IEEE Spectrum June, 2013 - 31

overview

Consider what life would be like if people were rational.
there'd be no stiletto heels, no Ferraris, no messy love affairs,
no professional sports.
and we'd probably eat bugs.
throw everything aside except cold logic, and entomophagy,
the fancy term for eating insects, makes a lot more sense than
what we're doing now. cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens are fed
on corn and soybeans, valuable crops that we humans also eat.
cows and sheep consume huge amounts of water and require
enormous parcels of land on which to graze. and before they are
slaughtered, these animals produce solid and gaseous wastes
that damage the environment.
insects have none of those drawbacks. they can consume
organic refuse-including spoiled food, rotted carcasses, and
even animal excretions. (hungry yet?) and the protein in an insect
is every bit as healthy as what you're taking in now.
"there's no reason for people not to eat insects if you con-
sider the nutritional value," says arnold van huis, a professor at
wageningen University & research center, in the netherlands,
and the coauthor of a recently published cookbook for insect
eaters. Van huis notes that insects have long been on the menu
in less developed parts of the world.
"we are on the verge of starting a new food production
chain," says van huis, sketching out a vision of big factory
farms raising grubs, mealworms, and other larvae for the
hungry hordes.
but come on, now. insects? For dinner? really? in the devel-
oped world, where the price of half a kilogram of ground beef
is less than what it costs to dry-clean a shirt?
it's not going to happen. "you can ask people to jump out of
planes, to do all kinds of things," says Vaclav smil, an environ-
mental scientist at the University of manitoba, in canada. "but
you can't get them to eat bugs."
still, interest in entomophagy just won't go away. "every day i get
mail or a phone call from somewhere in the world," says van huis.
i don't have the heart to tell him it's only because people think his
taste for bugs is so bizarre. -by glenn zorpette

finding new life (so to speak) in the old-fashioned technique of
selective breeding. For example, DNA-based molecular markers
allow breeders to screen large populations of plants for traits of
interest rather than rely on just a visual identification of the trait. By
removing some of the guesswork, such methods lower the cost and
speed the development of new varieties. Or take livestock breeding:
Today, instead of having to wait years for a female calf to mature
before you're able to measure how much milk she can give, dairy
breeders can predict it pretty accurately from the start. All they
have to do is run some of a bull calf's genetic markers through a
computer model to predict the milk production of his future daugh-
ters. Breeders can then immediately select which bull calf to raise.
But the main reason for my optimism is the clear evidence
that many developing countries are finally getting serious about
doing their own agricultural research, especially in places where
land and labor productivity are low. And what happens in those

places matters because they are producing ever more of the
world's food-about two-thirds of the global total in 2010. Even if
Ruttan was right that agricultural productivity in rich countries is
hitting a ceiling, faster growth in developing countries can keep
the global average rising.
It was quite an achievement, back in the 1960s, when the
developing regions managed to grow more food with a given
amount of land, labor, and capital-the total factor productivity
I mentioned earlier. It is world-changing that since around 1990
these regions have raised the annual growth rate of TFP to around
2 percent. The magic of compound interest is at work here:
An annual increase of 1 percent will double output in 70 years;
a rate of 2 percent will double it in 35. And that's just the improve-
ment the developing countries are getting every year by increas-
ing productivity-the way they use resources. If you throw in the
results from using more resources, you get an overall increase in
output of more than 3 percent a year. That'll double the overall
output of these regions in just 23 years.
Consider China and Brazil. For two decades they have sustained
exceptionally high growth in TFP, and that growth has reaped
remarkable dividends. China can now just about feed its own
1.36 billion people, and at a higher standard than ever before; and
by some metrics Brazil has emerged as second only to the United
States in its exports of food. Southeast Asia and Latin America
also have done well. And it appears that the Eastern European
countries have finally gotten their acts together since the breakup
of the Soviet Union in 1991, which sent their inefficient, centrally
planned agricultural sectors into a tailspin. TFP stagnated dur-
ing the Soviet era, but it took off around 2001.
Only sub-Saharan Africa has failed to significantly improve its
productivity. Some of my colleagues would take issue with that
statement, but my analysis indicates that the productivity of land,
labor, and capital invested in African agriculture is growing at only
about 1 percent per year. My view is that this slow growth is a conse-
quence of several factors: weak agricultural research, poor transfer
of the results of what research there is to the farmers, unfavor-
able price policies, poor infrastructure, and insecure land tenure.

what Distinguishes the most successful countries? sever al
things, but two stand out: national research institutions and poli-
cies that strengthen incentives and market access for farmers.
Agricultural advances aren't like other kinds. Today's Paris fashions
are disseminated within weeks throughout the world, with every
stitch in place. A logic chip designed in Silicon Valley doesn't care
whether it runs a laptop in the next town or on another continent.
A hybrid-electric car can be driven out of its factory in Japan and
soon make its way onto a street in Chicago. Not so with agricultural
innovations-they must be tailored to whoever would use them.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2013
