's is clearly problematic; Klein's is less so. It isn't a fait accompli, at least not yet. The fact that I got turned around on this (only a few years ago, I was saying the same thing as Rayner) is important in that people like me can be turned around on this. That is, it isn't just white guys with dreads who don't like Monsanto.
What's more, I don't think Rayner is making this argument in bad faith. There are genuine empirical questions here, not only about our agricultural capabilities but also about negative upshots of industrialization, be they environmental (i.e. runoff and greenhouse), health (i.e. nutrition and mass recalls) or cultural (a massive shift in how we think of food).
Now ask yourself, whose nicer to the other side, me or Rayner?
This is Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, always magnanimous (except when I'm not).
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