♫ Corn Wars/if they should scorn wars/please let these Corn Wars stay ♫
August 18, 2015 8:03 AM   Subscribe

Corn Wars: The farm-by-farm fight between China and the United States to dominate the global food supply. The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI now contend, in effect, that the theft of genetically modified corn technology is as credible a threat to national security as the spread to nation-states of the technology necessary to deliver and detonate nuclear warheads. Disturbingly, they may be right. As the global population continues to climb and climate change makes arable soil and water for irrigation ever more scarce, the world’s next superpower will be determined not just by which country has the most military might but also, and more importantly, by its mastery of the technology required to produce large quantities of food.
posted by Cash4Lead (26 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Bacigalupi was right.
posted by gottabefunky at 8:04 AM on August 18, 2015 [6 favorites]


Malthus was right.

We were able to significantly delay his catastrophe through technology to increase the carrying capacity of the planet, but climate change is very likely going to take a lot of that off the table, dramatically reducing carrying capacity back to something like pre-green revolution levels and the results are going to be hideous.
posted by Naberius at 8:14 AM on August 18, 2015 [8 favorites]


Yoda was right.

oh wait, clone wars
posted by Auden at 8:18 AM on August 18, 2015 [6 favorites]


Bacigalupi was right.

Yes, his biopunk work is looking more like a scary near-future reality.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:23 AM on August 18, 2015


There's been a lot of doom and gloom about reduced food production due to climate change around here lately but wouldn't we improve efficiency waaay before the apocalyptic mass starvation sets in? The UN says about a third of all food produced is wasted. Then if that isn't enough don't we just shift away from producing so much meat? Feedlot industrialized-style cattle production uses a lot of grain to produce meat, surely if things got too tight we would switch to alternate, less wasteful, protein sources?

I'm not saying things aren't going to get harder for the less fortunate or that food prices won't rise, but it's a huge leap from that to mass starvation.
posted by Wretch729 at 8:29 AM on August 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


wouldn't we improve efficiency waaay before the apocalyptic mass starvation sets in?

Given that the U.S. and China appear to be turning their secret war mechanisms toward the idea of being the guy who owns all the food when people start to starve, I'm guessing no.

That's one reason why I think I'm actually in favor of the Chinese, and the Dutch, and the Indonesians, and the Kenyans, and pretty much everybody, stealing the U.S.'s top secret corn. Unlike with nuclear weapons, proliferation is the best possible outcome for all of us.
posted by Naberius at 8:41 AM on August 18, 2015 [8 favorites]


So the threat is that China could produce more of its own food, and the US would lose leverage (and big Ag would lose profits)? Call me crazy, but I'd say this is less of a threat than nuclear warheads.

And if nations get to a point where they're competing for survival, they might be more likely to fight over the non-renewable fertilizer resources that our huge crops depend on.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 8:47 AM on August 18, 2015 [4 favorites]


By coincidence, it just so happens I was at the dollar store today (I was buying dollar store things - you know the things you get) and hanging right at the end of the food aisle, was a two by two floor to ceiling display of vacuum sealed corn cobs. They were pretty much these: fresh,clean,tender,natural,pure

Not a very good deal for 1.25 (I'm on to you, Dollarama) plus tax, when the farmer's market down street has cobs for $.75 each.

Shelf stable corn. That corn came across the ocean, to sit among the halloween trinkets and other dollar store ephemera.

Corn up left to you.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 9:52 AM on August 18, 2015


This article is fascinating on a number of levels.

Plant germplasm is particularly vulnerable to this kind of theft because, unlike semen and embryos, seeds remain viable at room temperature. While I'm not a fan of the patentability of plant lines I think it's interesting to see IP law used against the people described in the article, whether or not they were in the service of the Chinese government. I'm also very uncomfortable to see FISA used in this way because I think it's not at all clear that these men were engaged in anything other than corporate espionage, and I'm not sure that FISA is really supposed to apply in that situation.

I also think it's very interesting that China has invested a huge amount of money in agricultural research over the last 20 years with little or nothing to show for it. There are really great Chinese students training at top-flight agricultural universities all over the world, but that's not translating into important discoveries in China itself. I'm sure that there structural reasons for that which I don't know about, but it continues to surprise me. One of China's better-known science "successes" might be Beijing Genomics Institute, but I think they're mostly known for further enriching Illumina and doing sloppy work. I'm told by colleagues, for example, that their draft assembly of the goat genome was laughably poor. Why hasn't this investment paid off? It's certainly a slow process to become a leading player internationally, but in my field I've seen little or no improvement over time.

If, as the author suggests, a new cold war focused on food is developing then perhaps Congress will consider funding agricultural research at a level commensurate with its significance. Years of austerity budgets have severely harmed the Land Grant universities where most agricultural scientists are trained, and there is a growing loss of institutional knowledge as older scientists retire and younger scientists focus increasingly on basic biology rather than applied science because if you want tenure you go where the grant dollars are.

Disclaimer: I am an employee of USDA's Agricultural Research Service.
posted by wintermind at 10:32 AM on August 18, 2015 [10 favorites]


Bacigalupi was right.

Yes, his biopunk work is looking more like a scary near-future reality.


Animal labor stored as potential energy in super springs-as-batteries? No and no. Seriously. Just as animal tissue is an inefficient food source, muscle power is several times worse converting it to work. And then storing it again in a spring? Congratulations, you just threw away like 99% of what you gathered from the sun in the first place; there is no combination of photovoltaic and batteries that wouldn't have a high multiple of stored energy for the same investment. The Windup Girl is a great read and maybe some of its predictive powers were okay but I read that part as being deliberately surreal.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:00 AM on August 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


Definitely read the article, it is very entertaining! Spies with stolen corn! Road trips! There is a movie here.

Wretch729: "The UN says about a third of all food produced is wasted. "

What this is somewhat less clear about is that 1/4 to 1/3 is about your expected in-the-field crop loss due to pests (insects, fungus, raiding raccoons) and weather events. People throw away way too much food, it's true, but the "1/3" figure almost always includes in-field crop loss, and that is a GOOD crop loss ratio.

When pesticides quit working, it will be much closer to its historical level, which is ONE HALF.

the uncomplicated soups of my childhood: "That corn came across the ocean"

Did it? 99% of corn crops are feed corn, not sweet corn. Sweet corn is a specialty crop, I'd be surprised if Chinese growers can make any money on export since it doesn't sell in bulk.

wintermind: " perhaps Congress will consider funding agricultural research at a level commensurate with its significance. Years of austerity budgets have severely harmed the Land Grant universities where most agricultural scientists are trained, and there is a growing loss of institutional knowledge as older scientists retire and younger scientists focus increasingly on basic biology rather than applied science because if you want tenure you go where the grant dollars are."

From your lips to God's ears. Or Congress's. I'll take what I can get.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:18 AM on August 18, 2015 [6 favorites]


This is right out of the first act of Interstellar, what with the new dust bowl leading to frantic attempts to gengineer hardier corn. Dammit, whenever reality resembles Christopher Nolan movies, it's always the lamest bits.
posted by Apocryphon at 11:52 AM on August 18, 2015


Eyebrows McGee - I take your point and I'm certainly no expert but as far as I can tell the UN report mentioned (PDF link to the actual report) is not counting in-field crop loss in the 1/3 estimate, though it does count crop losses to pests/rot during storage and losses during harvesting.

Fig 6 (pg 9) of that report shows that in the developed world the majority of the losses are occurring during the consumption stage, and that's an area where it feels like there would be significant efficiency gains if food scarcity became a more pressing concern.
posted by Wretch729 at 11:53 AM on August 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Malthus was right.

We were able to significantly delay his catastrophe through technology to increase the carrying capacity of the planet, but climate change is very likely going to take a lot of that off the table, dramatically reducing carrying capacity back to something like pre-green revolution levels and the results are going to be hideous.

Naberius

Malthus is, was, and always will wrong.

As it is today and will be in the future, the problems are with distribution and production processes/patterns. People aren't starving today because there just isn't enough food in the world. It's because of the way food is controlled and distributed, and as Wretch729 notes even wasted.

Everyone, everywhere, would have more than enough to eat today if we changed our food system. Everyone, everywhere will have enough to eat tomorrow if we change our food system. The fact that I can walk into a grocery store in the US and walk out with enormous quantities of almost anything, while people in some areas die because they can't afford a cup of rice, is why people starve. What kills people is what we do with the far-more-than-sufficient amount of food we produce.

Malthus needs to stay where he is: dead and buried.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:01 PM on August 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


A few years ago there was an amazing piece which I believe was a New York Times op-ed or it may have been a book review. The thesis was in terms of biomass and total chemical energy flux by far the top species in the Americas is corn. Sort of like we think corn is our instrument but the reality is we are the Corn_God's instrument. When I try and google to find the thing the top result is a student essay farm.

Don't ask what google can do for you but ask what you can do for your google.
posted by bukvich at 12:08 PM on August 18, 2015


I guess my point is that framing this as a scary food scarcity apocalyptic scenario is silly. The world has way more food than it needs; there isn't a scarcity problem just a distribution problem (on preview what Sangermaine just said). This skirmishing between the US and China isn't about preventing future starvation or protecting our food security it's about protecting corporate trade secrets and the economics of the global market for corn.

That doesn't mean it's unimportant; Bacigalupi's Windup Girl dystopia is, if you actually read the stories, based on the idea that corporate warfare escalated to the point of tailored crop diseases getting out of control and effectively making it impossible to grow anything independently from the few agribusinesses with the resources to stay a season or two ahead of the ever-mutating plagues. It's an exaggeration, but one that points to the real problem: unequal distribution systems and regulatory/legislative issues in agriculture.
posted by Wretch729 at 12:10 PM on August 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's because of the way food is controlled and distributed,

Well yeah, but there's never been a frictionless distribution system. That's always going to be one more factor in the overall carrying capacity of the planet.

Also, just as, when information technology greatly reduced the need for people to do menial administrative tasks, we didn't use that to create universal prosperity and one-day work weeks the way period futurists thought. We solved it for a whole lot of people sliding down the drain while the rest worked their asses off and thanked god they weren't in the first group. Similarly, we aren't going to solve distribution problems. We could do that right now without climate change at all if we wanted to. Instead, this article points out that we're going to solve it for massive wealth and power for whoever manages to control of the food supply while everyone else is either beholden to them or starving.
posted by Naberius at 12:59 PM on August 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


Malthus is, was, and always will wrong.

Well, that's settled.
posted by sneebler at 3:02 PM on August 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


So Wretch729 and Sangermaine, all we need is a fair and equitable food distribution system that isn't linked to wealth, land ownership, profit motive, any other economic factor including investment and infrastructure, or for that matter, nationality? Well, I'm not going to disagree with you or anything, but when exactly are you expecting that to happen, and in your vision are global revolution, warfare and massive population upheavals involved in this coming to pass or not? Because as a solution it sort of reminds me the ones put forward here.
posted by George_Spiggott at 3:08 PM on August 18, 2015


Bacigalupi was right.

Yeah, we are definitely going to engineer giant elephants to wind up supertech springs that could launch into orbit by themselves.

There's plenty about the future of both water and food that makes for scary fiction (and non-fiction.) But Bacigalupi's stupid-ass book ain't one of them.
posted by tavella at 3:51 PM on August 18, 2015


There's been a lot of doom and gloom about reduced food production due to climate change around here lately but wouldn't we improve efficiency waaay before the apocalyptic mass starvation sets in? The UN says about a third of all food produced is wasted.

Constant technical improvements (whether in efficiency or distribution) are not laws of nature; the Green Revolution was not an inevitability that sprung forth at the time it did due to some intrinsic property of the universe. We got lucky then; we might not this time.
posted by MikeKD at 3:55 PM on August 18, 2015


bukvich: The thesis was in terms of biomass and total chemical energy flux by far the top species in the Americas is corn. Sort of like we think corn is our instrument but the reality is we are the Corn_God's instrument.

I don't know about an op-ed, but there was a NASA project that used data from satellites to correlate fluorescence with growth and photosynthesis. And the Corn Belt is the most efficient processor of sunlight in the US, possibly the world:
posted by tavella at 4:06 PM on August 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


bukvich, could the corn article you seek be this one by Michael Pollan from the NYT in 2002?

It ends:
One has to wonder whether corn hasn’t at last succeeded in domesticating us.
posted by megafauna at 5:19 PM on August 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


Isn't this basically the B-plot of Jurassic Park, but with corn instead of dinosaurs?

(I suppose a disappointingly high proportion of my lifestyle involves corn instead of dinosaurs.)
posted by Huffy Puffy at 6:35 PM on August 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


megafauna that's it but tavella's link is like a dragon slayer.
posted by bukvich at 7:31 PM on August 18, 2015


Corn... finds a way.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 8:35 PM on August 18, 2015


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