The State of Science Journalism Today

I can hear the voices of a hundred neglected tasks setting up a cheap, jangly tintinnabulation in my ears. My to-do list for this afternoon stretches to the horizon - and I live in a province where you can watch your dog run away from you for three days. So today will not be a feel-good post. I'm going to engage in some catharsis; in other words, I am going to irritably complain about the state of food reporting.

While I do have post-secondary education in the area of food, agriculture and social justice, it doesn't make me an expert on food issues; nor does my reading, my gardening practice, or what I like to think of as my common sense. But surely, some things are obvious to thinking people? I stumbled on this article, "Expert spills the beans on organic food: new article stews over the advertising myths of the corporate organics industry" by accident through an offhand Twitter link. It is absolutely appalling

Although it pained me to do so, because I taught English for several years, I overlooked the error in each of the first four sentences. I am more concerned with the lack of science knowledge demonstrated by the reporter - and, possibly, the cutbacks in media that allow a poor paraphrase of a press release to pass as journalism. Here are my quibbles with the article:

1) Claims to authority are unsubstantiated
The article, and its place of publication, are not listed. Google tells me that the author quoted works in a lab at the university mentioned; I could find no mention of a degree he may possess. I do not see how he can be called an expert. His publications, listed on his website, are primarily letters to newspaper editors.

2) Claims about organic food are misleading
While the article is not detailed enough to give specific examples of advertisements that make the claims that organic food is healthier, not grown with pesticides or antibiotics, and more natural, I can still argue against the author's oversimplistic refutation of these claims.
      a) He claims that "Every scientific organization that's in charge of food safety, that has looked for a health benefit in organic food, cannot find one." I wonder if he has looked at claims by organizations who are "in charge of" nutrition, rather than food safety. In truth, the evidence is inconclusive. It is clear, however, that organic food production is far healthier for growers, farmworkers, flora, and fauna. (Please note the credible sources I have linked to, as this is an essential part of science journalism.)

Organic insecticide used: thumb and forefinger.

     b) He claims "Organic foods do use antibiotics and toxic chemicals, they just aren't synthetically produced." This is true. However, there are strict regulations in place around the use of antibiotics: an organic dairy cow in the US, for example, can no longer be used for organic production when antibiotics are given. It is also true that organic growers can use some toxic chemicals, such as copper sulfate in orchards as a fungicide. The author does not say how widespread this use is, while implying that it is ubiquitous, and dangerous. But pesticides are not necessarily so. My brother set out dishes of beer for slugs - a potent and compostable insecticide. Many organic horticulturalists that I know use Bt, a biological insecticide that is non-toxic to humans and animals, biodegradable, kills only specific insects, and is non-toxic or only mildly toxic to beneficial insects.
     c) His last claim, that organic food is no more "natural" than say, genetically modified food because all agriculture is a human modification of the environment, is a simplification of the issue - I may post about it later. However, if he had said that the word "natural" as employed in advertising is meaningless because it has not been codified or standardized, I would have agreed.

Such is the state of science journalism today. I offer this complaint in the hopes that you, at least, will not let these facile arguments thwart your pursuit of the truth.

Yes, I sent a comment to the editor of this news source. No, I have not received a response.

The Myth of the Small, Inefficient Farmer

Here's an interesting bit of data from Cathy Holtslander that I think deserves to be widely seen. Counterintuitively, large farms in Ontario get less of their income from the market, and more of it from government program payments, than smaller farms do - and this is an increasing trend.

The first pie charts show that in 1995, the share of market income obtained by farms with over a million dollars in annual gross revenues was 15%. In 2008, that number fell to 5%.*

Gosh! Since this isn't due to a decreasing number of big farms - the number of million dollar farms tripled over this time, as the number of smallest farms dropped by 25%, I gotta wonder: Where did those big farms get their money, then? During that time, as the second pie charts show, the biggest farms increased their percentage of program payments received from 6% to 26%. (And the value of program payments increased from $30 million to $150 million at the same time.)

Would you rather have your tax money support large corporate farms, or smaller farms? Surely not the former, on the grounds of 'efficiency', because this data explodes that myth. If the latter, the suggestion of a lower cap on program payments to your MP might be a first step.

*Data for these charts is from Statistics Canada, Canadian Farm Financial Database

Scarcity

When I was eight, the starving kids in Ethiopia didn't get any of my food. Not because I had to clean my plate, although I did. I would have gladly given them the brussels sprouts, or the headcheese. I had plenty to spare. But they didn't get any of my food because the global food distribution system doesn't work that way.

No new article on the food system today is complete without a mention of the need to increase production drastically in the near future to feed either a growing global population or the growing Chinese and Indian middle class who will demand our obesity-based diet. Food is scarce or about to be, and genetically modified crops are increasingly touted as the way to increase production, despite the fact that they have shown only negligible increase in yields of staple crops. (For example, The USDA recently said, in its assessment of Monsanto's drought-tolerant corn,  "The reduced yield [trait] does not exceed the natural variation observed in regionally-adapted varieties of conventional corn".)

There used to be other accepted theories about hunger out there. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen caused a sensation in 1981 when he proposed that famines aren't caused solely by a lack of food, but from social and economic inequalities that affect food distribution. This seems obvious when we juxtapose the need for Food Banks in Canada with the 40% of food that Canadians waste in their households. We might also wonder, if there is a present or near-future global food scarcity, why millions of hectares of land are devoted to crops for biofuels or for feed for cattle that are turned into McDonalds hamburgers

But a lot of food movement organizations and activists believe in this scarcity, and this bothers me. It obscures the power relations in the world that not only decide who gets food and who doesn't, but create the hungry. Why did those Ethiopian kids on TV have big bellies? Yes, there was a drought. There was also a number of other factors: insurgencies in the country, lack of government preparation, the removal of peasants from their land, poor infrastructure, instability of land tenure, cash cropping for export rather than domestic production, and more. And as Amartya Sen remarked, "The rulers never starve." There is only relative scarcity.

Historian Iain Boal was recently interviewed on the philosophy of scarcity. He discusses Malthus' belief that population increases exponentially while food production increases arithmetically and therefore, without conscious checks on population growth, a population-reducing catastrophe is inevitable. It is not a coincidence that Malthus came up with his theory in the era when a forced scarcity occurred - the enclosure movement where peasants were forced off the common land and into the cities. Boal says:

The people of England, I mean the commoners, in 1800 are being literally excluded by fences enclosing the common lands that had sustained them for centuries. They are living the new scarcity that is being produced around them....And Malthus was the economist rationalizing and justifying the cutting off, or another way to put it is the rendering scarce, of the means of subsistence for the laboring poor, in the name of thrift and self-control and the efficiency of private property... 

 

I am not in any way saying that the earth's resources should be used up willy-nilly, that societies shouldn't concern themselves with how to live on the planet in the most sane and sustainable way possible....I'm not saying ecological destruction hasn't occurred in the human past - the deforestation of the coastal areas around the Mediterranean sea is a classic case, caused by centuries of Imperial Roman overfarming - but it tends to be by non-locals and elites. Let's call it the state. The major culprit in modern times is capitalist farming in private hands...

So what we're saying here is: it's important to notice the ideological move that naturalizes events which are the result of human decisions. It turns disasters that have as much to do with human agency and decision into natural and inevitable events.... 

For one thing, it's interesting to ask,  "Why all this talk of scarcity and collapse now? " After all, catastrophes are a permanent feature of history. So when you hear someone say,  "The world's food supply is going to run out in such and such a year, " well, excuse me! Forty thousand children die each day from the effects of malnutrition. Or perhaps I should say – from the causes of malnutrition....

Everywhere you look, there nothing much natural about it, this kind of scarcity. It's a story of artifice and force.


As an update, here's what's happening in Ethiopia right now. Chinese, Indian, and Saudi investors are renting millions of hectares for what amounts to pennies in order to produce food to export to their own countries.  Ethiopia exports many agricultural commodities as well. Surely, since Ethiopia can be so generous with its land and food, this means there is no famine now?

Romanticism

Yesterday, I made the mistake of using the term "small farmers" in a discussion.

Immediately, I was accused of longing for the days of Old MacDonald's little farm, with the unspoken implication that those hardscrabble, parochial, stultifying days were well left in the past (the appealing part of that life is just a fairy tale for children). Small farms are perceived as inefficient, unreasonably labour-intensive, technologically backwards, and soon swept away by progress.

Accusations of romanticism also dog those who are involved in peasant movements - or even use the term 'peasant' to refer to anyone living today - despite the fact that peasants often self-identify as such, with pride. The problem, however, is in the critics' view of the peasant or small farmer, as static, backwards, a relic of the past. I recently met two young members of a five-farmer cooperative that produces vegetables on five acres. They are educated and active. They choose the technology that best suits their practices and utilize leading-edge techniques for data collection and analysis of their production and markets. Each of the members makes a good living, both income-wise and in doing something they love. This is an anecdote, but it is by no means an isolated example. If small farmers were truly anachronistic, they would not still persist in the face of overwhelming odds.

My late father had a response to the accusation of romanticism.

I wouldn't worry about the romanticizing of small farms. If you want a romantic notion to banish, how about the romantic idea that companies can self-regulate. Or the notion that the unrestricted, unencumbered marketplace will bring prosperity to all. Or the idea that people who run big companies (into the ground) are such geniuses they deserve to become billionaires. What those romantic notions and the policies they drove brought us was Enron, WorldCom, AIG, the Ponzi schemes of Bernie Madoff and ultimately near economic collapse.

Worry too about the romantic notion that we will cure this recession with more of the same – the "hair of the dog that bit you" school of economic theory.

But leave the small farm alone.  Is it so bad to be romantic for a time when the country was full of people, when small towns were the cultural, social and business hubs of the prairies? Do we celebrate the fact that national and global economics has forced us to the point where we need to farm half the country to be viable? Or should we try instead to romanticize the notion of serfdom, since that is increasingly where agriculture is headed. If you doubt that, ask the contract growers of turkeys, chickens and hogs in the U.S. 

The present state of rural Canada is surely not one to celebrate unreservedly. At least not for this romantic…

My biggest problem with the accusation of romanticism is that the accuser gets to decide what is possible and what is rational. Why is the desire for social justice a romantic dream, while the desire for more money is not? Are moral values unrealistic?