Governments screwing up food production: how the Cold War affected our health, and unintended consequences of food aid
I’ve recently been taken with many arguments of Effective Altruism (EA) and longtermism – a co-movement promulgated by Will MacAskill, amongst others, with the commendable aim of aspiring to affect the most good for the longest period of time.
An early observation: the vast majority of (incredibly smart) people in this movement are vegetarian or vegan.
I consider (as a former vegetarian/vegan) there’s room for a more nuanced debate around environmental and ethical effects of pasture-raised meat versus vegetarianism.
I put together a summary of the book Sacred Cow for the Effective Altruism community here – challenging the movement’s predominant thinking. Check it out if you’re interested. It has some thoughtful comments.
Below is a post with notable passages from the book relating to government intervention in food systems. Enjoy!
How the Cold War affected our health
[The Cold War] proved to also be incredibly expensive for both the US and the then USSR. Abroad, the US was embroiled in the Vietnam War, while at home the prices for food and most other commodities were increasing at a painful rate.
It may seem a stretch to link the Cold War to our current obesity epidemic and billion-dollar junk food industry, but in a fascinating article in the Guardian, investigative reporter Jacques Peretti traced the origin of our problem to Richard Nixon’s Cold War maneuvering.
Peretti relates how Richard Nixon, mired in controversy at home and abroad, needed the economy to improve (or at least appear to improve) and to secure a large dedicated voting bloc; to bring down the prices of food, Nixon needed America’s farmers to come on board, so he appointed an academic from Indiana, Earl Butz, to create a plan. Butz’s solution? Pay farmers to produce massive grain surpluses.
The glut of corn, wheat, and other subsidies brought prices down (if you ignore the allocation of tax revenue in this scheme) and earned Nixon the loyalty of the conservative voting bloc, which was largely represented by farmers. Tricky Dick got his votes, the US citizen now had access to cheap food, and in fact there was so much food folks had to get creative about what to do with it.
Peretti writes:
By the mid-70s, there was a surplus of corn. Butz flew to Japan to look into a scientific innovation that would change everything: the mass development of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), or glucose-fructose syrup as it’s often referred to in the UK, a highly sweet, gloppy syrup, produced from surplus corn, that was also incredibly cheap. HFCS had been discovered in the 50s, but it was only in the 70s that a process had been found to harness it for mass production. HFCS was soon pumped into every conceivable food: pizzas, coleslaw, meat. It provided that “just baked” sheen on bread and cakes, made everything sweeter, and extended shelf life from days to years.Around the same time consumers were shifting away from animal products in the belief that saturated fat was a danger for their health. Peretti says, “The food industry had its eyes on the creation of a new genre of food, something they knew the public would embrace with huge enthusiasm, believing it to be better for their health: ‘low fat.’” Peretti goes on to connect our new hunger for sugar, along with the burgeoning low-fat movement, to the escalation of a dietary disaster: people were getting fatter, and no one knew why. Dietary fat was being vilified, particularly fats of animal origin. The main solution then was to consume more carbs and vegetable oils. Conveniently, the government also began the subsidization of corn and other commodities that are easily transformed into hyperpalatable, shelf-stable, high-profit-margin junk food. So connecting the Cold War to the junk food industry is not such a nutty idea after all.
With food prices going the way they are (and us potentially already amidst Cold War II), is it hard to imagine governments the world over subsidising more ill-conceived interventions with long-term unintended consequences?
Almond nuttiness
Take almonds, for example. Almonds are tough to dislike when we’re talking about flavor and nutrition, but in the US, they are one of the most water-intensive crops. The amount of blue water needed for, and gray water produced from, nut production is far greater than for typical meat production.
This wouldn’t be of particular concern if a water-intensive crop was grown in a water-rich location, but California’s Central Valley is notoriously parched. In an ironic twist, it’s challenging for people living there to find adequate drinking water (there is not much to be had, and what is there is rapidly accumulating various chemical by-products of industrial agriculture), yet farmers employ the incredibly inefficient method of flood-irrigating almonds. (If you would like to learn more on this topic we recommend the film Water and Power: A California Heist.) California agriculture uses 80 percent of available water and only contributes 2 percent of the state’s revenue. Given that two-thirds of the almonds produced in California are exported, one could make the case that California’s drinking water is being exported in the form of nuts, at least in part.
…California produces 80 percent of the world’s almonds, yet most are exported to China. In essence, we are exporting our water and nutrients to another country.
Antibiotics in livestock
Of all antibiotics produced in the US, 80 percent are given to livestock and poultry, the majority of which (90 percent) are not sick animals—rather, the antibiotics are intended to marginally improve growth rates and prevent sickness. Up to 75 percent of these antibiotics pass through the animal and into the environment unchanged. Antibiotic resistance in humans is a massive public health concern, and this is exacerbated, in part, by their broad use in livestock. By contrast, when livestock are given a healthy environment and low stress, they don’t need to be given preemptive antibiotics, which can dramatically cut down the incidence of antibiotic resistance.
Unintended consequences of food aid
A church in Atlanta decided that it was going to send over eggs to a small town in Rwanda after the genocide. This seems like a great way to help, right? But the unintended consequences were huge. A local man had just recently started a small egg business. It was a big investment for him. Just as his business was taking off, a flood of surplus free eggs from this church in Atlanta came into town and crushed his business. The next year, when the church decided to focus its energy in other ways, there were no longer local eggs.
The Atlanta church egg donations actually had a long-term negative effect on this community. All too often the desire to “do good” needs to be tempered with an understanding of unintended consequences. A similar situation happened in Haiti, which they’re now struggling to correct. After the earthquake of 2010, we began dumping our surplus rice on the Haitian people; we not only altered their diet but actually hampered their ability to feed themselves, as they largely abandoned producing their own food. Former president Bill Clinton has officially apologized for subsidy policies made during his time in office that he now sees were a huge mistake.
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If you got anything out of this, check out the book (and documentary) Sacred Cow.
Please share my summary of it with your vegan friends. Are they aware of these environmental and ethical arguments? And do they have good rebuttals?
One additional things to share, for anyone super keen…
From Bismarck Analysis’s piece on the Gates Foundation (https://brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/the-gates-foundations-blind-spot):
'However, other Gates Foundation-sponsored agricultural interventions have resulted in chronic instability which can take years to become fully evident. A venture jointly funded by the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation beginning in 2006, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), operates in 11 African countries to institute high-yield monoculture farming. This shift in local agricultural practices is intended to cultivate better nutrition, reduce food insecurity, and improve farmers’ livelihoods, with the stated goals of doubling crop productivity, doubling income and halving food insecurity by 2020. The disadvantages of monoculture farming are well-known, and include soil depletion, increased reliance on specialized products such as seeds and fertilizers, and loss of diversity, but monoculture farming can also produce high yields in a relatively short period. The project’s most recent status report notes that 60% of participating farmers reported increases in income compared to 2017 due to the sale of surplus crops.
Critics based in the project’s target areas, however, have pointed out that AGRA fosters dependence on agricultural corporations for commercial seeds and fertilizer, forcing farmers into debt. Furthermore, food insecurity and low wages persist amongst targeted populations not because of low yields or poor nutrition of native crops, but because local populations are consistently priced out of their own food markets due to low wages and global fluctuations of import and export prices. The project may have even served to further compromise local nutrition as staple crops such as millet, sorghum, and cassava were replaced with more exportable and subsidized cereal grains like rice and corn. With high international crop prices drawing private investment into agriculture, AGRA demonstrates that the introduction of global supply systems to developing economies may generate short-term profits, but whether it reliably leads to long-term stability remains to be seen. Though AGRA’s 2020 goals were not met, and were in fact removed from the project’s website last year, the project is ongoing. African interest groups have petitioned the Gates Foundation and other funders to shift their support toward African-led sustainable ecology efforts instead.'
* https://usrtk.org/bill-gates-food-tracker/agra-donors/