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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?

I wanted to write a post about GMOs, but I really don’t have anything to say about the topic that I haven’t said before. So instead of beating a dead horse, I thought I would just link to stuff that has come out on the topic in the last few months:

1. From the MIT Technology Review: Why We Will Need GM Foods.
2. From the always excellent Amy Harmon in the New York Times: A Lonely Quest for Facts on GM Crops.
3. From NPR: GMOs and the Dilemma of Bias.
4. The places that need GM crops the most for their subsistence are being “starved for science,” as Rob Paarlberg said: Tension over GM Crops Grows in Tanzania.
5. My über-productive Oklahoma State ag econ colleague Jayson Lusk and his coauthor Henry Miller in the New York Times: We Need GMO Wheat. If you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favor, and get a copy of Jayson’s book The Food Police.
6. “But wait,” you say, “what about the science against GMOs?” Funny you should ask: Kevin Folta has a post titled “Séralini’s Connections to Quack Science and Strange Philosophies.”
   Continue readingA List of Recent Readings (and a Rant) on GMOs

An article in the latest issue of Food Policy by my grad-school colleague and coauthor Sudha Narayanan explores the heterogeneity in welfare gains from participating in high-value agriculture for South Indian smallholder farmers:

This paper assesses the variable impact of participation in high value agriculture through contract farming arrangements in southern India. Using survey data for 474 farmers in four commodity sectors, gherkins, papaya marigold and broiler, an endogenous switching model is used to estimate net profits from participation. Findings suggest that average treatments effect vary widely across contract commodities. Papaya and broiler contracting offer clear net gains for participants whereas marigold contracting leaves participants worse off. For gherkins, while contracting holds net gains for participating farmers overall, this is true of contracts with some firms but not others. The standard deviations of point estimates of treatment effects are quite large indicating variability in profit gains even within the same commodity sectors. Thus, notwithstanding the sign of average treatment effects, contract farming arrangements have diverse impacts on income for individual farmers and these could have implications for sustained participation of farmers in high value agriculture.

After looking at correlations between participation in contract farming and welfare in the late 1990s and early to mid-2000s, the literature began focusing on both internal validity (by using more sophisticated means of teasing out causal relationships from correlations) and external validity (by looking at more than one commodity) in the late 2000s and early 2010s. It’s nice to see the literature delve a bit deeper now by looking at the heterogeneity in treatment effects.

This is also the only study I know of where a negative welfare effect is reported (for marigold farming). Such findings are presumably rare because contracts in which growers lose out tend to not last more than one or two seasons.