Stewards of the Earth

On GMOs, Roman Catholic bishops in Kenya are credited with "taking a new stance," and though it's only a small switch it's surprising to me how many people are against it. What's the new stance? If you're going to starve to death because of famine, it's really much better to eat genetically modified food than to die. ... I know, what was the policy before? Death before GMO? And there are people against this!? I think we need to call in Jon Stewart for this one.


On "over"population, I wish there were far more people arguing that babies are not the problem. Here is one argument from Yglesias:

It’s especially mistaken, I think, to try to look at children as a negative environmental externality. The beginning of wisdom here is to note that pollution isn’t “bad for the planet.” The planet is a gigantic roughly spherical chunk of rocks that can easily survive whatever level of greenhouse gas emissions or whatever else we care to pump into the atmosphere. The big picture ecological threat is a threat to human beings, and to the continued existence of ecological conditions that are conducive to human flourishing. Radical population reduction would sharply reduce the quantity of anthropogenic ecological impacts, but to what end? The goal needs to be to reconfigure human activity in order to make it sustainable over a longer time horizon. But sustained human flourishing requires both acceptable levels of ecological impact and also the continued production of new human beings.

On the lowered and falling prospects for jatropha, a new report by Wu and Kant addresses the Indian and Chinese largely failed plans:

It appears to be an extreme case of a well intentioned top down climate mitigation approach, undertaken without adequate preparation and ignoring conflict of interest, and adopted in good faith by other countries, gone awry bringing misery to millions of poorest people across the world. And it happened because the principle of “due diligence” before taking up large ventures was ignored everywhere. As climate mitigation and adaptation activities intensify attracting large investments there is danger of such lapses becoming more frequent ...

On the land grab, there is a new film out attacking the primary banana corporation in Cameroon. Among the interesting political economy issues:

"If you look at the congressman of the region, he is also the director of public relations of the company, the minister of trade of Cameroon is also president of the board of directors of the company."

An interesting paper showcases informal seed exchange between farmers for preserving seed diversity in Mozambique following a disaster. They argue food aid should include local seed varieties as part of the package to speed diversity recovery following a disaster.

The research established that nearly 90% of the farmers in the affected areas received cowpea relief seed immediately after the back-to-back calamities. Two years after, only one-fifth of the recipient farmers were still growing the seeds, while more than half sourced their seeds from markets. However, this did little in restoring cowpea diversity in the affected communities as the seeds bought by farmers from the market were mostly uniform, coming from other districts that grew just one or a few select varieties. 
On the other hand, about one-third of the affected farmers obtained seeds from friends and relatives living within the same or neighbouring localities to restock their farms – the same people that they have been exchanging seeds with prior to the disasters. This practice was the main reason why cowpea diversity was restored in these areas, the study showed.

Willingness to Pay: Livestock

Awono, Dupraz, and Vermersch, (2011) “Consumer willingness to pay for attributes of west-African poultry: using the microeconomics of implicit price,” GREDI Working Paper 11-01.

By west-African they mean Cameroon. They estimate a hedonic function to get at consumers’ willingness to pay for each attribute. They find that the most important attributes are low cost, being sold in separate parts, and distance to find it (the further the distance, the greater the desire for separate, ready-to-cook parts). This gives frozen chicken – imported from Europe or Brazil – a decided advantage over local “wet” market chicken grown locally. Attributes that were not significant included: taste, product quality, household size or occupation, or education. Imported chickens are blamed with putting many local poultry farmers out of business. The main item in favor of local chicken is that you can haggle over prices.

That apparently is not so much the case in China: “They insist on having the animal killed in front of them so they can guarantee it’s fresh. They need to see the gleam in the animal’s eye so they know the merchant is not cheating them.” Oh, the importance of a marketplace based on trust and enforced quality standards!

Among desirable attributes for meat in general is a certain degree of safety. Food safety is significantly increased by cooking your meat thoroughly. One article claims that we have gotten much better at getting rid of pathogens and contaminants in our pork supply chain, so we ought to be able to cook pork at lower temperatures while maintaining adequate safety, as we do with better cuts of beef. But the culture is so accustomed to only well-done pork that there is little call for recipes with medium-done pork.

Behavioral economics has some interesting things to say about willingness to pay in development contexts. Glennerster and Kremer present a handful of interesting conclusions, based largely on RCTs. For one thing, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are more effective than we think … and often on “control” groups: Malawi varied up the amount of the conditional cash transfer and even the smallest amount was enough to get the average effect, families in Mexico and Columbia who are near the cutoff for receiving the CCT are also more likely to send their children to school without receiving a penny themselves, scholarships for the best-performing girls in Kenya also induced greater effort from boys. Despite all this wonderfulness, the most cost-effective way of getting more students into school was providing information (in Madagascar) while CCTs in Mexico were the least effective. They have similar fun with health research on intervention uptake. Small incentives matter for individual behavior.