Re:Stop Bashing G.M.O. Foods, More Than 100 Nobel Laureates Say
by saalweachter on Friday July 01, 2016 @10:30AM
(#12016289)
To the lesser question:
> How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that?
The patent on the first generation of Roundup-Ready soybeans expired last year. A third party immediately produced a generic version of Roundup-Ready soybeans and sold it for half the price of the Monsanto seeds, with no restriction on seed saving. Madness! A company created something new, obtained a patent, and enjoyed a limited monopoly until their patent expired and the free market used the now-public information to undercut them. This is an example of the system working.
Regarding your greater point -- the claim that we are producing many times more food than we need -- the important question isn't how much food we're "wasting" but how much food waste is avoidable, given the constraints we want to live under.
The difficulty in food distribution -- as the article you linked pointed out -- isn't just a matter of warlords hording food or rich westerners cramming their maws with too much food[1]. The larger problem is that food is an organic product (as in, literally, not philosophically) produced in messy conditions with a limited shelf-life. Some food produced will be of substandard quality; some food produced will spoil before reaching a consumer. Agriculture is a leaky pipeline between the farmer and the hungry consumer, and most of the leaks that are left are difficult to plug, or shouldn't be plugged. Consumers shouldn't eat spoiled or fouled food, so if you can't prevent the food from being fouled or spoiling you should let it fall out of the system.
What all this means is that we need to be producing some multiple of the amount of food people consume to actually get that amount to them. We should try to improve distribution as well, of course, but the returns there will be as diminishing as they are everywhere else. By 2050 we'd like 60%-85% more food to be reaching end consumers than is now, to both keep up with population growth and to feed those who are hungry now. Some of that will almost certainly come from improvements in distribution, some of it will probably come from shifting diets away from meat and other inefficient crops, but we'll also need to ultimately produce more food per acre than we are now.
[1]: I found this sentence in the article particularly offensive:
> "And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum."
There may be someone out there eating 6-7 times some minimum (1500 calories?), but that is a weird abnormality and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is mildly overweight, my calorie surplus is about 50-100 calories, about 2% extra, which adds about 5 pounds per year. That is the typical overfed westerner. Adding in the extra calories to support my extra body weight amounts to about 10% more calories than would need at my ideal weight. If 30% of the world consumed 10% fewer calories, it would indeed have a measurable impact on the global food supply, but it is a bit of a red herring.
> How is privatising/patenting seeds going to change that?
The patent on the first generation of Roundup-Ready soybeans expired last year. A third party immediately produced a generic version of Roundup-Ready soybeans and sold it for half the price of the Monsanto seeds, with no restriction on seed saving. Madness! A company created something new, obtained a patent, and enjoyed a limited monopoly until their patent expired and the free market used the now-public information to undercut them. This is an example of the system working.
Regarding your greater point -- the claim that we are producing many times more food than we need -- the important question isn't how much food we're "wasting" but how much food waste is avoidable, given the constraints we want to live under.
The difficulty in food distribution -- as the article you linked pointed out -- isn't just a matter of warlords hording food or rich westerners cramming their maws with too much food[1]. The larger problem is that food is an organic product (as in, literally, not philosophically) produced in messy conditions with a limited shelf-life. Some food produced will be of substandard quality; some food produced will spoil before reaching a consumer. Agriculture is a leaky pipeline between the farmer and the hungry consumer, and most of the leaks that are left are difficult to plug, or shouldn't be plugged. Consumers shouldn't eat spoiled or fouled food, so if you can't prevent the food from being fouled or spoiling you should let it fall out of the system.
What all this means is that we need to be producing some multiple of the amount of food people consume to actually get that amount to them. We should try to improve distribution as well, of course, but the returns there will be as diminishing as they are everywhere else. By 2050 we'd like 60%-85% more food to be reaching end consumers than is now, to both keep up with population growth and to feed those who are hungry now. Some of that will almost certainly come from improvements in distribution, some of it will probably come from shifting diets away from meat and other inefficient crops, but we'll also need to ultimately produce more food per acre than we are now.
[1]: I found this sentence in the article particularly offensive:
> "And yet more people in the world—1.7 billion—are considered obese or overweight from a daily caloric intake that in some cases is at least six to seven times the minimum."
There may be someone out there eating 6-7 times some minimum (1500 calories?), but that is a weird abnormality and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. As someone who is mildly overweight, my calorie surplus is about 50-100 calories, about 2% extra, which adds about 5 pounds per year. That is the typical overfed westerner. Adding in the extra calories to support my extra body weight amounts to about 10% more calories than would need at my ideal weight. If 30% of the world consumed 10% fewer calories, it would indeed have a measurable impact on the global food supply, but it is a bit of a red herring.