Feast and famine

FACTS can be stubborn - and irritating. It is satisfying—perhaps even gratifying—to accept the idea that genetically modified crops are causing thousands of Indian farmers to commit suicide (as this article claims). The notion seems plausible: farmers take out higher debts on the promise that GM seeds will be a bonanza and then lose everything when the harvest fails. There is genuine distress: farmers are indeed killing themselves. Their cause has been adopted by high-profile campaigners such as Britain’s Prince Charles and India’s Vandana Shiva, who blames the spate of deaths on Monsanto, an American biotech firm.

MONOCULTURES are a worry. Efficient, certainly; resilient, no. If something goes wrong, the whole crop can be disastrously lost. In practice, many of the plants usually thought of as monocultures—soyabeans, say, or potatoes—are grown as single varieties only in a few places. Round the world, there are plenty of different versions. But there is one genuinely global monoculture. It is a crop in which the dominant variety has been wiped out by disease within living memory. And it is facing new threats to its survival. It is the humble banana.

There are over 1,000 varieties of wild banana in the world. But 95% of banana exports come from a single cultivated variety, the Cavendish.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS don’t like meat. It is not just—or even mainly—that some will not eat meat on moral grounds. Rather, greens say, meat has a big environmental hoofprint. It takes much more grain, land and water to fatten an animal to produce a pound of meat than it does to grow the same number of calories in the form of grain that is eaten directly (as bread, say). Animals also belch and fart forth remarkable quantities of greenhouse gases. The logical conclusion was drawn by Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said “eat less meat; you’ll be healthier and so will the planet.”

GENETICALLY modified maize causes cancer: that was the gist of a study, among the most controversial in recent memory, published in September 2012 in the journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology. Well, actually, it doesn’t. The journal has just retracted the article. It would be too much to say that GM foods have therefore been proven safe. But no other study has so far found significant health risks in mammals as a result of eating GM foods.

The article in question was by Gilles-Eric Séralini of the University of Caen and colleagues.

In 1991, David Dollar and Aart Kraay, both of the World Bank, published an influential paper, “Growth is good for the Poor”. It established, as an empirical matter, that when average incomes rise, the average incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise proportionately. The implication was that economic growth and its determinants—macroeconomic stability, rule of law, openness to trade and so on—benefit the poorest fifth as much as they do everyone else.

This was the heyday of the "Washington consensus". The term had been coined by John Williamson of the Institute for International Economics only two years before.

A NEW food security bill passed in India aims to end hunger for the poor, but it will not end malnutrition