Know your food politics.

• Author: Burns, Andrew
• Position: Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know - Book review

Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know

Robert Paarlberg

(New York, NY: Oxford University Press), 218 pages.

Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know is a broad overview of the recent trends at the intersection of agriculture and political power. Robert Paarlberg, an expert on international environmental policy, details how the political influence of consumers and producers affects the development of genetically-modified foods, the creation of farm subsidies, the Green Revolution, and the international distribution of food aid. Dr. Paarlberg is a thoughtful writer who frequently writes in support of specific facets of larger policies that he otherwise resists, particularly activist concerns over the suffering of farm animals. He does so without straying from his overarching argument: political intervention in agricultural production without a healthy respect for the data is often shortsighted and driven by some combination of votes, money, or fear, rather than by an appreciation for hard facts.

Since Food Politics is written as a wide-ranging introduction to the topic, Dr. Paarlberg spreads his analysis over several issues to provide a reasonably thorough picture of how political influence shapes agricultural production. Dr. Paarlberg's defense of a rigorously data-driven approach to the science and economics of cultivation is strong, and makes Food Politics worth reading, even though it lacks some detail in his arguments.

Although Dr. Paarlberg acknowledges Malthusian pessimism, he focuses more on how to meet the demands of a growing population while respecting economic, ethical, and environmental limitations. This pessimism, the author argues, inadvertently created the conditions necessary for Malthus' predictions to occur. The author cites one prominent example where policies shaped by Malthusian pessimism created the widespread famines throughout colonial India. In contrast, Dr. Paarlberg advocates for a results-driven approach to cultivation guided by scientific discovery and sound economic policies to address the demands of a growing population. Rather than scrapping industrial farming and returning to cultivation on a smaller scale, Dr. Paarlberg consistently supports a utilitarian approach to agricultural policy that addresses issues through incremental reform, rather than through radical changes.

His chapters on genetically-modified foods and trends toward supporting small-scale farmers that rely on less intrusive farming...