Will posted today on his blog Willtaft, that higher food prices will directly and indirectly contribute to agribusiness profits, and erode public resistance to GE crops. You can find his post here.

Perhaps I am just trying to find the silver lining in a serious global problem, but I really think that the food shortage and rising food prices will support our movement.

First of all, this crisis is proof that the biotech industry has not delivered what they promised. CBC’s “As it Happens” today interviewed one of the chair people from the world conference on food security (sorry, no podcast so no reference). In their report, they singled out organic agriculture as the way to ensure food security in the future. The interviewee referred to the fact that GE soy crops actually yield lower than conventional soy crops (edit: this is supported by this new study, and this old study).

Second of all, the reason mega-agribusiness exists today is because it is so hard for a small family farm to compete using traditional methods. Their margins are so narrow, that they often end up having to sell their farm. Many independent family farmers in Canada are finding that as people focus more on eating local, they are finally able to make farming a sustainable business financially. If we look only at the economics of it, an increase in the price of grain will mean that farmers that don’t use the major inputs that are increasing in price (GE seed, fertilizer), they end up with larger margins.

Finally, even if the cost of organic and conventional/GE (there is not a strong enough market for non-GE crops in Canada for there to be market price for non-GE) foods increased by the same amount, the organic food gains the competitive advantage. Bbrian017 posted a comment on Will’s post saying that the cost of a bag of pasta increased from $1 to $2. I am assuming that that was the cost of a bag of conventional pasta, so imagine organic pasta was $1.50, and now it is $2.50. Before you had to justify spending 33% more to buy organic, whereas now you only have to pay 20% more.

While I definitely disagree with using food crops to produce biofuels, and the rising cost of food is a global crisis, I believe that it will push some of those fence-sitters into the non-GE camp.