Have GMOs Benefited Us?

by Levi Russell

A recent NY Times article claimed that GMO crops are not delivering the originally-promised benefits of higher yields and lower pesticide application rates. The article is short, so I recommend reading all of it, but here's how it starts:

About 20 years ago, the United States and Canada began introducing genetic modifications in agriculture. Europe did not embrace the technology, yet it achieved increases in yield and decreases in pesticide use on a par with, or even better than, the United States, where genetically modified crops are widely grown.

I later read a couple of articles that provided very detailed responses to the original. One is written by Andrew Kniss, a weed scientist, and the other by Jayson Lusk, an economist. Kniss uses more detailed versions of the data used in the NYT article and discusses the role of toxicity in pesticides. Lusk makes some great points about revealed preference. Both certainly worth a read.

The GMO Knowledge Gap

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- While consumers are aware of genetically modified crops and food, their knowledge level is limited and often at odds with the facts, according to a newly published study by a University of Florida researcher.

Last year, Brandon McFadden, an assistant professor of food and resource economics at the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural ‌Sciences, published a study that showed scientific facts scarcely change consumers’ impressions of genetically modified food and other organisms.

Consumer polls are often cited in policy debates about genetically modified food labeling. This is especially true when discussing whether food that is genetically modified should carry mandatory labels, McFadden said. In conducting their current study, McFadden and his colleague, Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economics professor at Oklahoma State University, wanted to know what data supported consumers’ beliefs about genetically modified food and gain a better understanding of preferences for a mandatory label.

So he conducted the survey to better understand what consumers know about biotechnology, breeding techniques and label preferences for GM foods.

Researchers used an online survey of 1,004 participants that asked questions to measure consumers’ knowledge of genetically modified food and organisms. Some of those questions tried to determine objective knowledge of genetically modified organisms, while others aimed to find out consumers’ beliefs about genetically modified foods and crops.

The results led McFadden to conclude that consumers do not know as much about the facts of genetically modified food and crops as ‌they think they do.

Of those sampled, 84 percent supported a mandatory label for food containing genetically modified ingredients. However, 80 percent also supported a mandatory label for food containing DNA, which would result in labeling almost all food.

“Our research indicates that the term ‘GM’ may imply to consumers that genetic modification alters the genetic structure of an organism, while other breeding techniques do not,” McFadden said.

As participants answered questions designed to measure their knowledge of scientific data on genetic modification, respondents seemed to change their statements about the safety of genetically modified foods, McFadden said.

The study is published in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.

Last Modified: Mon, 23 May 2016 10:36:46 EDT

Major Environmental Legislation and EPA Regulations

In my last post on EPA regulation of agriculture, I looked at the majority party in the House, Senate, and the party of the President from 1974 to 2014. Some of it lined up with what I think most people, including me, would assume (i.e. Democrat control means more regulation), but much of it didn't. I suspect part of this is a function of our short memories but a good portion of it could be the relative independence with which regulators operate. They don't necessarily need legislative mandates to change the regulatory environment. One other thing to keep in mind: the regulations in this index can apply to any aspect of agriculture. Regulatory restrictions on forestry, crop farming, ranching, concentrated animal feeding operations, and aquaculture are all included in this index.

In this post I want to show some major legislation and regulatory actions laid over the same 1974-2014 regulatory restrictions data. I don't know if the events I identify on the chart are the causes of subsequent increases in regulation. I picked most of these events off the EPA History website, so the agency itself believes they're significant. If and when I dig into the RegData data for a research project, I'll be able to tell a more interesting story.

The graph shows EPA regulatory restrictions on agriculture. Data were taken from the RegData Database at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The data are counts of restrictive words in the Code of Federal Regulations such as "cannot," "must," "shall," etc weighted by the probability that the particular Title and Part apply to agriculture. This time I converted the restrictions count into an index (something the Center recommends) in part to make it easier to see just how much regulatory growth the ag industry has experienced. In 2014, there was 492% more regulation on agriculture than there was in 1974.

Basic Textual Analysis of EPA Regulations

In the last post I showed the relationship between the majority party in the House, Senate, and Presidential office and EPA regulatory restrictions on agriculture from 1974 to 2014. As I noted there, the relationships aren't always clear and they definitely aren't what a "naive" understanding of the current political divide would predict. In this post I thought I'd take a step back and provide a more general summary of EPA regulations, without the focus on politics and agriculture.

The RegData 2.2 database provides highly detailed data on regulation at the federal level. Cutting it down to just EPA regulation yields 11,353 observations. Each observation gives a number of restrictions and word count for a given Part in a given Title in a given year in the Code of Federal Regulations. Titles are divided into Chapters, Subchapters, and Parts, but RegData doesn't split the data up by Chapter or Subchapter.

The Title designation basically tells you which agency you're looking at, though agencies like the EPA can be found in several Titles. The primary Title for the EPA is 40. Parts divide the Titles into subject areas. For instance, Title 40, Part 171 includes information about the certification of pesticide applicators. Part 406 details effluent guidelines for grain mills.

The chart below shows the number of Parts in Title 40 from 1974 to 2014. There are more than 3 times as many Parts now as there were in 1974. Most of the growth in Parts since 1974 occurred before the mid-1990s. If you look at my previous post, the number of parts generally tracks with the number of restrictions on agriculture. I don't know whether this is a coincidence or not.

40 Years of EPA Regulation - Political Factors

I've been a bit lazy about posting lately, but I think the next series of posts will be interesting if you liked our previous posts on the EPA. Within the last few weeks, the Mercatus Center has put out a much longer time series going back to 1974. I have some ideas for journal articles I'll be exploring over time, but as I sift through the data I thought I might share some of the insights they provide as I go.

Most of us who haven't studied the EPA's history in detail probably have a few assumptions about the political drivers of EPA regulation, especially regulation of agriculture. We'd probably think about things like pesticide bans, clean air and water regulations, and fuel standards. We'd probably associate these regulations with Democrats, with an exception for Nixon, who created the EPA.

The charts below show the annual index of regulatory restrictions on agriculture by the EPA (red line). The blue shaded areas indicate years in which Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives, the Senate, or held the Presidency.

Food Labels and the Informed Consumer

Product labels are an important part of communicating product information to consumers. For a long time, regulators and politicians have been in the business of mandating the content of labels for a whole range of products, especially food. While other reputation mechanisms are important to being fully-informed, we all rely on labels to some degree.

But mandated labeling has its share of pitfalls. Regulators might require too much information on a label, increasing costs to consumers with little upside. They might reduce the amount of information on a product label by increasing the costs of using certain language. More bizarrely, they might require completely misleading information to be put on a label. Arguments in favor of different labeling requirements can come from consumer pressure groups, but often they come from within industries.

An example of the first problem is mandatory country-of-origin labeling (or MCOOL) of meat products. Though there are efforts in congress to repeal MCOOL, it is currently the law of the land. A fact sheet distributed by K-State concludes:

The overriding finding of limited awareness of MCOOL, narrow use of origin information in purchasing decisions, and no evidence of a demand impact following MCOOL implementation is consistent with the argument that voluntary labeling by country of origin would have occurred if it were economically beneficial to do so. More broadly, the findings of this project generally support the assertions of MCOOL opponents who have asked “where is the market failure?” 

MCOOL creates international trade issues and increases costs to producers, processors, and retailers with little to no upside.

Neonics and the Farmer as Peacemaker

Neonicotinoid (neonic) pesticides are a commonly-used class of pesticides that have stirred up their share of controversy in the last few years. These pesticides have come under fire for their alleged negative impact on bee populations. The issue is typically framed as a war between the environmental groups, who are concerned about bee population health, and the agrochemical companies, who are concerned about their revenue stream. Research institutions play the role of the black market arms dealer supplying ammunition to both sides.

A recent article in the Guardian takes aim at the political aspects of the issue, focusing on the debate in the UK and the EU. Thankfully, the article considers the view of an often-ignored party in the debate: farmers. The article seems to give a slight edge in the war to the chemical companies, if only because the scientific evidence seems to be currently shaking out in their favor, but the most interesting participants in this war are farmers.