Agricultural Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Genetic modification of foods is to global agriculture what derivatives have been to the global financial system - recalling Warren Buffett's memorable phrase, a weapon of mass destruction just waiting its chance to go off.

This thought occurred to me as I pondered the line-up of senior Goldman executives at the Senate committee hearing this week on Fab Fabrice and the Abacus CDOs: a strange irony indeed that "Mr Fundamentals" himself should have been one of the white knights who rescued Goldman when the very "financial weapons of mass destruction" he had so presciently warned against had gone off and the bank, along with all the others, was about to collapse amid the poison and nuclear clouds.


For non-experts in finance, I should perhaps explain derivatives. These are secondary products which are derived from primary products such as home or small business loans, or which act as a proxy for the performance of such products. The main examples are “securitisation” (packaging of portfolios of  loans so that they can be sold on to people other than the originators) and swaps, where you either exchange one risk for another, or buy insurance against risk.

Now there is nothing essentially “unsound” (as Mr Kurtz might have said) about securitisation as a tool for sharing risk and expanding the availability of credit – provided it is transparent. If you buy a bond that represents a share in a portfolio of loans to, say, a number of specified companies, you can investigate those companies and assess their quality and risk.

This is where securitisation started out in the mid-90’s, but by 2007, the products on offer – the kind of deals Mr Fab Fabrice was cooking up - securitizations of securitizations, the so-called "CDO-squareds" or even "CDO-cubeds" – had departed so far from this necessary transparency that not even super-sophisticated computer programmes written by super-sized banking brains could any longer comprehend them. And if you can’t understand something you can’t manage the risk of it effectively - though of course the rating agencies and bankers claimed to be doing both.

Similarly, with swaps, there are many entirely legitimate commercial reasons to insure your risks - indeed they are a vital financial product.  The problems arise when swaps are piled on swaps, and bought and sold not for commercial reasons but for speculation.  And the swap market too was eventually brought low by lack of transparency:  there was no formal exchange, anyone could sell and buy them, so no one had any idea what was out there until they started to unravel.  Indeed, we still don't really know what's out there, more than three years later.


So why the analogy with GM?

Well, first there's the similarity of the apparent promise:   just as anyone via the miracle of the markets could have pretty much any amount of credit even if they didn't have any money to pay for it, so via the miracle of GM the world will mysteriously go from mass hunger to abundant plenty more or less overnight.

Next, there's the whole raft of conflicts of interest between clients and agents that lie at the heart of the Goldman issues the Senate started to investigate this week, and which are also present in the GM value chain.  The biggest of these is the creation of tied users; that is, farmers who, once they start to use GM seeds, become dependent on the products of what is effectively a monopoly, with all the attendant potential for abuse.

Mainly though, it's because the two main elements that constituted the toxicity of derivatives to the global financial system – their lack of transparency and the impatience they manifested with traditional, careful banking practice - are present in the GM value chain and technology too. 


So we might "know" that GM seed A is resistant to drought – just as we "knew" that securitisation A was rated AAA. But, just as with a "CDO-squared", neither we nor the GM producer has any way of knowing what else might turn out to be included in the deal. What are the effects on soil and wildlife? What happens when the GM plant crosses with a native? What happens if a resistant strain appears and spreads?

Likewise the impatience with the fundamentals of good, sustainable agricultural practice that GM represents. Modification has always been a part of agriculture and livestock rearing - and indeed one that's essential to progress in productivity and resistance to disease.  But there's a difference between crosses that take several generations, where harmful effects can be observed and corrected, and the introduction of modifications which go from point A to point Z in one step, without any opportunity for such observations or corrections.

And do we need this kind of high-tech approach anyway?  Anyone who has ever raised a crop knows that more or less everything comes back to the quality and health of the soil. As I’ve travelled around Africa and Asia, in some of the poorest countries in the world, what I’ve seen is the need for very basic improvements, not highly sophisticated engineering. Improved (unmodified) seeds, basic principles of organic farming (for example composting animal and even human waste to provide fertilizer) and simple water management measures could enable massive improvements in productivity and local food security.  So, indeed, would just bringing idle land into production for local consumption - a whole subject in itself, with some extremely worrying developments in terms of the acquisition of land for the production of food exports to the Gulf, China and elsewhere.

I’ve no doubt there is a place for GM in agriculture - just as there’s a place for transparent securitisations and currency hedges in the financial markets - but it needs to be used for proper purposes and closely regulated.

Otherwise for GM read "agricultural WMD", and for Lehman, RBS and Greece read financial exploitation,  pollution and ever more starvation...

Re-use: The Forgotten Green "R"?

Of the "3 R's" of responsible environmental practice - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle - we seem to spend a lot of time thinking about the first and last (and perhaps even practising them to some degree).  But the second seems to me to get neglected.


As well as reducing the amount of packaging we use, I've been trying to make it a rule for myself to try to reuse as much of it as possible in some way before it eventually goes to be recycled or, if absolutely necessary, dumped.


This little series has a few ideas on uses for all that plastic...

First up, the wrappers on large Cadbury's chocolate bars (Caramel being  a particular weakness in this household) make excellent labels for plants or indeed anything else you need to identify outside - in the case in these pictures, air-drying sausages.

They're essentially the same as the labels you get on plants from garden centres.  Cut the wrapper in long strips about 15mm wide.  Turn over one end so it's doubled up and cut down lengthways, creating a slash.

Write the information you need with a laundry pen or similar (on the inside of the wrapper), then wrap the label around the plant (or whatever) and pass through the slashed opening to tie. 


They seem to be pretty strong against the elements, and the writing survives the rain fine as long as you use an indelible marker.

Nettle beer and the Kenya bean conundrum

One of the lessons of my increasingly wide-ranging forays into self-production is an appreciation of the amount of water that's consumed in making things.  This is something you never really consider when you pick something off the shelf, but perhaps we should start paying more attention (and asking for more information), because as this Guardian story demonstrates, there are serious implications for parts of the world that are already in dire trouble over water.

Take the nettle beer I have just bottled (and which I sincerely hope wont be exploding on me in a few days).  To produce just two gallons I have to do the following involving water:

• Wash the nettles (using 5 gallons of water?)
• Rinse out the pots I'm going to boil them in (using 1 gallon?)
• Boil the nettles up in two gallons (the only water that I actually end up consuming)
• Sterilise the fermenting tub - this involves washing it out, filling it with water and the sterilising powder, then rinsing it several times (10 gallons?)
• Sterilising the bottles - similar process (5 gallons?)
• Cleaning the fermenting equipment (5 gallons?)
• Washing and rinsing the bottles after use (3 gallons?)

So to make my two gallons of beer I have used 31 gallons of water, plus whatever water was used to produce the two kilos of sugar that went in - so say 35 gallons in all?  At least my nettles were growing anyway, or I would have to add whatever the water consumption was in cultivating them (as I would if brewing beer made with malt and hops).

The Guardian story on Kenya is the lesson writ large - first the massive environmental costs that we impose on countries that grow and produce things for us; and now the massive water costs in countries like Kenya where vast tracts of previously fertile land are now gripped by an apparently permanent drought.  Time to think through the employment arguments again:  what are we truly achieving employing farmers to grow beans for us when the effect of the water usage involved is probably to contribute to removing the livelihood of the herder down the road whose cattle now have nothing to drink?

In which I become a conceptual artist

My latest work, entitled Carbon Loaves and pictured below, is a meditation on the links between carbon usage and the production of food.

Technically, it is not a complex piece.  I created it by kneading and proving two ordinary white loaves, putting them into the hot oven of the Aga, forgetting to set the timer, and then going off to watch Liverpool FC lose to Atletico Madrid on the TV.  Going to the breadbin the following morning to cut some slices for toast, I discovered, like the tomb after the resurrection, that it was empty. A memory was stirred; the door of the hot oven of the Aga was opened - and there they were, in all their glistening black perfection, still gently smoking.

They have an odd Rachel Whiteread feel about them, having exactly the shape of the tins in which they were baked, but having shrunk by an inch all round.  Removing them from the tins, they made curious tinkling sounds, like tiny bubbles of glass being popped.  (Perhaps there's even glass in there somewhere, so completely have they been kilned?) 

Phase two of this serendipitous project is to leave them outside and see what effect wind and weather have.  Meantime, back to the mixing bowl ...