Biotech, Lean Times and the New York Times

Today, the New York Times ran a story about the ways that food producers are being pressured, by market prices, to be less selective when it comes to preferring non-genetically modified inputs. On the one hand, I don't doubt that price pressures are influencing the choices of inputs large agri-food producers are selecting these days. On the other hand, there two additional suggestions in the article. The least objectionable of these two suggestions is that consumers may also begin to be less likely to choose non-GMO products in the supermarket in the face of lower prices for foodstuffs with GMO inputs. The more objectionable - and subtly implicit - suggestion is that the change in food prices and the rise of food shortages has something to do with the lower productivity of non-GMO crops, and therefore, the higher price associated with them.

First of all, under conditions where long-term industrial and chemical-intensive and conventionally monocropped agriculture has induced (or at least presented the perfect agroecological conditions for) soil erosion, perched watertables, soil infertility and salinization, and pest and weed infestations, some GM crops allow corporate growers and large farmers to reduce chemical inputs and sometimes increase productivity. However, Round-up Ready soybeans are generally less productive than conventional and actually leads to an increase in Round-up applications. Also, Bt-Corn in the Midwest has already begun to generate resistance corn rootworms; herbicide-tolerant canola in Canada has already begun to cross-pollinate with a primary weed, wild mustard; and Golden Rice has neither stickiness nor palatability necessary to successfully extend the supposed benefits of its higher Vitamin A composition to hungry and nutrient deficient people in southeast Asia.

Secondly, the problem with food prices and availability is still not a problem of productivity, it is a problem of profitability. Since the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, only more accelerated and intensively since 1989, rural and urban development policy around the world has resulted in a massive decline in food self-sufficiency for families, regions and countries. Whereas the global South used to have high population growth, that rate of growth has always been associated with the displacement of self-sufficient rural peoples, particularly their displacement into the ever-expanding slums around mega-cities where displacement engenders deep male insecurity, women's declining status and the need for children to increase gross income and adult survival once incapacitated by infirmity or old age. As these slums have grown, demand for food increases proportionate to the inability of slum residents to produce - and often provide - for themselves.

That the explosion of urban slums across the global South is coincident with the rise of new industrial, informational and cultural elites and professionals seeking to consume at rates approaching those in the global North has not only driven up the price of food but also re-oriented agricultural production towards 1) exports in the name of World Bank-led development and IMF-enforced structural adjustment and 2) production of feed for high end animals rather than food for the people. Neither of these developments helps the hungry.

More recently, the coincident rise in demand for oil - the key input in most all pesticides, herbicides, machinery, refrigeration, processing and transportation - has generated all-but exponential multiplier effects on the price of food. What constrains the price in our supermarkets, somewhat, is how very little value embedded in the price of our food actually goes to the farmers/growers/producers who bear the brunt of these rising costs. The key, of course, is that a push for GM crops isn't going to generate anything like a real reduction in food prices since other inputs, processing, transportation and retail add far more to the price than production on the land.

Lastly, the resistance to GM crops is an inordinately complex thing - especially in Europe where scientific knowledge is more widely spread and cultural commitments are agri-nationalist. Resistance to GM crops has long been dismissed as anti-scientific romanticism when, in fact, much of the resistance comes from folks with legitimate ecological concerns, with variously viable health concerns - where the viability lies in the reproduction of unhealthy diets more than the particular health dangers of specific GM crops, and serious concerns for the reproduction of cultural landscapes and identities in the face of the power of international agrichemical, seed and biotech firms and the scalar efficiencies - at the level of price - of massive capitalist agricultural units. All of these concerns are generally youthful or middle and upper income concerns, admittedly, but they speak to parallel conditions tied to the destruction of traditional livelihoods, ecological patrimonies and heirloom varieties across the global South as well - though these voices tend to get drowned out en route to the American press.

Maureen Dowd: Eggheads and Cheeseballs

Maureen Dowd, today, parrots the Republican/Clinton-ite "elitist" tag placed on Obama based on her personal biography, first, and Obama's limited comfort-level with blue collar slumming - something Dowd notes Clinton is better at, but fails to point out that it is slumming nevertheless, second.

She suggests that her family's not bitter, had guns, had "a strong Catholic faith, an immigrant father, brothers with anti-illegal immigrant sentiments and a passion for bowling" and that her "family morphed from Kennedy Democrats into Reagan Republicans not because they were angry, but because they felt more comfortable with conservative values. Members of my clan sometimes were overly cloistered. But they weren’t bitter; they were bonding.... They went to church every Sunday because it was part of their identity, not because they needed a security blanket."

What she completely fails to recognize is that her (lower?) middle income, legal-immigrant Catholic upbringing in the Washington DC of the 1950s and 60s was a period of extensive economic growth - at least in the aggregate... a period, and place, that in no way resembles the last quarter century of declining blue collar employment in the industrial and rural regions of Western and Central Pennsylvania about which Obama was talking.

Furthermore, in the late 1970s, before the Reagan revolution, middle income citizens of the United States had similar rates and similarly declining rates of church attendance as in Europe - and an almost universal agreement on the second amendment as a collective rather than individual right to bear arms. Since then, the xenophobic neoliberal discourse of "small" government, self-discipline, personal responsibility and "traditional" values have destroyed the confidence working class and middle management types in this country used to have in the stability of their employment. Any number of pundits have, furthermore, pointed out the brilliant conflation of cultural neoconservativism with economic neoliberalism under Reaganism and socially, ecologically, medically and culturally contradictory consequences of folks in the former camp committing themselves to Republican demagogues in the latter camp.

Whatever the cause, however, there is an empirical correlation between the rising economic insecurity of the last quarter century and an explosion - particularly among those in the most precarious economic positions - in church attendance (often, if not always, in or related to evangelical mega-churches which preach the kinds of populist xenophobia Obama was addressing.

Obama never said all religious commitments and political concerns in all places and times are derived from economic insecurity, only that in his experiences in rural and rust-belt Pennsylvania (and Ohio), that was some of what he saw. I expect better from Maureen Dowd, as I do of the Clintons.

Krugman's Health Care Crises

In an otherwise excellent - as usual - op ed, Paul Krugman surprised me by ripping Obama supporters who followed the Washington Post's lead in claiming a Hillary Clinton anecdote about a case of health care tragedy to be false more than he ripped the Washington Post for running the BS story in the first place (tho, admittedly, he was critical of their having done so.) There are certainly overly zealous and ideological Obama supporters out there and we all need to check the sources of our "facts" before we start tearing down others, but it strikes me Obama supports come second in this case to the Post's primacy when it comes to fault.

David Brooks' "The View from Room 306"

David Brooks' revisionist history never stops... That he can provide an account of Martin Luther King's engagement in the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike that stresses the disjunction between the economic and identity-radicalism of Black Power and King's work at the time seeks to reinforce the conventional view of King as a liberal, civil rights reformer when, in fact, King himself had joined in the efforts of folks to the left of the moderate civil rights movement and was stressing economic equality in a manner not all that far from late-in-life Malcolm X and many of the Black Panthers (tho, his commitment to peaceful resistance obviously set him apart from the all-but surely justified militarism of the Panthers.

Further stretching history, as a means of supporting his efforts to shore up the positive/moderate conception of MLK, is Brooks' claim that "in the ensuing years [after King's assassination-APR], crime rates skyrocketed, cities decayed and the social fabric was torn. Dreams of economic opportunity and racial integration were swallowed up by the antinomian passions and social disorder." It's simply not possible that Brooks doesn't know or failed to check on the fact that the Watts riots were in 1965, the Detroit, MI, and Newark and Plainfield, NJ, riots were in 1967 and that the rending of the fabric of the urban US was part and parcel of the white, middle class, industrial and tax flight from cities in the twenty years following WWII. Furthermore, the interstate highway system - which facilitated this exodus - then destroyed the social and economic coherence that existed in places like the Oranges in NJ, the Bronx in NYC and a significant portion of Philadelphia, PA, and Oakland, CA. (I'm sure there are parallels across the country, I just don't know their specifics.)

The key to understanding David Brooks and his editorials is to understand that he is not ignorant, just ideologically incapable of bringing contravening examples that what he knows (or could easily find out) to bear on the topics he covers.