Polling is now open for the post of White House Farmer, the person who would be entrusted with digging up that precious lawn in order to grow fresh food for the First Family. There’s just one teeny problem. POTUS hasn’t said he wants his lawn dug up.
Where do your garden seeds come from?
Patrick over at Bifurcated Carrots had a post a couple of days ago echoing the “fact” that “98% of the worlds seeds come from one of six companies.” He went on to list them and to say a bit about how companies that sell smaller quantities have to enter into straightjacket contracts with the big six that mean the “small” guys cannot say where they get their seeds, or whether they are F1 hybrids.
I’m deeply skeptical of the original claim, and asked Patrick where it came from and how it was calculated. He replied:
This in not a very hard statistic. It originally came from the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. … I don’t own a copy of the book, and I have only seen lots of other people on the Internet cite the reference, so I can’t say a lot about it. I assume it does include cereal grains. I’m sure the person who came up with the statistic did it for purposes of making a point, rather than making an accurate statement. Perhaps this was a poor choice of a statistic to give here. If you have other ideas of a more accurate statistic, I’d love to hear.
On the final point, I have ideas, but not the ability to implement them. It is interesting, though, that there are far more than six registered maintainers of seeds listed in the EU Common Catalogue. But that’s an arcane discussion for another time. As for the rest, I had already determined that almost all the noise around this 98% number did trace back to Barbara Kingsolver’s book, and I do have a copy, which I’ve almost finished reading.
First, I had to find the quote. Not so easy when there is no index. ((There is one now that you can download from the book web site.)) But there it is, on page 51 of my US paperback edition, published by Harper Perennial. So I turned to the notes and references at the back of the book, to see if I could discover where Kingsolver had got the figure. Alas, the references given are not tied to anything; not the chapters, not the pages, certainly not the individual claims.
OK, I’ll just ask her directly. But can I find an email, or any other way to get in touch? Can I heck. Neither on her “personal web site” nor on the book’s site is there any way that I can see to get in touch with the author.
Shouldn’t I just give her the benefit of the doubt? After all, her heart is in the right place. Well, as I read the book I was making notes of inaccuracies and outright errors. ((Sample: page 57, Arugula is not, and never has been, a member of “the lettuce clan”.)) I stopped because it was interfering with my reading and enjoyment, having to pause and find my notebook and pencil every page or so.
But this figure of 98% and six companies is gaining truthiness just by being echoed uncritically all over the shop, like so many other useful but wrong “facts”. It is a perfect example of what the great J.B.S. Haldane called The Bellman’s Theorem, ((“What I tell you three times is true.”)) and I fear that I cannot just ignore it.
There is concentration in the seed industry. There may be contractual obligations on people who retail seed from others. But people who think that those things are bad should not rely on untruths to support their arguments. My hope, then, is that while Barbara Kingsolver may not want anyone disturbing the quiet of her old Virginia home, she may just be egotistical enough to monitor, and care, what the internet is saying about her, and that she’ll pop up in the comments here to tell us all where she found the figure, so that we can go back and check it for ourselves.
That’s how one assesses truth.
Input subsidies to the rescue
Input Subsidies to Improve Smallholder Maize Productivity in Malawi: Toward an African Green Revolution. Denning G, Kabambe P, Sanchez P, Malik A, Flor R, et al. PLoS Biology Vol. 7, No. 1, e23.
Silver bullet, or propaganda?
Nibbles: China, Coconut, Sheep, Water, Plums, Kew
- “These young people can’t farm.”
- Let the people tap!
- Wolf sighted in Massif Central. France surrenders.
- Fascinating discussion of how much water farmers “use”.
- “Blueberries have some stiff competition”. From plums.
- Millennium Seed Bank hit by credit crunch.
Gates speaks
The Annual Newsletter of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is online. Page 3 deals with agriculture. The emphasis is clear:
New seeds and other inputs like fertilizer allow a farmer to increase her farm’s output significantly, instead of just growing enough food to subsist.
A big reason [for the Green Revolution’s failure there] is that African countries have widely varying climate conditions, and there hasn’t been the same investment in creating the seeds that fit those conditions.
Since I grew up as a city boy and didn’t know anything about farming, I have been on a steep learning curve to understand things like fertilizer, drip irrigation, plant breeding, and which crops are best for which conditions.
Our optimism about technology is a fundamental part of the foundation’s approach. … Technology is also a personal passion of Melinda’s and mine. So we try to point scientific research toward the problems of the poor, like agriculture.
But as Tom Philpott over at Gristmill points out:
The document never considers the complex history of agriculture in Africa; nor does it mull the social and ecological effects of industrial-style agriculture in the West and India. Are we still so enamored of our food system that we feel compelled to export it to Africa?
A more robust vision for that continent’s food future is laid out by the United Nation’s Conference on Trade and Development and U.N. Environmental Program. Called “Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa” [PDF], the report emerged in 2008 with the support of more than a dozen civil-society organizations throughout Africa.
The report concludes that organic and near-organic agriculture is ideally suited for millions of marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa — and build food security and soil fertility in unison.
Making better use of agricultural biodiversity and other solutions that do not involve what the Gates’ think of as technology is, I think, an even more exciting challenge that just trying to duplicate the Green Revolution again for Africa. And if Africa’s “widely varying climate conditions” were the problem (to say nothing of widely varying soils), how exactly will new seeds and fertilizers address that problem?
Gates also makes much of climate change, whose “negative effects will fall almost entirely on the poor, even though they did not cause the problem”. Does he really think he can breed, from scratch, fast enough to keep up? Or would he do better to devote at least some resources to making more and better use of existing agrobiodiversity in ways that can deliver the improved stability and size of harvests he says he wants?