Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
If you have any interest in agriculture, development, and food policy, the news item this week was British environmental activist Mark Lynas‘ “coming out” in favor of GMOs.
Lynas announced that his position had changed in the context of his lecture to the 2013 Oxford Farming Conference, which you can watch here:
If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, here is an excerpt from a post on Lynas’ blog:
Wherever I shop for food these days, I find an ever-widening array of food products labeled “organic” and “natural.” But are consumers getting the health benefits they pay a premium for?
Until the 20th century … all farming was “organic,” with manure and compost used as fertilizer and “natural” compounds of arsenic, mercury and lead used as pesticides.
Might manure used today on organic farms contain disease-causing micro-organisms? Might organic produce unprotected by insecticides harbor cancer-causing molds? It’s a possibility … But consumers aren’t looking beyond the organic sales pitch.
The short answer is: Most of them.
That’s the conclusion from a meta-analysis by Jonathan Schoenfeld and John Ioannidis (yes, that John Ioannidis) in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
From James Choi’s blog: