Our World In Lies

[This is a script for my latest video on food supply and billionaire influence on online content about it]

There is an increasing amount of content sponsored by billionaire philanthropies. From small YouTube channels through established media companies. Billionaire funded videos, articles, publications and research are becoming ubiquitous. It’s not the money that worries me. It’s the influence network propped up by connections and cordial relationships between scientists, journalists, media companies, critics and commentators. Parties that should remain critical of each other are now business partners saturating the discourse with positive messaging about their sponsors’ interests.

There is a lot to uncover but today, I’ll only zoom in on a single research publication as a case study of how this web of connections work. It’s a website almost exclusively funded by some of the wealthiest individuals and their organizations. It’s Our World In Data. An open source data based outlet comprised of a team of credible scientists mostly from Oxford University, kickstarted by generous sponsorship from the Gates Foundation and a few other wealthy donors. Our World In Data is on a mission to show how news coverage might skew your perception of reality and that the real data shows a much brighter picture. That despite all the bad news about growing inequality, poverty and hunger, we should all optimistically look forward to a bright future.

They write clear and concise articles about these complex global issues but they rarely provide any of their own data. Most of their work just recycles information from more authoritative international organizations, such as the United Nations or the World Bank.

Yet the power of Our World In Data isn’t in the data itself but in how engaged the publication is in getting their perspective into the mainstream. They are cited in dozens of thousands of articles in mainstream media and their team is eager to provide an expert view on any given topic. The views of this small group of experts is then often uncritically offered as a representation of scientific consensus and as the correct view of reality.

But if you dive deep into the broader academic literature on any one of these stories, you’ll find plenty of contention with their perspectives. The work of Our World In Data has been openly criticized by other scientists multiple times in the past. Today, I’ll show you one such story, a case study in how powerful interest hijacked control of global food supply, and how the ignorance of Our World In Data perspectives exacerbates the injustice caused by the big agrochemical industry. That’s a big claim so please hear it all through the end.

I am not on the billionaire payroll. So I don’t need to worry about biting the hand that feeds me. I am worried about being able to do this thanks to YouTube’s attempted murder of my channel with Patreon barely keeping me on life support. My only hope is that you see enough value in my research that you decide to keep me alive and perhaps even grow.

That’s enough. Let’s take the leap of doubt.

Who feeds the world?

Let’s start with a simple question. Where does most of our food come from? It’s not as settled as you’d think. If agricultural policies of rich countries are any indication, we’d conclude that all of our food comes from these giant industrialized farms. It’s these monoculture fields with GMO crops, chemical pesticides and artificial fertilizers, grazed by giant oil-guzzling combines each replacing dozens of mules.

This is not how most of the world is primarily fed.

Large farms, the size of 200 hectares or more, contribute only about 13% of human food supply as measured in calories. The 1,000-hectare giants only contribute 3%. More than half of global food supply comes from farms of less than 10 hectares in size. The largest single contributor to food security, are the smallest subsistence farms of only two hectares. They produce one third of calories consumed by humans. In many developing regions, that ratio can be 80% or more.

A study by ETC Group goes a step further. They suggest up to 70% of food directly consumed by humans comes from “peasant food webs”. These are networks of small producers, hunters, gatherers, fishermen, foragers or other peasants that may or may not produce their own food.

Much of the peasant food production isn’t picked up by agricultural surveys because many of these non-industrial producers do not participate in global financial markets. Many of them don’t even have a bank account or a business. So unless you actively look these studies up, there is little reason to think small farmers are nothing but inconsequential.

But OWID

That’s nice. But Our World In Data has a different opinion. According to this article from Hannah Ritchie, there is no evidence that smallholder farmers are responsible for 70% of food production. In fact, there are two scientific studies that found it’s only about 30%, so less than half of the original estimate. Ritchie says that relying on small-scale farming is what keeps the country poor. It’s not a pillar to food security as the silly United Nations thinks. Small farmers have a grueling job with poor returns. They are not labor productive. Therefore, they should be phased out in favor of bigger and better farms, with the right kind of technology and innovation. The kind that our biggest sponsor just happens to be heavily invested in but that has nothing to do with it.

Ritchie’s article doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is actively weaponized by fact checkers and commentators to whitewash the record about global food production. In September 2021, an article written by small farmer advocates was submitted to the Guardian. The original submission contained the 70% peasant contribution claim. But it was changed by editors before publishing to alter the claim to only one third. Should it be mentioned that the Guardian section this article was published in is sponsored by OWID’s sugar daddy, the Gates Foundation?

Debunking the debunkers

So what is going on here? Who is right and who is wrong? Well, let’s see. Ritchie authoritatively assumes this position of a fact checker that is debunking a myth, double-tapping a zombie statistic. In her article, Ritchie cites two studies to prove her point. And while both studies claim the smallholder production is closer to 30% than 70%, there are flaws in their methodologies.

Neither of the studies expand their data sets to include the broader peasant food webs. They are debunking a 70% claim about small farmer production. But the ETC Group’s study only attributed 50% of food coming from small farms, not 70%.

Ritchie uses farmer production as a metric for how much food consumed by humans comes from which farm size category. But the ETC Group’s research studied relative human consumption, while  Ritchie is counting smallholder farmer production. These are different metrics that are not proxies for one another. Not all farmer production makes into human consumption and not all food consumption comes from farmer production.

Additionally, one of the ‘debunking’ studies is subject to a heavy geographical bias. It only evaluates 55 countries, most of them European, and systematically excludes almost all of Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific, and only sparsely includes countries from Africa and Latin America. Half of the world’s smallholder farms reside in India and China.

But Ritchie’s article has an implication here. If small farmers matter, then we should change our agricultural policies because subsidizing big farms is clearly ineffective. But in her short article, there is only space to argue for the opposite. That the food production policies of the rich developed world is the right model that should be adopted by the poor. The problem is that neither of the two studies cited in her article nor her own analysis prove that big farms are better at feeding people than small ones. And we shouldn’t stay confined to just this handful of studies. Let’s broaden our literature to see what other researchers say.

Smallholders importance

There is now a plethora of scientific research studying the small farmer question. They analyze farms from all different angles – size to yield output, labor productivity, profitability, value efficiency… and even though they evaluate different metrics, they still arrive to a few similar conclusions.

A great majority acknowledge the smaller the farm, the better yield it gets and the more people it feeds on less land. Academic research across different countries and regions, looking at small case studies as well as the big picture data sets, has consistently arrived to a similar conclusion. Small farms make more food while needing less land. Even Ritchie acknowledges the good yield of small farmers. For instance, farms of up to 10 hectares produce 55% of food supply on 40% of land. Large farms supply 13% of food on 28% of agricultural land. Why is that?

Researchers looking at profitability and efficiency metrics usually find that the bigger the farm, the more profitable and less labor intensive it gets. They are far more labor productive – they generate more revenue and profit using less human labor – but their returns diminish with scale. Small farms have better yields on less land because they often employ more human labor, mostly from their own families and they make the most out of every square inch of their land.

What helps big farms generate more revenue, is also that they are not interested in feeding people. They can make much more money out of biofuels, fiber, cosmetics and livestock feed than actually producing food for direct human consumption. So that’s what most of this produce goes to. In the United States, for instance, only 27% of calories produced by farms directly feed people. In India, that number is 89%.

Reports from international organizations state that global food security is dependent on small farmer production. Some estimate that about 90% of farms around the world are 2.2 hectares in size on average. They are closer to their communities and provide income to rural regions. Small farms are more local and can deliver food more directly and immediately than centralized production centers. On the other hand, dependence on large farms is incredibly wasteful. Industrialized farms regularly oversaturate global markets with surplus much of which ends up on a landfill. In fact, 40% of all food is wasted, with more than 15% of the waste happening before the food even leaves the farms. One of the articles cited by Ritchie even shows that food waste is growing with farm size.

Fuck small farmers

Our World In Data doesn’t exist to just correct the record and leave it there. Their data analysis exists to prescribe policy. Ritchie’s article very boldly and very concisely affirms that small farms should be phased out in favor of big ones. That this is a trend that needs to be followed. But this is not a trend that occurred naturally. As if the spirit of competition slowly weeded out losers from winners.

The official policy to fuck small farmers has been lobbied for since at least the middle of the last century.

Modern agriculture is rigged against small and independent farmers in every part of the world. The most powerful players –  Western Europe, the United States, OECD producers… use trade deals, World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization to aggressively push their business model on everyone. This model surrenders all food security to a few giant production centers in a handful of countries whose governments subsidize big farms to lower their prices and incentivize foreign exports. Thanks to these subsidies, the giant industrialized farms sell their produce well below their market value, which causes small farmers to lose income and local economies to lose domestic production.All of this must go on under a strict patent regime, where participating governments have to uncompromisingly pursue the same policy of prosecuting infringementand incentivizing foreign trade.

The agrochemical lobby has played a major role in pursuing this policy for decades. They have successfully introduced changes to patent laws that gradually expanded protections to include genetic research and agricultural products. Today, their lobby is being assisted by billionaire philanthropies, such as the Gates Foundation. Gates’s charity has poured millions into advocacy for technologies and innovations spawned by the agro-chemical giants. Gates’ powerful grant-making machine doesn’t just donate to charities, but also to for-profit businesses such as media companies. They rarely turn down the offer and happily make uncritical content about the interests in which Gates happens to hold major investments in. These outlets often talk about technologies and innovations as solutions to our problems, but they rarely if ever critique the model under which these technologies are supposed to be introduced.

Proprietary seed

That’s the biggest problem I have with this white savior complex. It’s that their model venerates insane ideas and it’s not even remotely considered that they might be a part of the problem.

Industrialized farming is dependent on this idea that seed should be a patentable product, heavily guarded by intellectual property laws. That means farmers are no longer allowed to save seed they purchase from the big agro. They have to, by contract, repurchase a new batch of seeds every year.

The patented seeds are now part of a platform. They’ve been genetically engineered to resist only one kind of herbicide. And they just happen to sell that herbicide. And you wondered where Apple got their walled garden idea from.

Oh, but this patent system is justified. Because now big chemical companies have incentives to invest in food products and solve world hunger. But they don’t invest in products to eradicate hunger. They invest in seed hybrids that lose yield potential and vigor every subsequent harvest, thus forcing farmers to come back for a new stock of commercial seed. Even better, they developed so called terminator technology that makes seeds incapable of reproducing. A final solution to the patent infringement question. Nothing could ever go wrong with that.

That’s where most of this private research and development funding goes to. In contrast, when a public institution does research, they make a variety that is open-pollinated, mass produce it and cheaply distribute it. But at least the corporations don’t a point a gun to your head.

Governments are bad and all, but at least they used to breed seed and give it out to their farmers for free. The idea was to decentralize food production and build up resilient genetic diversity in case of future calamities.

Diversity loss

We don’t have any more diversity. Industrialized food chains and the patent regime have killed it.

In just 50 years since the big agro has taken over, the world has lost three quarters of plant genetic diversity. We have lost half of domestic animal breeds and more than 90% of crop varieties. Today, 60% of dietary energy is derived from just three crops – rice, maize and wheat

But moar big

Oh, but what am I talking about? There is now more people overfed than there are people underfed. That’s something only an out of touch billionaire would say.

Yeah, but that’s not a good thing. Our food is less nutritious and more caloric. The big agro doesn’t care so they mass produce corn and wheat and lo and behold, that becomes the major staple of Western diet. Our fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be and industralized food production is responsible for that – the high-yield varieties in monocultural fields quickly depleted natural soil nutrients. That problem was fixed by artificial fertilizers, but that only came at a price of more soil degradation. Introduction of pesticides only further exacerbated the problem by polluting our soils and waters. The super- hyper- labor productive tilling and harvesting methods of big farms have completely destroyed soil health.  As a result, human-induced soil degradation now affects 35% of agricultural land.

But, what am I talking about? Hunger and poverty have been on the decline for decades. Just look at this graph. Global food production outpacing population since at least the 1960s. If anything, the green revolution, that’s what they call this industrialization of agriculture, has been nothing but an absolute win.

Sure, but here is another graph that illustrates this point. Hunger now affects almost 800 million people. A number that has been increasing for the better part of the last decade. It’s not just in absolute amounts, the proportions have increased too. On top of that, additional 2.4 billion people are food insecure, that’s a third of the global population that doesn’t get adequate food supply.

This graph perfectly illustrates the point global food experts have been making for decades. Industrialized food chains are not resilient. They are vulnerable to shocks, disasters, logistical failures. The COVID19 pandemic as well as the war in Ukraine have brought hundreds of millions of people into the misery of hunger and poverty. Not mainly in Ukraine. But in far away places on the other side of the planet. And there have been conflicts and disasters happening all over the world that keep adding to this statistic.

We have centralized our food systems and locked our dependence on this most basic need on a handful of concentrated production centers.  Only five countries today account for 90% percent of global soybean and two thirds of wheat and beef exports.The proprietary restrictions forbid farmers from decentralizing production and developing countries are threatened by sanctions if they fail to enforce WTO rules. So industrialized agriculture can’t adapt to a crisis quickly enough, and traditional farmers are prevented from doing anything about it.

You won’t find any of these problems considered in Ritchie’s article. The only concern is labor productivity, growth and farm size. There is no mention of diversity or how destructive industrialized farming is to the environment. There is no talk of sustainability or resilience. No mention of the subsidy system undermining small farmers. The only solution is more big farms less small farms.

Solutions

We don’t need to wait for billionaires to solve our problems. We have them already. The UN has this great piece on ending all forms of malnutrition by 2030. It’s a policy prescription for world governments, but our governments won’t do shit unless their people force them to. And there is a lot you and I can do about it.

Decentralize food systems.

The UN calls for more investment in rural infrastructure. What you can do is support local and small farmers. The smaller the better. Support organic farms too, not because their food is healthier or better, but because they are not bound by the perverted patent regime of proprietary GMO traits. Big farms and supermarket chains might sell cheaper food but only at the tax payers’ expense. It’s time we start being political about this.

Promote genetic diversity

We need to promote genetic diversity of seeds. This can be done a lot more locally than you think. Grow and breed as much as you can. Every small patch counts. Even if you live in an apartment. Donate, barter and trade your seeds with others or with gene banks and seed vaults.

Support insects

Protect insects above all. They are our best pollinators and without them, the whole system will collapse. Plant flowers, do not use pesticides and stop using insect repellents in your garden. Replace your lawn for a garden of flowers or just let it turn into a meadow. Build a bug hotel for the native species in your area. These can be made to look very nice if you put time into it.

Become political on the most local level all the way up to the national. There are likely local conservationist groups you can join and express your voice with your representatives regarding local farming and infrastructure projects.

There is this great report by FAO on the state of world hunger and food systems. It outlines why and how hunger and food production affect different regions. What I’ve found consistently in the report was that redistribution efforts work best to elevate people out of poverty and eliminate hunger. Not even economic growth by itself was able to offset challenges to food access. Let’s start calling for labor and social protections, food distribution, public investment and similar policies that work. And vote!

The UN calls for elimination of all export subsidies and other distortions to agricultural markets. Rich countries have been trading unfairly with the developing world for decades. But we would all benefit from more equality. Go out there and use your right to freedom of expression. And vote!

Agriculture is a complex system and volatility is inevitable. But we can limit the pain by preparing. Build food reserves, not just for yourself, but do it with your community, town, region, state… Talk to your locals about it. Initiate ballots. And vote!

And last, feel free to steal this video and post it wherever you want. Just not on YouTube, unless you translate it, and do not pretend to be me. That’s all. This is the kind of content hardly to get sponsored by anyone. YouTube has done a great job killing this channel, so Patreon is my only life support at this point. But you can change that. I know my content can be depressing, but we need to a find a way to resist this. All I ask, is that you support me by whatever means you can. Join my Patreon, share my content and spread the word. On Patreon support me for long as you can. You’ll get access to tons of additional content from me in return. Thank you.