“Just Eat the Darn Quinoa…”

Farmers in Bolivia feel the pressure of global markets to grow large quantities of this agricultural produce, sometimes at the compromise of their own food and nutritional security. Unforeseen and increasingly high demands and limited supply cause for perpetual market tensions with farmers trying to keep up with an economy they were forced to participate in. These factors, coupled with standard within-country inequality, skewed export/import dynamics, and capitalist trade practices that remain in the favor of the powerful player in these dynamics – the core consumer – cause for Bolivian farmers to experience various negative externalities. Furthermore, environmental factors also must be considered, since growing such large amounts of quinoa has been causing for the degradation of the Andean soil: even the FAO outlines concerns for biodiversity, while otherwise touting the phenomenon.

While efforts have been put in place by farmer unions, cooperatives and development initiatives to mitigate some negative effects on the primary producers of quinoa, they have not been enough to protect the food security of these Andean farmers. Increased consumer consciousness is therefore essential in ensuring that these farmers don’t continue to suffer because of Western dietary fads.

From an article a blog post by Aarushi Bhandari on The Society Pages, in which the author makes a series of dubious claims about quinoa.

Indeed, there is no evidence supporting the claim that quinoa consumption in the North/West/whatever-is-the-appellation-du-jour-for-rich-countries threatens food security anywhere else. None.

And really, let’s think about this logically: If Bolivian peasants would rather keep the quinoa they grow for themselves to ensure their subsistence rather than sell it at a high price, no one is forcing them to do so. But Northern/Western/whatever-is-the-appellation-du-jour-for-rich-countries activist types are absolutely hell-bent on feeling guilty about the fact that quinoa is now consumed in the US, the UK, and other rich countries.

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post titled “Quinoa Nonsense, or Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists.” In that post, I outlined what we needed to know in order to know whether we were robbing peasants in the Andes of their food security by consuming quinoa:

1. Are most households in the Altiplano net buyers or net sellers of quinoa, or are they autarkic relative to it? Knowing the answer to that question would be a good first step toward assessing the welfare impacts of a quinoa price increase.
2. Do net seller households produce under contract, as part of a quinoa value chain, or do they sell to processors on the spot market? Knowing the answer to that question would allow knowing whether producers are insured against price risk
3. Is it possible to store quinoa for a relatively long period? Knowing the answer to that question would allow us to tell whether people can avoid the “sell low, buy high” cycle by which many smallholders in developing countries are rendered poorer than they need to be.

I didn’t know the answers back then because I didn’t have data, but now I do. Indeed, my original quinoa post went viral, and it caught the attention of the good folks at the International Trade Center in Geneva, who had been promoting the international trade of quinoa in Peru and had caught flak for it, and who subsequently hired me and my friend/colleague/coauthor Seth Gitter to collect data in the Peruvian Andes in order to answer the questions above.

Our fieldwork on this is ongoing (we are collecting four rounds of a 150-household survey, so as to study annual price, consumption, production, and welfare dynamics), but we have another paper (which I want to debut soon on this blog) in which we use a nationally representative data set to ask whether the quinoa boom has had any impact on quinoa producers and find that, lo and behold, being a producer of quinoa is associated with a higher rate of welfare growth in recent years, i.e., after the quinoa price boom.

Moreover, in our survey data, we find that people mostly grow quinoa for their own consumption, and they sell whatever else is left once they have eaten. The big quinoa exports largely come from the coast, where quinoa is grown by big agribusiness firms instead of by the Northern/Western/whatever intellectuals’ poor-but-happy, bucolic smallholders.

When presenting our paper using nationally representative data, Seth likes to tell audiences an anecdote about meeting other parents at his kids’ play dates who, upon hearing that he is working on the economics of quinoa, tell him they have stopped eating quinoa out of guilt. When he relates his interactions with those other people, he concludes by telling audiences that he tells those parents to “Just eat the darn quinoa…”

ht: Heather Lanthorn.