"If there's a problem, technology will solve it". For much of the 20th century this has been the mantra, applied reflexively and unquestioningly. Technology, at least the bits I interact with, does have real benefits. My home is warm and well lit. I have access to more information than I know what to do with all without getting up from my desk. The list of benefits is long. So why am I worried?
This evening, I caught part of a broadcast of a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos (here is a summary). The Session PanelistsBill Gates, Co-Chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Jakaya Kikwete, President of Tanzania, Ellen Kullman, Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of DuPont, Nguyen Tan Dung, Prime Minister of Vietnam, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director of the World Bank, Patricia Woertz, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Archer Daniels Midland. An impressive panel.
But I came away with serious misgivings. The three Americans all expressed a deep-rooted faith that technological innovation was the solution. Interestingly this was not a view shared by the Prime Minister of Vietnam, the President of Tanzania, and the Managing Director of the World Bank who suggested that there were other approaches that should be perused, including fixing distribution infrastructure and local markets, irritation, fertilizers and simple mechanization.
The kind of innovation Woertz Kullman and Gates were talking about is the engineering of new strains of crops that are higher yielding and pest and drought resistant. This sounds good but the economic model is less appealing (unless you are a ADM). In order to pay for this crop research, ADM has to ensure that farmers come back every year for seeds, which they will because as a by-product of some of the crop 'engineering', the plants are sterile. This has two implications. First Farmers, who have faced increasingly concentrated and powerful buyers, now increasingly must deal with powerful suppliers too. So from an industry analysis perspective, framers are in what Porter would term a relative unattractive industry (there are many of them and low barriers to entry).
But while I sympathize, that's not my main concern. What really worries me is complexity, interdependence, and tight coupling: all of which, while making the system of agricultural production more efficient, also make it more fragile and likely to fail catastrophically. Charles Perrow coined the term "Normal Accidents": we've just seen one in the financial crisis of 2008/9. entities become more interdependent and inter-linkages proliferate, perturbations that once would have caused small local ripples now generate cascading tidal waves. A full scale depression was averted with the injection of large amounts of money. But money can be found fairly quickly - food on the other hand, cannot.
Imagine a day when all the food on the planet comes from one or two 'high yield' strains, for example one strain of wheat and one of corn, those that are the most profitable for ADM to sell and for farmers to buy. Then something happens. "What can possibly go wrong?" technophiles ask. "After all, these strains have been vetted and passed by the FDA, and have been used for years without a problem". To which my reaction is "how did we get antibiotic resistant strains of staphylococcus"? We didn't see that one coming. Neither will we be able to anticipate the ways in which these strains on which we will all be dependent will fail; but they will, and since they are all genetically identical the entire system will fail at once. Injections of cash will not help if the raw material for the food manufacturing system dries up. It will ripple through the entire industrial food value chain; livestock will die, food prices will soar, staples will disappear. The Irish Potato Famine of 1845, but this time on a world-wide scale.
It may be 50 or 100 years before we get to that point: but if we continue on our current trajectory driving out requisite variety and building complex interdependent systems in the pursuit of efficiency, I predict there will be a "normal accident", and one of a scale that could do for us what a large meteor did for the dinosaurs.
