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Q: What inspired you to launch this?

A: Marc Bellemare’s brilliant piece on Development Bloat in Foreign Affairs from January 2014. It struck me that Marc was making the types of arguments lots of people I talk to make in private, but that you almost never read in print. … The piece – and the idea of Development Bloat as an analytical category – really spoke to me. But I thought that there was much more to it than anyone could hope to cover in one Opinion piece…hence, [the Campaign for Boring Development].

Continue readingCampaign for Boring Development

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