Can biotech cure world hunger?

Last week we learnt that there are now 1 billion hungry people in the world, more than ever, albeit a smaller proportion of the population than in the 1950s. I found this debate from the New York Times a useful guide to how to respond. On the one hand, it would be absurd to condemn millions to malnutrition because we don't like high-tech farming in Europe. On the other hand, genetic modification has delivered very little for poorer countries so far: herbicide-tolerant maize and soybean varieties, yes, but none of the drought-resistant crops that the biotech companies promised.

Beyond the biotech dichotomy, most contributors recognized that the solution to the food crisis will involve a combination of technologies, including some that don't exist yet. High-input farming depends on natural gas, which won't be around forever; water is running short in many grain-growing regions; a strictly organic world food system would be a disaster for forests, but many techniques from organic farming are useful and should be spread. It would probably help if the NGOs and corporations stopped insulting each other and worked together for a change.

If I could contribute to the debate, it would be on prices and the signals they send. High food prices are in general a disaster for development, but we need higher prices for meat, fish and air-freighted vegetables for richer people (not just rich countries) to change their destructive eating habits. We need to tax water and energy use in such a way that basic grains and vegetables are cheap enough for everyone, but beef becomes an expensive luxury for the Americas, Europe and Australia just as it is for the rest of the world. A serious carbon tax would stop us agonising between strawberries grown in Dutch greenhouses or flown from Kenyan orchards: they will be too expensive to eat anytime they're not in season.

In the absence of carbon and water taxes, more information can help: just publishing the emissions associated with beef burgers led 20% of diners to switch to chicken or the veggie option, according to this photo essay. Ultimately, though, the most powerful information is provided by the price.

Measuring economic growth from outer space

I love the satellite picture of the world at night - the one where Europe and America are seas of light, North Korea is invisible and the only lights visible in much of Africa are in South Africa and the oil flares in the Gulf of Guinea. Obviously, there is a strong correlation with economic development, or at least people having stuff to do at night.
J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard and Vernon N. Weil at Brown University take this insight a step further: why not use lighting levels to measure changes in development over time? This turns out to be a particularly useful method for countries where statistics are erroneous or missing, for example because of civil war. Governments can manipulate figures, but lighting never lies. Here are the two main findings (also summed up by the Wall Street Journal and Marginal Revolution):

1. Lighting is indeed a proxy for economic development and it goes down as well as up: there are some great pictures of changes in lighting levels in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Whereas Poland experienced economic growth of 56% and an increase in lighting of 80%, neighbouring Ukraine saw its economic activity decline by 35% and lighting fall by 47%.

2. Increases in agricultural productivity (from high rainfall years)raise economic activity and hence lighting in nearby cities. Are these farmers rushing to sell their goods at the market, buy TVs with the earnings or simply celebrating their good fortune at the bar?

I'd love to see some further work on this data set. One question I have is whether the data might be distorted by certain high-light activities: mining, for example, or oil refining. This might matter for, say, DR Congo, where light levels seemed to increase in the 1990s, in the middle of a devastating civil war. I'd also like to see the impact of power cuts, such as California experienced a few years ago or South Africa in 2008. Most power cuts don't last long enough to show up in GDP figures, but their short-run effect might be severe: think of what happened in Europe this January when Gazprom turned the heating off. Next time that happens, we might be able to measure its effect from outer space.

Would a green revolution in Africa be bad for women?

Most people would probably say 'no'. After all, most African women are farmers and so a green revolution should raise their incomes.

But what if improvements in farming technology shift control over food production (and hence income) from women to men?

The much-maligned Food and Agriculture Organization has a focus piece on this, which concludes that the Green Revolution in Asia benefited richer farmers more than poorer farmers and men more than women. Richer farmers, because not everyone could afford high-yielding seeds and fertiliser. Men, because
women lost the income they used to get from threshing and pounding grain when they were replaced by male-operated mills.

This is an important lesson for me, because I've been keen to see rice mills and other low-tech devices spread throughout Africa. I suspect the conclusion is less applicable to Africa, because wage labour is already rare among rural women and rice mills like the one in the picture employ women too. But it's a salutary reminder that we ignore the gender dimension of development at our peril.

Overall, I feel that any kind of agricultural development would be better for women than, say, a rural economy based around mining. My colleagues Emily Stanger and Molly Kinder just won an award for a paper that makes this point in the Liberian context.

Who wants to develop a low-cost rice mill?

Anyone visiting a West African village will notice the distinctive sight and sound of women pounding food to eat - yams, cassava or rice. As combine harvesters spread across Europe and North America and the green revolution throughout Asia, farming and processing practices in Africa barely changed. Rice mills, such as the one shown below, are the exception, not the rule, in rice-growing countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Does this matter? Not if pounding rice by hand yielded the same quality of rice as milling it - but it doesn't and it's hard work as well. The evidence suggests that African farmers continue pounding by hand because the alternatives are too expensive or simply not available. In some countries, women are actually going back to hand pounding, because their diesel-powered mills broke down or were sold for scrap to fuel a civil war.

There are various programs led by NGOs and the UN trying to change this, based on the belief that agricultural processing technology is essential if farmers want to move beyond subsistence and grow a surplus for sale. However, their efforts are generally uncoordinated, fall well short of what is required and may just hand out the same old technology that is inefficient and breaks down easily.


Now there are two exciting developments in this field. The first is a program sponsored by the Gates Foundation to create 600 agro-enterprises in Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso using multifunctional platforms, essentially a diesel generator to which different machines (rice threshers or mills, peanut shellers and cassava graters) can be attached. It's a traditional grant-based program, but I'm optimistic because Gates is paying for it and they insist on value for money.

The second development - and one I am keen to join - is the spread of social enterprise models using new technology. New technology here means redesigning a product to make it simpler and cheaper: this is the One Laptop per Child model, not the MacBook Air! Typically these enterprises bring together engineers, designers and development practitioners and create some clever, cheap technology. The challenge, as always, is taking it to scale and getting people to pay for it.

There are some great organizations working out there: in the last few months, I have been introduced to the MIT D-Lab, the Extreme Affordability program at Stanford's d.school (d for design), KickStart and Design that Matters. Fortunately for me, Cambridge seems to be a hub for this kind of thing! I have also heard of Engineers without Borders and Practical Action. But nobody has developed a low-cost rice mill yet. Is nobody interested, or am I just not looking hard enough?