Tag: Asia
Agribusiness in a Changing Global Environment
By cgfi | October 10, 1999
You have heard today of the tremendous opportunity emerging in Asia due to the combination of population growth and rising living standards. Despite the recent Asian economic crisis, the unprecedented economic growth in Asia over the last decade represents the largest increase in per capita income for the largest population in human history. There are strong indications that Asia is already started its recovery and is preparing to move on. Thus, the trends in dietary changes and increased animal protein consumption we have seen over the last decade will continue into the next.
Worldwide poultry consumption has been growing at about ½ a percent per year. This growth rate should actually increase during the next five to ten years as more Asian populations reach the critical development stages where meat consumption increases most rapidly.
So the question is not whether or not there will be growth in the demand for poultry products. The question is will North American poultry producers have free access to those growing export markets and how fast will they get that access. The next round of World Trade Organization talks, starting this November in Seattle, will hopefully settle many of these issues. However, they will likely take several years and there is still time for public opinion to influence the outcome and direction of the negotiations. That is why environmental and anti-trade activists will be out in unprecedented force in Seattle. They smell blood. They have even been holding week-long activists commando training camps all summer long, teaching how to scale buildings and barbed wire fences to fly Greenpeace banners. The battle over agricultural free trade and fair access to open markets has just begun.
This brings us to the other large question: what regulatory constraints will be placed on the poultry industry and what impact will they have on the competitiveness of our poultry products in the global market. Public opinion has a great impact here, as well.
Currently, there is a new push to tighten regulation of agricultural nutrients as part of the renewal of the Clean Water Act. The EPA is focusing a significant share of its early efforts on livestock operations, including poultry. While hog farming has taken the brunt of environmental criticism over the last two years, poultry has not been left unscathed. Rightly or wrongly, the poultry industry has been assigned the blame for Pfiesteria in the Chesapeake Bay and other eastern shore waters. That debate has been settled and we lost. We’ve lost so bad that poultry farming gets blamed for fish kills which the experts all agree were due to natural anoxic conditions in the Bay, not Pfiesteria.
As a result of this public relations loss, the Virginia Poultry Federation has agreed, at least on some level, to a phosphorus standard for applying poultry litter to pastures and fields-limits on phosphorus application which are arbitrary and poorly justified at this time. The bitter irony is that there is little evidence that phosphorus is a significant problem in our watersheds, including the Chesapeake Bay. This example perfectly illustrates the power of public opinion over facts or science.
In fact, the public is turning against production agriculture in general. Fueled by nostalgia for an agricultural past most have only read about and a more direct connection to earth, the public (at least as portrayed by the media) has convinced itself that it doesn’t want production agriculture. Of course, the public has always sided with small, family farms over large agribusiness when asked in polls, but the difference is that today the anti-agribusiness sentiment runs much deeper. It’s not just who is farming and how big they are, but what they produce and how they produce it. There is no better example of this than biotechnology.
Agricultural biotechnology is being rejected by consumers around the globe. Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea all have labeling requirements for genetically-modified foods. This even applies, in many cases, to livestock fed genetically-modified feeds. Far from adding value to the farmer, premiums are instead being paid for commodities free of genetically-modified crops. This is Monsanto’s and the rest of the biotech industry’s worst nightmare.
A recent report by a biotech stock research firm was understandably grim. According to their analysis, “rebuilding consumer, regulatory, and political confidence in the economic and social value of agricultural biotechnology, will not only take time, but will require a different message than “the science is safe,” as well as the need to…reach out to all stakeholders.” The question for this firm is “not whether, but to what degree farmers retrench from their use of biotech seed technologies.”
In preparing for this panel discussion I was directed to the recent report by the Council on Agricultural Science and Technology which concluded that animal agriculture was essential to ensuring an adequate global food supply. While we like to see that others have made the same conclusions as us as far as the role for production animal agriculture, it would be a mistake of the highest order to assume then that the public will see the light and finally appreciate the poultry and livestock industry. Biotechnology is only the most visible example of the recent backlash against agricultural technology. This is true with livestock production technologies. There is a fundamental reason for this backlash: lack of understanding. One of the most important and neglected areas in agriculture today is communicating with the public. Only two percent of the public farms, with many of those farming only for the tax break. The vast majority of the food produced in this country is produced by a tiny minority. The public doesn’t care anymore about protecting the farmer’s way of life-in fact they want to reshape it. Environmental organizations have convinced the public that farming is controlled by corporate moneymen who will rape the environment for profit. The enemy has become production agriculture in much of the public’s mind.
Therefore, it is time that agriculture engage the public directly. We cannot afford to continue hoping that the media will get the story right. The biotechnology industry is learning the hard way that unless the public is shown the benefits of new technologies, they will happily reject them. But there are examples of success from which we can learn. While considered a long shot, the plastics industry was faced with a potential ban on many plastics on environmental and health grounds. But they considered the threat realistic enough to launch a PR campaign aimed directly at consumers. The campaign is surely one of the most successful in recent memory. Greenpeace has had to abandon their Ban Plastics campaign and the failure in plastics may be what led to the anti-biotech campaign.
The lesson is that the public will listen and react reasonably when given the full story about new technologies or industries. Poultry farming is in the situation today where few understand what they do, how they do it, or how it benefits them. They see only what the media tells them: that poultry farmers destroy the Chesapeake Bay and pollute the water.
The poultry industry cannot afford to lay low any longer. Public opinion is far too important in today’s business world to leave it to hope. If the industry fails to communicate its message to the public, they risk losing the support of government leaders needed to open foreign markets and continue operating profitable operations in the 21st century.
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