Left Flank

Brad DeLong pits Megan McArdle against Greg Clark on the odds, that food prices will cut global economic growth. DeLong backed Clark's optimism about "...the race between technological improvement and growing demand...". Still, the price of rice continues to rise.

It seems DeLong was right. Technological improvement might save the day.

As far as I can tell it hasn't hit the English-speaking media yet, but researchers in Chile announced this week (warning: links in Spanish) the discovery of a new genetically engineered variety of rice that can be cooked with 1/4 the amount of water needed for normal rice.

Here's the official University of Santiago release, reviewing the new strain of rice and also the crush of press interest since the first reports on Monday. The project was cosponsored by Chile's governmental Foundation for Agricultural Innovation, which is sponsoring a number of other projects to help increase Chile's agricultural output.

In the context of the ongoing global food crisis, the discovery won't provide more rice, even if widely adapted. But it could reduce the costs of cooking rice in terms of both water and fuel used to heat the water, giving poor consumers a partial break. In Chile alone, economists have estimated the jump in food prices could raise the poverty rate at least 2%.

This isn't the same sort of innovation as dwarf wheat, so what Gary Gardner argues, still goes: "What's needed is a new model of prosperity that meets people's needs within the boundaries set by nature. It's what we call sustainable development. Embrace it and we can bury Malthus for good. Ignore it and we'll find that Malthus was simply ahead of his time."

Philip Brasor writes a great piece about the conflict between the market and agricultural traditions and government trade policies. With only a change, from «rice» to «maize», a farmer in Iowa could feel a Japanese farmer's pain.

Though they paid lip service to the farmers' hard work, some of the studio participants wondered out loud if there wasn't something stone-headed about government support for rice. University of Tokyo Professor Masayoshi Honma said that the main reason the government promotes rice consumption right now is that rice is the only crop that holds up the self-sufficiency rate, as low as it is.

In response, the farmers' position in advocating the continuation of government protection through tariffs and subsidies became increasingly defensive. They said that if the Japanese rice market collapsed, the rural environment would deteriorate, small communities would disappear, and Japan's connection with its agrarian past would cease to exist. While these developments would certainly be dire, they have little to do with the problem's source, which is that Japanese people don't want to eat as much rice any more.

The government's rice protection policy was formulated during World War II, when the citizenry was starving. After the war, production increased and rice was pretty much all there was. The quality wasn't very good, but everybody ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Consumption peaked in 1963, when the average Japanese person ate five bowls a day. That statistic decreased to 3 1/2 bowls by 1978 and now stands at 2 1/2.

There's a simple reason for this: more choice. Japan's standard of living is among the highest in the world. Japanese people can eat anything they want, and they famously do. There is no reason to eat as much rice as they once did, or any at all, for that matter; but as the arguments on the NHK program showed, rice has a powerful hold on the Japanese imagination.

Halfway through the three-hour marathon, the moderator put this question to the studio participants and the viewers: Should Japanese people eat more rice? Again, the voters at home overwhelmingly sided with the farmers: yes, they should. But a number of people in the studio took issue with the question itself.

«Why can't I eat anything I want?» asked one student, even though he said he ate more rice than the national average. And Honma seemed offended. «That question is pointless,» he said. Whether or not Japanese people «should» eat rice was irrelevant to the debate, since you couldn't do anything about people's preferences in a free society.

There's no PR in the world can compete against free choice and affluence.