A seed of hope: corn genome sequenced

This just came in my inbox.  Let's hope they can do something good with it!

National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22230
"Where Discoveries Begin"

For Immediate Release
11/19/2009

Media Contacts:    Lily Whiteman, National Science Foundation, (703) 292-8310,  lwhitema@nsf.gov
     Jennifer Martin, U.S. Department of Agriculture, (202) 720-8188,  jmartin@nifa.usda.gov
     Caroline Arbanas, Washington University School of Medicine, (314) 286-0109,  arbanasc@msnotes.wustl.edu

KERNELS OF TRUTH: RESEARCHERS SEQUENCE THE MAIZE (CORN) GENOME
New, high-quality sequence will advance basic and applied research

Sequence of maize genome.
Credit: Image courtesty of Science/AAAS.
Credit and Larger Version
The completion of a high-quality sequence of the maize (corn) genome is announced in the cover story of the November 20, 2009, issue of Science.

This new genome sequence reports the sequence of genes in maize and provides a detailed physical map of the maize genome. This map identifies the order in which genes are located along each of maize's 10 chromosomes and the physical distances between those genes.

Additional information provided by the new maize genome sequence includes the locations on chromosomes of interesting, repeated sections of DNA (called centromeres) that are responsible for the faithful inheritance of those chromosomes by daughter cells during cell division.

This new genome sequence represents a major watershed in genetics because it promises to: 1) advance basic research of maize and other grains and 2) help scientists and breeders improve maize crops, which are economically important and serve as globally important sources of food, fuel and fiber. Resulting improved strains of maize may, for example, produce larger yields, show resistance to disease, offer efficiencies in nitrogen use that would enable farmers to reduce applications of costly, polluting fertilizers, and tolerate changes in rainfall or temperature accompanying climate change.

The research team and its funding

The new maize sequence was produced by a consortium of researchers that was led by the Genome Sequencing Center (GSC) at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and included the University of Arizona, Iowa State University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. This sequencing project was part of a joint Department of Energy/Department of Agriculture (USDA)/ National Science Foundation (NSF) effort that was funded by NSF under the auspices of the National Plant Genome Initiative (NPGI).

The NPGI, which began in 1998, is an ongoing effort to understand the structure and function of all plant genes at levels from the molecular and organismal to interactions within ecosystems. The NPGI focuses on plants of economic importance and plant processes of potential economic value.

"Production of a high quality maize genome sequence was a high priority for the NPGI from the beginning," said Jane Silverthorne of NSF. "This accomplishment builds on technological advances and basic research into maize biology that were essential to the design of the most cost-effective strategy to assemble and anchor the genes onto the genetic and physical maps."

Real-world applications

Accompanying the announcement of the new maize genome sequence in the November 20, 2009 issue of Science is a "Perspective" on the sequence. The same Science issue also announces the results of two other NPGI-funded studies that were enabled by the new maize sequence. One of these studies produced a so-called HapMap of the maize genome, which describes the genetic differences between various strains of maize that are currently bred around the world. This resource will help researchers identify the genes that control various maize traits. The HapMap was produced by a team led by Edward S. Buckler of the USDA and Cornell University and Doreen H. Ware of the USDA and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

The other NPGI-funded study that also appears in the November 20, 2009 issue of Science builds on the new maize genome sequence by identifying a surprisingly widespread biological process that determines the level of expression of certain genes present in hybrid strains of maize. This study was produced by a team led by Patrick S. Schnable of Iowa State University.

"Sequencing the corn genome provides scientists with new information and tools to access the vast array of genes available to improve corn," said Kay Simmons of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service. "This new sequence information can be exploited to translate basic discoveries to the field for the benefit of corn growers, the corn industry, and consumers."

Rick Wilson, lead investigator and director of the GSC, adds: "The new maize sequence will pave the way for the development of maize breeding programs that will improve the quality and quantity of maize crops, and thereby benefit people living throughout the world."

The November 20, 2009, issue of Science also reports on the sequencing by a Mexican consortium led by Luis Herrera-Estella of CINVESTAV, Irapuato, Mexico of the popcorn variety Palomero toluqueño, which is bred in central Mexico. Comparisons between Palomero toluqueño and the NSF-funded genome sequence, which is from a maize strain that is inbred in mid-western regions of the U.S., reveals important clues about how maize has been domesticated over the last 10,000 years and highlights the importance of biodiversity.

Significance of sequence for research

This new maize sequence provides significant refinements over the draft sequence that was announced in February 2008. These refinements include the elimination of redundancy and improvements in the ordering and orientation of chromosomal segments.

Because maize has served as a model plant for basic genetics research for the last 100 years, the completion of its genome sequence has important implications for basic research--as already evidenced by the immediate publication of the two companion papers in Science. In addition, the November 20, 2009 issue of PLoS Genetics features an editorial on the new maize sequence and ten more companion studies--each of which either provides background information on the development of the maize sequence or uses the new maize sequence to produce additional insights into maize genetics. In addition to advancing research on maize, the maize genome sequence is also expected to advance other cereal genome sequencing projects, such as those for wheat and barley.

A daunting task

The maize sequencing project, which was initiated in 2005, is a notable achievement because it was completely quickly and because the maize genome is among the most challenging genomes sequenced to date. The complexity of the maize genome is partly due to its size: with 2.5 billion base pairs covering ten chromosomes, the maize genome is almost as big as the human genome. "The maize genome is the largest plant genome sequenced to date," says Wilson.

The complexity of the maize genome is also partly due to the fact that about 85 percent of its DNA is composed of transposable elements--segments of DNA that can move between locations. "Transposable elements are found in all organisms, but were discovered in maize by Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock more than 60 years ago," said Rob Martienssen of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "It is a remarkable achievement to be able to visualize these elements in such detail in the genome sequence."

An easy-to-understand explanation of McClintock's discovery and a photo of an ear of corn that was grown by McClintock at Cold Spring Harbor in 1949 are included in an eye-catching poster about maize genetics that accompanies the Science paper announcing the new maize genome.

via Mark Thoma, Jeffrey Sachs worries about transgressing our planet's boundaries

I'd really like to read the whole thing, but I don't have a subscription to Scientific American.  Maybe I'll buy a copy of the magazine at the airport tonight and read it on the way to DC.

Here's Thoma's snippet:

Transgressing Planetary Boundaries, by Jeff Sachs, Scientific American: We are eating ourselves out of house and home. ... The green revolution that made grain production soar gave humanity some breathing space, but the continuing rise in population and demand for meat production is exhausting that buffer. ...

Food production accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions... Through the clearing of forestland, food production is also responsible for much of the loss of biodiversity. Chemical fertilizers cause massive depositions of nitrogen and phosphorus, which now destroy estuaries in hundreds of river systems and threaten ocean chemistry. Roughly 70 percent of worldwide water use goes to food production, which is implicated in groundwater depletion and ecologically destructive freshwater consumption from California to the Indo-Gangetic Plain to Central Asia to northern China.

The green revolution, in short, has not negated the dangerous side effects of a burgeoning human population, which are bound to increase as the population exceeds seven billion around 2012 and continues to grow as forecast toward nine billion by 2046. ...

It is not enough to produce more food; we must also simultaneously stabilize the global population and reduce the ecological consequences of food production—a triple challenge. A rapid voluntary reduction in fertility rates in the poor countries, brought about by more access to family planning, higher child survival and education for girls, could stabilize the population at around eight billion by 2050.

Payments to poor communities to resist deforestation could save species habitats. No-till farming and other methods can preserve soils and biodiversity. More efficient fertilizer use can reduce the transport of excessive nitrogen and phosphorus. Better irrigation and seed varieties can conserve water and reduce other ecological pressures. And a diet shifted away from eating beef would conserve ecosystems while improving human health.

Those changes will require a tremendous public-private effort that is yet to be mobilized. ... The window of opportunity to achieve sustainable development is closing.

Many in my business casually (and vehemently) dismiss this kind of talk as "MalTHusian," with heavy accent the "th" combined with an air of disgust.

This bothers me for a few reasons.  First, Malthus was brilliant and his simple and elegant model did a fantastic job of describing the history of the world up until the industrial revolution (see Delong on Clark, for example). It just isn't right to dis Malthus given his insights were so good and so important, at least historically speaking.

Second, today's dismal story is far different from Malthus.  Today's constraints are less about technology and an inability to control ourselves reproductively speaking.  Rather, today's constraints are political and institutional: poor governance and big-time externalities.  Population is one symptom of the problem, but it isn't the root source of the problem. And technological change, while rapid, may not be enough to compensate for poor governance and big-time externalites.  If, however, we can deal with root problems utopia is ours.  Problem is, that's a BIG if.


Thirdly, these problems are very real.  A billion people live in Malthusian-like misery, another couple billion are very close to it, so to be casually dismissive is as thoughtless as it callous.

Solutions will difficult to figure out and we need to be wary of unintended consequences of bad policies with good intentions. But we need to face these problems, squarely and seriously.

Questions from China about the Food Summit

A reporter (Xu Jingjing) from China's Life Week magazine writes with questions about the FAO's food summit.  Here are the questions and my answers:

1.        Do you think it is a productive summit? If it is, what are the most important outcomes? If it’s not, why this happens?

I think it's great that the summit took place.  And there may be some productive results from it. But I'm an academic and am not very connected to international political events like this one.  It's hard for me to judge whether it is a success, or even how to measure the success of such events.

2.        Some comment said world leaders at the food summit on Monday rallied around a new strategy to fight global hunger and help poor countries feed themselves. Is it a substantial progress or just on rhetoric?

I think I'll defer to my answer to question 1.  It's often hard for me to discern the difference between rhetoric and substance.  Maybe in 10 years I'll be able to look back and see more clearly what was successful about the summit and what wasn't successful.

3.        FAO had hoped that leaders would commit to raising the percentage of official aid spent on agriculture to 17 percent -- back to the 1980 level -- from 5 percent now. That would amount to roughly $44 billion annually. But it failed. Why the percentage of official aid spent on agriculture has been decreasing in the past 30 years?

I don't know all the causes for the decline.  Geopolitics and moneyed interests run events like these. 

One reason could be that, at least to the pocketbooks and in the minds of people in rich countries, agriculture is a small issue.  Few in developed nations really think about the price of rice or about agricultural production systems.  At least not on a regular basis--staple food prices are so small relative to our incomes that it's simply trivial.  Obviously that's not true for the poorest 3 billion people in the world.  Historically basic commodity prices were a larger share of all our incomes so maybe everyone cared about it more.

While $44 billion from all OECD countries combined is not that much, all of these countries are still suffering from the worldwide recession.  And most have large budget deficits.  Leaders of these countries probably don't want to be susceptible to claims that they are favoring the poor in foreign countries over the poor in their own countries.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture claims 14 percent of the U.S. population is "food insecure,"  a term that does not imply malnutrition or hunger approaching that of the world's hungriest billion.  Nevertheless, statistics like these make it more politically challenging for leaders of OECD to contribute more resources to the poor in foreign countries.

Some may also be skeptical about the ultimate effectiveness of this kind of aid.  Many believe a large portion of foreign aid goes to corrupt bureaucrats rather than to poor local farmers.

4.        Earlier this year the International Food Policy Research Institute said that since 2006 15-20 million hectares of land in poor countries had been sold or were under negotiations for sale to foreign buyers. How did this situation deepen the food crisis? The FAO plans to draw up guidelines to try to safeguard the sometimes conflicting interests of local farmers and investors for the governance of land. In your opinion how to solve this problem?

I think it is hard to say whether this will turn out to be a positive trend or a negative one.  A reasonable comparison might be to U.S. manufacturing in China, which has probably helped to spur growth there and lower prices of manufactured goods here in the U.S.--overall a good thing, in my view.  Similarly, foreign investors may be able to bring in modern farming practices and inputs and thereby better manage the land and achieve higher yields and production efficiency in poor countries.  The downside is that it could relegate farmers in poor countries to a modern form of serfdom. 

It seems to me poor countries, perhaps working with FAO or other NGOs, should work with local governments and poor farmers to develop contracts with investors that would allow the local farmers to maintain some ownership of the land and profits from farming operations.  This could be done with creative lease agreements that might include revenue-sharing arrangements with local farmers.  If local interests retain some rights to their land it would help mitigate the downside and increase the upside to these kinds of arrangements. 

The big problem is when poor farmers are simply pushed off their land without compensation.

5.        FAO hoped countries would adopt 2025 as a deadline to eradicate hunger. But the declaration instead focused on a pledge set nine years ago to halve the number of hungry people by 2015. Do you think whether the target can be achieved? Why?

It's nice to have a goal.  But without a clear idea about how to achieve the goal it is largely symbolic.  This is a big and very complex problem and I don't think anyone really knows how to solve it, so I'd say the goal was largely symbolic. 

6.        Seeking to drum up private sector support, FAO brought together leading food and agribusiness companies, including Nestle, Unilever and Cargill, for a two-day meeting last week. How do you think about this approach to fight against hunger?

I don't see a fundamental problem with it.  These companies are mainly interested in earning profits.  But part of their profit model involves maintaining a good public image. In many cases they might be willing to provide aid to the extent that it bolsters their image.  They are also acutely aware of the larger economic forces at stake and I suspect they will, in one way or another, make those forces clear to those trying to fight hunger.

7.        Since last year's record levels, the prices of staple commodities like rice, corn and wheat have fallen. In your opinion, will the further rises are inevitable? Why?

Right now I'm not very optimistic: I think prices will rise a lot further.  Prices fell largely because of the near collapse of the world economy, and with it, demand for commodities.  As worldwide growth and demand is restored, I think prices will rise again. 

For prices to fall over the long run we need crop yields to grow faster than demand.  Demand will grow rapidly with population and particularly with rapid income growth in places like China and India.   Ethanol subsidies--which divert about a third of the U.S. corn crop (enough to feed hundreds of millions)--are also growing demand.  My research with Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University estimates that rice, corn, soybean, and wheat prices are about 30 percent higher due U.S. ethanol subsidies.  This has surely contributed to the hunger problem.

On the supply side I believe water shortages and climate change pose serious obstacles to yield growth.  The hope is that the climate scientists are all wrong (which seems unlikely) or that genetically modified crops will accelerate yield growth. 

8.        In your opinion what are the most critical problems needed to be solved to fight against hunger?

In my view the most critical problems are extreme poverty and rapid growth of income inequality, both within and across nations.

A strange and tragic reality is that extreme poverty and food shortages are exacerbated by a large portion of the world rapidly becoming richer and climbing out of poverty while another portion of world languishes.  Continued growth in the OECD countries, and rapidly emerging growth in China and India,  greatly increase demand for the world's food resources. 

There is nothing wrong with growth.  But rapidly growing demand--particularly for meat and animal-based food products--may well cause demand for staple grains to grow faster than supply, leading to price increases.  If prices rise too much, then the remaining poor simply cannot afford to survive and food aid becomes very difficult to provide.

If income growth were more equal, things would be different.  While food prices would be a lot higher, hunger, famine and nutrition-related diseases would not be the problems they are today, because all would be able to afford the higher prices.  Instead, higher prices would cause substitution away from foods that are more resource intensive (like meat and animal products) and toward consumption of less resource-intensive foods, like staple grains, beans, and vegetables.  Wealthier nations like the U.S., which suffers from obesity-related problems stemming from overindulgence in meat and other resource-intensive food, would likely see health benefits from this kind of substitution.

It's going to be hard to solve the big and complex problems of extreme poverty and income inequality.  I don't pretend to know the answers.  I expect there are many answers that vary widely by location.

Instead, and looking at the more immediate future, I would suggest smaller, more targeted policies like:

(1) Stopping ethanol subsidies.

(2) Increasing public funding for organizations like CIMMYT the IRRI and funding of basic crop sciences at research universities and experiment stations.

(3) Taxing meat.

I think these three simple policies would probably reduce the number of hungry and undernourished by hundreds of millions and would have few negative unintended consequences.  But they would likely face large political headwinds, too.

How are we going to feed the world?

I'm trying out a new trick: embedding power point slides into a blog post.

These are for today's panel discussion for International Education Week.  The topic: 

"Genetically modified food crops: a solution to the global food crisis?"

2- 3:30 PM, Talley North Galler

Here are my slides:

Is dynamic inconsistency really the problem with inflation targeting?

Okay, I should really heed Brad Delong's two rules regarding Paul Krugman:

1. Remember that Paul Krugman is right.
2. If your analysis leads you to conclude that Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to rule #1.

But I've already stepped out of my field and way beyond where I have any business spouting off about what the Fed should do.  Maybe I'm just looking for someone to present a better argument for why inflation targeting is infeasible.

Besides, I'm actually pitting Krugman against Krugman, since what I know about inflation targeting I learned from reading the one and only PK

So the comments to my earlier post argue that dynamic inconsistency is the reason inflation targeting won't work.  I understand dynamic consistency, backward induction, and all that.  Or at least I hope I do, given I teach those fundamentals to each crop of 25 PhDs each year during their second semester of micro theory.

For context, here is Krugman's argument against inflation targeting, despite it being "the first-best solution" to our economic malaise:

But the key thing to recognize about this answer is that it’s all about expectations — the central bank only has traction over expected inflation to the extent that it can convince people that it will deliver that inflation after the liquidity trap is over. So to make this policy work you have to (i) convince current policymakers that it’s the right answer (ii) Make that argument persuasive enough that it will guide the actions of future policymakers (iii) Convince investors, consumers, and firms that you have in fact achieved (i) and (ii).

In reality, we haven’t even gotten anywhere near (i): the conventional wisdom is still that any rise in expected inflation above 2 percent is a bad thing, when it’s actually good.

The crux is really (ii), since Bernanke is convinced (inflation targeting has been his mantra forever) and markets will follow suit soon enough if the policy is made clear and the Fed follows the announcement with appropriate positions in the bond market.  Indeed, I believe this may even be the current de facto strategy of the Fed, but it's not the announced strategy, and I think that weakens its effectiveness. 

Anyhow, in the comments to my earlier post Workhorse writes:

It is optimal for a central bank to promise a future higher inflation. But after the recession is over (with higher expected inflation), it is no longer optimal to do so - the central bank (CB) happily goes back to be an inflation fighter. Markets rationally expect this and thus nobody believes the CB's promise (believe me, the markets are to some extent rational!).

I find this argument strange.  If the policy works then it seems the Fed will have plenty incentive to follow through with its inflation commitment so it will have the power to use the same tool in the next crisis.  Indeed, this is exactly the same incentive the keeps the Fed inflation fighting in the first place.

A popular guy, tightening does not make a Central Banker (Yoda speak).

Indeed, most worry about the Fed being too loose, hence their independence.

Finally, I think it is important to note, as Krugman does today, that modest inflation is no Road to Serfdom.  We talking a couple years at 3-5%, with a subsequent tightening announced well in advance.  Forward-looking commitments may even help to soften any recession such eventual tightening might induce.

Anyway, I really don't see how what's optimal for the Fed to commit to today won't be optimal for the Fed to follow through with tomorrow.  Unless, of course, events change.  And that wouldn't violate the commitment either, because changing policy in response to new information is not the same as reneging on a prior commitment under baseline expectations.

If inflation targeting is the first-best policy (and from what I've seen and read, I think it is) then that's what the most influential economists should be saying, loudly and often.

Mainly I'm just puzzled why the higher minds haven't been taking this stand.  My only guess is that Bernanke and Co are worried about diplomacy with China.  Hence Bernanke's double talk today about a "strong dollar" coupled with strong indications that he will keep the liquidity pedal the metal for a very, very long time.  Maybe Bernanke, being a government bureaucrat and all, needs to do the double talk.

Krugman doesn't.

A thoughtful critique of Gladwell (and by implication, other populist extremes)

Here Steven Pinker critiques Malcom Gladwell, nominally about his latest book What the Dog Saw And Other Adventures, but it is actually much broader than that.

I don't have much to say about it.  Mainly I just wanted to save the link.

But the reason I think this is important, and something I'd like to save, is that the subtle devices used by Gladwell, like the "Straw We" and perverse manipulation of uncertainties, are not unique to his writing.  These devices are ubiquitous.  These devices exploit our (a "Straw Our"?) collective discomfort with ambiguity.

Update: Pinker smackdown alert (and, by implication, smackdown of me):  Gladwell's response to Pinker:

     In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published the Journal of Productivity Analysis,  analyze forty years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance—in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs—they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

       I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. Pinker’s second source was a blog post, based on four years of data, written by someone who runs a pre-employment testing company, who also failed to appreciate—as far as I can tell (the key part of the blog post is only a paragraph long)—the distinction between aggregate and per-play performance. Pinker’s third source was an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, prompted by my essay, that made an argument partly based on a link to a blog called “Niners Nation." I have enormous respect for Professor Pinker, and his description of me as “minor genius” made even my mother blush. But maybe on the question of subjects like quarterbacks, we should agree that our differences owe less to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google.

I promise to read Pinker with more skepticism.  But I wish Gladwell had fleshed this out a bit more, perhaps with links to the questionable sources.

Krugman: Inflation targeting is the first best solution

So now Krugman says inflation targeting is the first-best solution to our economic problems. This is consistent with everything he wrote about Japan over a decade ago, and also consistent with a wide majority of non-crazy macro economists across the political spectrum.

So why on earth has he not said this a lot more starting a long time ago? (Note that I've asked this question several times before--here are a couple early examples: 1, 2)  Krugman blames stupid economics.  He just sees misguided conventional wisdom against inflation as too much to overcome.

Huh?  Krugman--the man who boldly, clearly, and effectively challenges establishment views on EVERYTHING--gets weak knees when it comes to inflation targeting?

I see and get that inflation is a four-letter word among some crazy economists and much of the media.  But that's exactly why Krugman should be writing about it. Bernanke must have sympathy for this this view.  After all, it is what he spent much of his academic career advocating.  Conservative economists Ken Rogoff and perhaps Greg Mankiw would even back him, and many others on both sides of the political fence.

I'm annoyed because I think Krugman is in a unique position to raise the level of debate.  If he wrote about inflation targeting a lot, others would have to agree with him or not.  And those who didn't eventually would have had to back up their positions.  If Krugman started boldly with this line of attack a year ago I think there's a chance we'd be in a better place right now.

Incidentally,  my guess for what's restraining Bernanke, Geithner and others from more talk of inflation targeting is diplomacy with China, who would probably be unhappy if we were to target 3-5 percent inflation rather than 2 percent for the next five years or so.

Update:  Krugman and others have said that the key challenge is technical feasibility, not political feasibility.  They say the problem is developing credible expectations for future inflation. (See comments.)

I don't get that argument.  I think that if Bernanke laid out a clear 5-year plan for inflation, first increasing and then decreasing target inflation, markets would respond big time. He could further enforce those expectations through purchases of and sales of treasury bills, especially the inflation-indexed variety.

One argument against this is that it takes too many purchases from the Fed to influence long-term rates enough.  But I think those arguments were based on traditional Treasury bills, not inflation indexed bonds.  The inflation indexed bond market is a lot thinner and would be easier to influence. And despite possible claims of "cheap talk", I think a clear announcement by the Fed of targets going forward would further increase the Fed's leverage.

Risky? Maybe. But I think its potential benefits far outweigh its expected costs.  And unlike the other "second best" alternatives, it doesn't need to pass Congress.

Can biotechnology help fight world hunger?

I just found the transcript to forum from over nine years ago.  This seems like good reading in preparation for the panel discussion next week.  It's also good reading for anyone else who may be interested in the broader topic.

Here's the lineup:

CONGRESSIONAL HUNGER CENTER BIOTECH BRIEFING

Congressional Hunger Center
The Gold Room, 2168 Rayburn House Office Building, Capitol Hill
June 29, 2000 9am-12pm

For pdf version, click here.

09:00 - 09:30	Introduction: Rev. David Beckmann, Moderator President, Bread for the World, Congressional Hunger Center Board Member
	Opening Remarks:
	Rep. Tony Hall
	Sen. Richard Lugar
	Rep. Robert Ehrlich, Jr.
	Rep. Dennis Kucinich
09:30 - 10:20	Presenters (Each presenter will speak for 10 minutes):
	Dr. Martina McGloughlin, Professor, University of California at Davis
	Dr. Vandana Shiva, Director, Foundation for Science, Tech, and Natural Resources
	Dr. C.S. Prakash, Professor, Tuskegee University
	Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, Reader in Biology, Open University, United Kingdom
10:20 - 10:30	Questions and Answers Session I
10:30 - 11.40	Challengers:
	Ms. Therese St. Peter, Specialist, Zeneca Ag Products, Inc.
	Dr. Michael Hansen, Research Associate, Consumers Union Policy Institute
	Dr. Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Director, International Food Policy Research Institute
	Dr. Arthur Getz, Specialist, World Resources Institute
	Dr. Peggy Lemaux, Professor, University of California at Berkeley
	Mr. Michael Pollan, Contributing Writer, New York Times
11.40 - 11.50	Questions and Answers Session II
11:50 - 12:00	Concluding Remarks: Rev. David Beckmann

Here's a link to the whole transcript.

Update:  Here's more good background reading:  Lester Brown writing for Scientific American frames the essential issues very well. I'm much more wary of Brown's policy prescriptions, his "Plan B."  Some of his suggestions could make matters worse.  It's strange to me that he can outline the fundamental problems so clearly but not suggest policy solutions that target the root source of those problems.

Evolution of heat tolerance in corn: implications for climate change

I've just finished my lastest paper with Wolfram Schlenker.  It will be a chapter in a book "Climate Change: Past and Present" that will be published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.  Here's a link to the draft we're shipping off, and the abstract is below.

We present new evidence on the relationship between weather and corn yields in Indiana between 1901 and 2005, extending earlier results for corn from 1950-2005. Indiana, a major corn-producing state has the best coverage of daily weather records for the early half of the 20th century. The effects of precipitation and extreme heat are shown to evolve over time as new seed varieties, supplemental irrigation systems and management practices are introduced. In particular, we find the detrimental effects of either too much or too little precipitation seems to have steadily diminished over time. In contrast, the evolution of tolerance to extreme heat is highly nonlinear, growing with the adoption of double-cross hybrid corn in the 1940’s, peaking around 1960, and then declined sharply as single-cross hybrids came online. Corn in Indiana is most sensitive to extreme temperatures at the end of our sample. Since climate change models predict an increase in extreme temperatures, the big question is whether the next breeding cycles can increase both average yields and heat tolerance simultaneously as in the period 1940-1960, or whether an continued increase in average yields can only be achieved at the expense of more sensitivity to extreme heat as in the period from 1960 onwards. Finally, we discuss these impacts in relation to possible distortionary effects of current agricultural subsidies in the United States.

We take a few digs at Michael Pollan in the later part of the paper.  Like I've said before, I like Pollan's books and highly recommend them.  But he steps in a few places he maybe shouldn't and this leads to popular ideas that are badly wrong headed.  In fact, this whole section doesn't really fit with the rest of paper, but we had to include it because of all the suggestions that climate change impacts on corn production were a GOOD thing, since corn is so evil anyway.

Yeah, the meat industry and corn syrup is pretty disgusting.  But no, huge hits to corn yields are unlikely to make us less fat.  It will just make the poorest in the world disappear, and that's definitely not good.

I have a twinge of regret with this paper.  I like the paper a lot and am happy to publish with NBER amid the company of some excellent scholars.  My regret comes from the fact that book chapters count for little at tenure time and think this could have flown higher.  C'est la vie.

Update: Many thanks to Andrew Leonard for summarizing this research on his "How the World Works" blog at Salon.com

Denialism

This new book by Michael Specter is one I think I need to read:

http://www.amazon.com/Denialism-Irrational-Thinking-Scientific-Threatens/dp/1594202303

Here's a short interview with the author at NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120139776

In the interview anyway, Specter touches on some issues I've recently raised on this blog and that I will probably discuss in this upcoming panel discussion:

Genetically modified foods – a solution for the global food crisis?

THE IEW GLOBAL HEALTH PANEL ON TUESDAY NOVEMBER 17TH, FROM 2:00-3:30 PM, THE NORTH GALLERY OF TALLEY STUDENT CENTER (2ND FLOOR)
WILL FEATURE A PANEL DISCUSSION ON A TOPIC OF LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL INTEREST.

WITH CHANGING WEATHER PATTERNS, WATER SCARCITY, AND SOCIO-POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES, WE MAY BE FACING A LOOMING GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS.
WILL GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS BE THE ANSWER?

COME AND JOIN A DISCUSSION WITH:

DR. PEGGY BENTLEY, UNC-CH GLOBAL HEALTH
DR. MICHAEL ROBERTS, NCSU AG & RESOURCE ECONOMICS
DR. DAN ROBISON, NCSU FORESTRY
DR. RONALD WIMBERLEY, NCSU SOCIOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGY
DR. BOB PATTERSON, NSCU CROP SCIENCES
DR. PREMA ARASU, NCSU GLOBAL HEALTH INITIATIVE (MODERATOR)

How raising prices can reduce the cost of conservation

Many don't realize that the U.S. Department of Agriculture governs what is probably the world's largest conservation program: The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).

It's a big deal by at least two measures:  (1) the amount of land, currently about 34 million acres (a little smaller than the size of North Carolina or a little more than 10% of U.S. cultivated cropland); and (2) government expenditures, which are about 1.8 billion a year last time I checked, which swamps any other direct expenditures for the environment that I know of.  It's not all that much less than the total value of SO2 permits, which is about 3.0 billion a year.

Some may say CRP isn't a conservation program, it's just another way to give money to farmers.  That  is probably part of it.  And part of it is to moderate total production and keep commodity prices higher for farmers not participating in CRP. But to me CRP looks a lot more like conservation program today than it did awhile back. 

Acres enrolled were (mostly) planted with crops before they were enrolled in CRP.  Farmers receive annual rental payments from USDA (about $50/acre on average, but it varies widely) in exchange for retiring the cropland and instead planting native grasses, trees, legumes, buffer strips around water ways, and creating wildlife areas.

Like all USDA programs, this program has a lot of complex details.  But there is one detail that bothers me because I'm unsure whether folks at USDA, or even academic agricultural economists, generally understand how important it is.  In short, I think this program could save government expenditures AND buy more conservation services with a relatively small and seemingly innocuous change.

That change would be to INCREASE maximum rental rates in CRP general signups.

Let me explain.  General signups essentially work like an auction.  Offers of land get an environmental score than is combined with a cost score, which depends on how much rent farmers request.  The environmental component and the cost component are combined using a complex formula and all offers are ranked and selected from highest to lowest.

Here's the crux:  all rent requests are constrained by a maximum rental rate, and this rental rate is (supposedly) a guess for the market rent of the parcel.

The problem is that farmers will never submit offers if their true market value is greater than the guess (a crude appraisal of sorts).  This is true regardless of how low that market rate really is or how high the environmental score may be.  If the appraisals are unbiased then setting the maximum rate equal to the appraisal effectively throws out half the land the program is targeting, ultimately making the program much more costly for the government and less environmentally beneficial.

Here are couple pictures to illustrate the issue, one where maximums are set equal to appraisals and one where maximums are set 10% above appraisals.  In both cases I'm assuming the farmer's true opportunity cost is typically 10% above or below the appraisal (a coefficient of variation of 10%, the proportional error begin normally distributed).

In the first graph maximums are set equal to the appraisals and this effectively excludes about half the potential land (the red dots) because the maximum is too low for these landowners to participate.  This causes the supply of participants to be about twice as steep as the supply of land.

In the second case, maximums are set about 10 above the appraisal, which attracts much more participation and makes the supply of participants flatter.  In this simple simulation, the total cost of buying 75 units goes down by about 25% in the second case as compared to the first.  If the goal is to buy the most conservation services for the least amount of money, the maximum rental rates should be a little higher in this simulation--about 15% above the appraisal.  And if appraisals are less accurate than I'm assuming here, the optimal maximums for cost effectiveness are higher still.

In general, the most cost-effective maximums depend on: (1) how steep the schedule of appraisals is; (2) how many units are being bought;  and (3) the accuracy of the appraisals.

It would be a little different in the actual CRP because the environmental scoring, but this doesn't change the overall conclusion.  And to do it all nice and formally the math gets just a bit more complicated than my simple simulations here.  But again, this doesn't change the take home story or even the ballpark magnitudes.

Maybe everyone in the agricultural world understands all of this and there is good reason for the way things are done now.  But it's hard for me to see what objective is achieved by setting maximum rental rates equal to the appraisal values.

Update: Below, in the comments to the last post, Claudia asks about how appraisals are made and whether they are really unbiased.  The answers are, it's complicated and probably not.  I'll hopefully write what I know about appraisals some other time.  But the jist is that in some areas appraisals are probably biased too high and other too low.  But there is talk of changing appraisals so that they would be tied more closely to surveys of actual leases.  These would probably be unbiased, which sounds like a good thing on the surface but has me worried about unintended consequences, hence this post.