Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Are we on a path towards significant unmet hunger, problems in food supply and conflicts regarding food? My guest today is Richard Sexton. He's a professor of Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis, and he's recently published a new book, it's titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World". Professor Sexton, welcome to the program.
Richard Sexton: Thank you, Grant. Thank you for having me.
GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So I want to start, as I often do with books, with just sort of laying out some of the basics of the context before we get into the arguments that you make about some of these issues that the title brings up. And I want to just get a brief and basic sense of sort of where things currently stand regarding food and hunger. So first, let me ask you a very, very basic question. How do we figure out or how do we know when a person or a group or an entire people, even a country, is suffering from a hunger problem? Is there some commonly used marker for that?
RS: Well, that's actually a great question and the United Nations is the official body that measures that. And you know, they just released their most recent estimates for 2024 and so they, according to the U.N., there's about 700 million people that face hunger and malnutrition routinely and then in excess of 2 billion that are what the U.N. calls food insecure. And, you know, I honestly don't know all the means that they use to estimate that. I'm thinking they're piecing together, you know, various pieces of information, there's no single survey or anything like that. And so I think they're, you know, doing their best to compile data and come up with that. But, yeah, it's probably subject to some kind of error. But the, you know, there's quite a bit of consistency in the numbers across the years. It went up higher during COVID and really stayed disturbingly higher, came down a little bit this past year, but it's those are the numbers we're seeing routinely.
GR: And that's a big, those are big numbers. I mean, that's a decent sized chunk of the world's population.
RS: Yeah, no, there's, you know, about 8.2 billion of us. So, you know, 700 million is what, about 8% of the world that's facing hunger and yeah, malnutrition, stunting, those are routine outcomes in, you know, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. And so, yeah, by no means have we solved the problem as a global society of adequately feeding our population.
GR: You mentioned sub-Saharan Africa. Are there general areas of the world that are more heavily hit by this than others? I mean, I would assume it's the poorer countries.
RS: Yeah, no, absolutely it is the poorer countries. And yeah, the biggest concentration is certainly in sub-Saharan Africa. There's some parts of Southeast Asia where there's a significant hunger problem and, you know, less so obviously in this country and, you know, Europe and so forth. And so the, you know, the real heart of the problem is in sub-Saharan Africa.
GR: And you mentioned less so in the United States. Is this a problem inside the United States, though, nonetheless?
RS: Oh, sure, but an isolated basis. But you know what the United States has that most other countries don't have, is we have very significant feeding programs. So we have, you know, the SNAP or the food stamp program, WIC, Women's, Infants and Children's program, and then the school lunch program. So, you know, we're very unique in countries across the world that we put in place these programs to take care of hunger and malnutrition. Do they work perfectly? No, they don't. And then, you know, there was quite a bit of controversy with the most recent congressional session about cutting back some of these things. And so it's a difficult question but yeah, we've uniquely addressed that problem in this country with those programs, you know, dedicated to putting food in the hands of the right people. Most other places in the world do not have that.
GR: And I hope this question isn't too abstract. And I'm going to unpack this, obviously, as we go on our conversation, but are the are the food problems in the world primarily in food production and food supply or are they more like social distribution and economic fairness issues? In other words, we have the food, it's just not getting to those people for whatever reason.
RS: Yeah, I think that's certainly a big part of the problem. And so, for example, tariffs are a bad thing in terms of distributing food to where it needs to be consumed. And so, yeah, it's a big income problem, right? There needs to be more food going to sub-Saharan Africa, but those are very poor countries. And so, you know, it's not an attractive export destination for a lot of companies that that specialize in those types of things. And so, yeah, it's at least partly a distribution problem that we're not getting to the food to where people need it the most. But then, you know, a very premise of the book, Grant, is that it's probably going to become a more significant problem over time unless we mend our ways in terms of the actual food production itself.
GR: Yeah. And I wanted to get into that with you. Before I do that, though, there was something in your book that really struck me. You've got a couple of sections on it, and I wanted to ask it directly early on. How much of the problem right now comes from wasting food and who are the biggest waste culprits?
RS: Yeah, great, great question and based on the official statistics, which
is largely coming from the U.N., about 31% or close to a third of the potential food supply is lost or wasted. And those are terms that the U.N. distinguishes. So they say food loss is everything that occurs from harvest to retail, and then food waste is everything that occurs at retail or in the households. And so that's a big number. And the interesting thing is it's kind of similar across both rich and poor countries. We might think to ourselves that, well, in the poor countries, they'll certainly waste less food, but then they have less means of preserving food. For example, refrigeration is rare in some parts of the world, so food is wasted because it's spoiled. Probably in the rich countries we're wasting it because it's just, you know, simpler and easier to buy a little bit too much than a little bit too little and so, yes, we can reduce that. And the UN, the U.S., the European Union, they all say we're going to cut it in half. I don't think for a second that that's going to happen, but certainly we can improve on that. I mean, one way, the low hanging fruit for that, as far as I'm concerned, is freshness, dates on packages, right? So that we need to, you know, have better understanding of what those dates mean and so that we're not throwing things out just because you know, there's a date on it. Maybe it's a sell by date and not a use by date, but we see a date and it's expired and we toss it, right? So we can do better on that. But I do not think that wasting or losing less food is a real answer to the food production challenges that lie at lie ahead of us. But of course, as it becomes more expensive, there'll be less waste and less loss. But, you know, I think it's a pipe dream to say we're going to cut it in half, which is the goal of, you know, a lot of the main governmental bodies in the world right now.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Richard Sexton, the author of a new book titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World". Yeah, so let's get into that part of the book. First of all, you mentioned something earlier, you said it's going to get worse, these problems are going to get worse. So it's going to get worse if we don't do something different. Why? That may seem like an obvious question, but what are the biggest reasons why it's going to get worse?
RS: Well, one big reason why is climate change itself, right? I mean, the climate has warmed in recent decades, but it hasn't warmed that much. And so based upon all of the forecasts, all the models, the greatest warming is yet to come. And there are a myriad, hundreds of studies across wide ranges of crops, all parts of the world that say that a warming climate is going to be detrimental to food production. I mean, I've got a basic statistic in the book that basically compiles all of this scientific information and then adds in the warmth that our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA is projecting without mitigation, which is 2.8 degrees Celsius or roughly five degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century and I come up with a 14% yield loss. Some of that can be mitigated by adaptation, but not all of it. And so, you know, that's a challenge we haven't faced in in previous centuries. I mean, another great challenge is pest resistance to traditional treatments, and that's happening right now as we speak. And the dramatic thing that's happening, Grant, is that the next generation to replace things like glyphosate or Roundup, as we more commonly know it, it's not in the pipeline. And so when plants achieve resistance to glyphosate, people are going back and using the previous generation of those pesticides which are harmful in and of themselves. Those are the pesticides that we used when I was a youth on the farm all these many, many years ago. So that's just another example of a challenge. And I'll mention one more, it's very, very important because, through the centuries, what saved us from hunger and malnutrition that a lot of people like Malthus and so forth were predicting has been technological advancements. And I'm blessed to have a faculty colleague here at UC Davis, who's the world's leader on research on productivity advancements in agriculture. And what their work showed is that through the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, the productivity growth was about 2% a year, which means essentially we can get 2% more output for a given amount of inputs, land and labor and fertilizer and so forth. But then it basically has been cut in half in the most recent decades, and there's no real evidence that the tide is turning. And that's a dramatic effect, right? Because we can't count on technological advancements to save us as they have in the past, right? A 1% rate of growth isn't sufficient to keep up with the growth rate in demand. And so that's a big, big factor that a lot of people don't understand and know. But then, yeah, so kind of the blithe response to concerns raised by people like myself, oh, yeah, the technology will advance and we'll be fine. That's not true anymore.
GR: Yeah, we'll figure our way out of it.
RS: Yeah.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Richard Sexton. He's a professor at the University of California, Davis and the author of a new book on food and food supply. It's titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World". So, a lot of what your book is about is debunking, like, myths that are popular and are held by policymakers or sometimes deliberately put forward by others and then also spread by the media. What are some of the biggest myths out there right now about food production and supply?
RS: Yeah, a lot of the myths pertain to, you know, different ways of producing food beyond the conventional means that people think are better for the environment and maybe somehow result in better foods being produced and so forth. And all of these, the thing all of these methods have in common and certainly the list includes organic, non-GMOs, production by of local food, small farms and so forth, is that they're all associated with significantly lower yields, right? And so those are examples of, you know, inefficient ways of producing food that nonetheless, as a society we've embraced and in many cases subsidized. And, you know, the consequence, of course, is less food produced off a given land base in agriculture. And then the really unfortunate thing that results when we're either taking land out of agricultural production completely, which is something we do with what we call the Conservation Reserve Program or moving land into less productive means of producing food, is that we cause the land base in agriculture to expand, and that's what they call indirect land use change and we've come to understand that much, much better in the recent decades. And so if the U.S. produces less food, if the Europeans produce less food, people are going to try to produce more elsewhere. And that results in deforestation of the Amazon, of the forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, in sub-Saharan Africa. And there's no dispute that's about the worst thing we can do for the environment. These virgin forests are great sources of carbon sinks, they remove carbon from the atmosphere. You burn them down and clear cut them, you fill up the soil, all its carbon is released. It's, you know, it's horrible for carbon emissions, biodiversity and so on and so forth. But we're causing that. We're undeniably causing that with our policies in the Western countries, the US, Europe, all of our strategies to produce less food. So, you know, frankly, Grant, I don't get it in the sense that the Europeans want to take 10% of their ag-lands out by 2030. The U.S. has 7% of its ag-lands in conservation reserve and we're proud of it. Well, what do we think is going to happen? If we take land out, it's going in somewhere else in the world where it'll probably be less productive and more environmentally damaging. And that's really, you know, the elephant in the room for all of these policies that we're enacting in the name of the environment. If they cause us to produce less food on a given land base, they are going to cause this indirect land use change and they're going to cause deforestation in some of the most environmentally sensitive places in the world.
GR: Yeah, that's a fascinating connection you're drawing. But let me just back up a minute and say organic food, return to small farms, you're skewering some pretty sacred cows there that you know, among a constituency that is not necessarily entirely on the left, but a lot of it is on the left and that's the group that usually voices concerns for things like the rainforest and international concerns about, you know, less wealthy parts of the world. So there's quite a contradiction built in there.
RS: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And it's and it's quite ironic indeed, yes. Because we might associate those groups of people with the support for these types of food production systems. But then, yes, those people would, you know, tend to be advocates for the poor and so forth. But yeah, there's no basis to deny the fact that if you put into place production methods that are less efficient or if you simply take the land out of production completely, A: you're raising food prices and those that are harmed the most by that are, of course, the poor in some parts of the world to this day, upwards of half or more of people's incomes go for food. And so when we make it more expensive, we really hurt the poorest among us unequivocally. And then yeah, the response to less food availability and higher prices is to, you know, anywhere in the world =to try to produce more food and then it's now it's resulting in deforestation then we cause, you know, great environmental harms. And so again, the ironic thing is a lot of these policies are enacted in the name of the environment, but probably ultimately end up hurting the environment.
GR: Interesting. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is UC Davis Professor Richard Sexton. Okay, so what are the policies and programs that you would recommend that we should pursue and start pursuing now?
RS: Yeah, well, the nice thing is my policy prescription is one sentence, and so it's not very complicated. And that one sentence is, we need to produce food in the places of the world where it's most efficient to do so and using the most efficient means of production. And then, the thing is, of course, that will maximize the amount of food that we're able to produce, but it will also be the best thing for the environment and that's the thing that gets missed, right? Because then we will stop the deforestation, we'll, efficient production, you know, by its very definition means the least resource use, right? And so it's not only that we're stopping the deforestation, but, you know, as we economize on inputs, the fertilizers, the pesticides and all of those types of things, those yield environmental benefits as well. So that’s the answer. That's the simple answer because it addresses both the food production problem and the environmental problem.
GR: Right. So on the ground, what does that mean? Does that mean the United States produces more food, Europe produces more food? Do we do more things in Asia? What would it look like?
RS: Well, it would look like the US stopping, you know, subsidizing people, taking land out of production. The Europeans have the goal for 2030 to take 10% of their ag-lands out of production. So, you know, for most crops, the most efficient producer in the world is the US. The Europeans are pretty good themselves for most crops. So for example, they're more efficient at producing wheat than the US, but corn and soybeans, that's our big strength. But yeah, the most efficient places, you know, that list, I mean, Brazil now has become a very powerful producer of soybeans and corn and so forth. But yeah, we want the most efficient producers to be doing it. That's going to stop the deforestation, that's going to make food most plentiful. And so any of these policies that we're enacting in this country, I mean, we subsidize organic production in this country in various ways, but every time we convert an acre from its conventional form into its organic variant, depending upon the crop and the location, we're going to give up between 30% and 45% of the available yield. So every, say, three or four acres we convert from conventional to organic, we got to put one more acre into production, you know, in order to maintain food production. So the, you know, the idea of land use change applies to things like organic, it applies to things like non-GMO. In this country we're quite receptive and open to GM foods, but they're largely banned in Europe, they're banned in parts of Africa, they're banned in Russia. And so that's been a significant impediment to food production as well because those GM variants are associated with significantly higher yields.
GR: So I'm a political scientist, I want to come back and hit you again with this politics question as I was listening to what you were just saying. There are going to be people, political figures, media people in particular, who are going to hear that and they're going to say, ah, this guy is basically just making an argument for big agriculture. And, you know, he's against organic food, he’s against the small farms, and they're going to just switch it off right away. Do you have a response or a counter argument to try to penetrate that?
RS: Yeah, I mean, coming from psychology or behavioral economics, that's called the disconfirmatory bias, right? We don't we don't want to hear about things that challenge our or beliefs. And so, yeah, I agree that this book challenges a lot of these traditional beliefs, but there's really no denying it, right? I mean, the book itself is meant to be, you know, accessible to a broad audience, it's not laden with a lot of jargon and so forth. But the footnotes are there, you don't have to read the footnotes if you don't want to, but the footnotes document what I'm saying in terms of a vast scientific literature, are there. But Grant, you're right that we don't turn on a dime. And so one thing we haven't talked about is biofuels in this country. But it is a fact that based on productivity potential, we're probably using about 25% of our ag-lands to produce fuel, not food, corn ethanol and soybean oil for diesel fuel. If you back up to the beginning of the century, we were doing almost none of that, right? And so, are we going to phase out biofuels? No way, right? That's ,you know, you're the political scientist and that's built in to the economies of big parts of the Midwestern U.S., where there's powerful senators and congresspeople and they're not satisfied with the status quo. We're all burning E-10, 10% ethanol in our cars but they want E-15, they want E-20, they want corn ethanol to qualify as a sustainable aviation fuel. So it's not less, it's more and we need to draw the line someplace because, yeah, since we enacted that policy in 2005, that's when we passed the Renewable Fuel Standard, there's been lots of research that demonstrates once you factor in these land use changes, the environmental impacts of biofuels are more harmful than fossil fuels. And so yeah, we're not going to get rid of it, but we can at least put the brakes on expanding it.
GR: Yeah, that's a good observation and it's probably not unrelated to the fact that Iowa is the first primary. I even think there was a West Wing episode on that. We've just got about a couple of minutes left and I want to squeeze in one, maybe two more questions, we'll see, but, well, I'll leave it with these two things. So that's from the production standpoint, that's sort of big level policy. What about myself as a consumer? Is there anything I should be doing differently to help you, or to help all of us with this big problem you've identified? Do I give up beef, for example? I mean, give me some pointers here.
RS: Well, I mean, we haven't talked about it, and it would probably take more than a couple of minutes we have left. But, yeah, I mean, meat consumption is an inefficient way of converting land resources into production for foods, right? So that if we did eat less meat, it would take some of the pressure off of the food, the food production systems. But the problem is going to be that as we move forward, as some of the poorer places in the world become wealthier, they're going to want to diversify their diets and that includes eating more meats and dairy products. And so, yeah, for a lot of people, the answer is, oh, yeah, we just need to eat less meats. And yeah, that's not a bad answer, but it's not going to happen, right? People are going to want to eat more, not less. And then, you know, another thing I say in the preface to the book is that if you read with an open mind, if you don't let your biases really take hold, you can save a lot of money in your food budget because things that you're paying maybe double what you'd need to pay for, probably aren't doing what you think they're doing. And so if you, you know, if you read the book with an open mind, you might say, hey, I can spend a lot less on food than I'm spending right now.
GR: Well, you've convinced me on a lot of things. I think the one thing I'm going to hang on to is my beef from my small farm because I like the way that tastes and it seems to taste different now. Maybe we could have those other cows eat the same feed, but you've got me part of the way, not all the way, yeah.
RS: Well, I'll consider that a victory, right? And so, yeah, and I know we're running out of time, and so it's not so much the small farms in in this country because they're not that small, but in a lot of parts of the world, they're just a couple of hectares or two, three acres. And those farms condemn people to a life of poverty, and they're not very good ways of producing food. And so that's the bigger problem, not the smaller farms in this country because they're not that small.
GR: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. Richard Sexton's new book is titled, "Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World”. As you've just seen from our conversation or heard, it's a very provocative book and make some very interesting arguments. Richard, thanks again for making the time to talk with me, very illuminating.
RS: My pleasure, thank you, Grant.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
