Last updated on February 5, 2014
I attained an important milestone for an agricultural economist yesterday. (No, I was not made a fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.) Rather, for the first time in my life, I was called a Monsanto shill:
Our friend M. (in pink) posted a link to that ridiculous article from the Guardian about about how Westerners who eat quinoa are hurting the poor peasants of the Altiplano. I countered by posting a link to my post “Quinoa Nonsense, or Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists,” and told M. that it was a bit more complicated than the Guardian wanted it to be, because we really don’t know what the welfare effects of a change in the price of quinoa are.
Soon after, one of M.’s friends (in black up there) chimed in, saying that he’d never heard of quinoa, but that it was most likely a GMO, and that I probably worked for them. After some exchange (and no, he was definitely not joking; I did confirm that with M.), “probably” became “definitely,” presumably as a result of my working for the University of Minnesota… or something?
May I respectfully submit for consideration that the “Monsanto shill” accusation be now considered the food policy and agricultural economics equivalent of Godwin’s Law?