I went to Argentina and the US did a bank run.
I’ve been in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the last month, including through the recent turmoil in the banking industry in the United States and Europe. It’s a coincidence that has, um, given me some things to think about.
For those unfamiliar, the ways people in Argentina navigate the day-to-day economy can sound wild. When you don’t think you can trust the bank, the currency, or anybody in charge, things can get pretty weird pretty fast.
Amid super-high inflation, people can’t bet on the value of the Argentine peso staying stable, so when they’re paid in them, they spend them fast or convert their money to American dollars — it’s unwise to keep your money in pesos for too long. The government limits how many US dollars people can buy at the official exchange rate, if they’re allotted any at all, and so they buy them at a much higher black market rate, called the “blue” dollar. It’s about double the official rate — at the moment, the official exchange rate is around 200 pesos to a dollar, while the blue rate is around 380 to one.
“The Argentine economy has taught the people here not to trust in institutions in general but also not to trust in one of the central institutions for the functioning of the economy, which is money,” said Santiago Cesteros, a research fellow at the University of Zurich and former consultant at the World Bank.
Argentina, like every country, is its own unique beast with a distinct set of political, economic, and historical issues that tend to render its economy a bit of a consistently inconsistent mess. There’s no one explanation on why it is the way it is, or how to fix it. But it’s worth backing into the bigger picture here, an issue that matters whatever the context: the question of institutional trust.
If you can’t rely on your bank to have your money when you need it or your government to keep things stable, it can wreak all sorts of havoc on society and on the economy. Just look at what happened in the US with Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. It’s sparked widespread concern about the soundness of the US banking system despite the federal government’s best efforts to shore up confidence. The fear of contagion is strong, as America’s crisis is now spreading into Europe and the risk of recession seems to be on the rise once again.
A well-functioning economy requires confidence in the banking sector and the financial system; when that confidence is eroded, the entire system becomes unstable. Worse, getting that confidence and stability back is a tough order.
What it looks like to live in an economy where you trust no one
I lived in Argentina for about seven years and go back from time to time. I want to keep up my permanent residency in case everything goes to hell in the US, and also I go because it is fun and great. Every time I’m back, I’m always struck by just how strange the state of economic navigation is, even if I more or less still get it. When someone was describing to me their peso-to-dollar-to-mattress scheme for saving money recently, I remarked how abnormal it was. “What’s not normal here? Things working well,” the person responded, laughing.
Last year, I went to visit a friend in the Buenos Aires province who casually informed me there was $20,000 in cash hidden in their small one-bedroom apartment. I spent hours wondering where it was. This year, another friend sold his mother’s house in a $110,000 transaction that will be in all dollars, all cash. He and his brother are trying to figure out how to make sure the dollars the buyer pays in aren’t fake. They think the best move is to put the money in the bank initially, but there’s debate about whether to keep it there — the other option is to take them back out in physical dollars and stash them away.
To be clear here, when I say people buy and stash dollars, I mean they purchase the literal, physical paper bills — preferably $100 bills with a big Ben Franklin face, or “cara grande,” not the small face, “cara chica,” because those are older. Indeed, if you’re on the flipside and want to sell your dollars to convert them to pesos, you’ll be hard pressed to hand off smaller denominations such as $10s, $20s, and even $50s. If the bill has been used or has marks on it, it’s considered less valuable, too — the guy at the exchange place, called a cave, or “cueva,” might not even take it. People can get dollar (and, of course, peso) accounts in a bank, but many prefer not to — instead, they hide stacks of dollars around their homes.
“Fundamentally, people only really want dollars because they don’t think the banks are trustworthy, they don’t think the currency is going to hold its value, and they don’t think the government is responsible enough to deal with it, either,” said Maia Mindel, an Argentine economics blogger who writes at Some Unpleasant Arithmetic. “There have been really clear experiences of saying, ‘I’m going to trust my bank, I’m going to take out a fixed deposit, put my money in this bank, my life savings,’ and then the entire thing comes crashing down.”
It’s sort of a you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it situation. Nowadays, the money is probably fine in the bank, but what if it isn’t? In 2001, the Argentine government stopped a countrywide bank run by freezing billions of dollars in deposits; many people were never able to recover all of their money.
“I don’t think that the government would be willing to steal that money from the people and get the dollars and give them pesos like in 2001. I think they won’t be willing to assume that cost,” Cesteros said. “But I still think people are afraid of something like that. It’s like a ghost.”
“There is an idea that you need to save in a currency that isn’t the local currency, and you need to save outside of a bank,” Mindel said.
Argentina’s economy has been troubled for decades, its history punctuated by various episodes of crises, of hyperinflation, of booms and busts. There was a brief moment of relative calm in the 1990s, but it ended in deep recession and skyrocketing poverty. “Since the ’60s and ’70s, Argentines’ confidence in their currency and their economic institutions has been eroding,” said Roy Hora, an Argentine historian. “What Argentines have done is to adapt to that scenario.”
Hora compared it to boiled frog syndrome, where things get worse and worse but just slowly enough that in the day-to-day it’s rather imperceptible. Then, by the time the disaster has really set in, it’s too late. Argentina’s inflation rate just hit 100 percent annually. (In the US, it’s 6 percent.) Hora sent me a tweet about the country’s mega price increases. “Here’s a title for you,” he said, “Worse than expected, even for the biggest pessimists.”
The distortions caused by these intermittent economic crises, inflation, and generalized distrust in financial and governmental institutions show up in big ways and small.
Consumers try to buy things on long installment plans, knowing that over time, inflation will mean the payments they’re making on their televisions or laptops will amount to the cost of a pair of jeans or a cup of coffee. (In turn, retailers cut down on just how many installments are allowed.) Many businesses offer discounts in cash, the tacit agreement between seller and buyer being that the sale perhaps isn’t being recorded and therefore won’t be taxed. Banks offer fixed-term deposit accounts that pay annual interest rates of 75 percent and may still result in account holders losing money. The peso has a multitude of exchange rates, including for the World Cup in Qatar and for Coldplay tickets. Workers and unions are consistently in search of higher wages to try to keep up with skyrocketing prices, leading to frequent pickets and protests and a sense that it’s just never enough.
“Knowing that inflation has very negative consequences for the medium and long term, for most people, it takes away the opportunity to save,” Hora said. “They can’t plan for the future, they have to live in an eternal present.”
Much of the turmoil is a question of inertia, Cesteros said. Everything’s getting more expensive because it always does. Everything’s chaos because it always is. “It is not easy at all to change people’s minds that inflation is part of the Argentinian economy,” Cesteros said. “You need a very strong change of regime in order to change the way that people think.”
There’s a saying in Argentina that if you leave for 20 days and come back, everything’s different, and when you leave for 20 years and come back, everything’s the same.
It’s not good when things fall apart
I’m not trying to suggest here that what’s going on in the US economy right now is anything akin to Argentina or that any one country can really be neatly compared to any other. But given current concerns about inflation, it’s not a bad idea to take a beat to think about what happens when prices really spiral in a way that seems unstoppable. With the current financial tumult in the US and Europe, why confidence in institutions matters — and what happens when it’s lost — is worth ruminating on, too. Two, three weeks ago, few people in the US would tell you that they were seriously worried about the fragility of mid-sized banks. The prospect of bank bailouts felt like a question largely of the past, or at the very least, one not in the immediate present.
It will be years before we fully understand what’s going on in the banking world right now, what caused it, who’s at fault, and why so many people didn’t see it coming. Still, one issue front and center here is that of trust. Bank runs, like what happened with SVB, don’t come to pass unless people pull their money out, and once they start, they’re hard to stop. It’s like a stampede, said Itamar Drechsler, a professor of finance at Wharton. “I might not want to stampede, but if everybody else does, it doesn’t matter,” he said.
Central bankers and government officials in the US and Europe are trying to reassure the public and investors that things are okay, to varying degrees of success. Some consumers and businesses are still worried that their deposits might vanish, even though, by and large, there’s absolutely no reason for concern. The markets are still jittery. The banks themselves are working to get people to relax as well — and to get the government to promise it will back them if things go awry, too.
You can debate whether making Silicon Valley Bank’s depositors whole above the $250,000 FDIC insurance threshold was a good idea or whether its customers should have known better. You can certainly question why some banks seem not to have realized that they were at risk among rising interest rates from the Federal Reserve and a very concentrated client base. You can also ask why bank regulators and supervisors didn’t sound the alarm.
On a broader level, plenty of people are, fairly, scratching their heads that much of the economy just doesn’t seem to make sense anymore. They’re also feeling stressed and angry about persistent inflation. In the US, price increases do seem to be slowing, and they’re not nearly as big as they are in other parts of the world, but they’re still happening. What’s more, one of the keys to keeping inflation in check is making sure people don’t expect it to keep going — they’ve got to, again, trust that the Fed will be able to get it under control.
The thing about confidence in institutions is that once it’s lost, it’s hard to get it back. Mindel said that for Argentina, she thinks it’s possible to get the economy on track — but it’s a heavy lift. “If you were to manage to solve all the country’s extremely serious and extremely deep-rooted macroeconomic issues and also have some large reforms in the financial system, [you could fix it],” she said. She laid out a laundry list that was a long one — reforming business statutes, labor, the informal economy, people paying so much in cash. “If you could do all that, you could have an economy that runs on trust.”
Whatever else, it’s a decent reminder of why it’s important not to lose trust in the first place.
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
Sign up to get this column in your inbox.
Have ideas for a future column or thoughts on this one? Email emily.stewart@vox.com.
How Parade deconstructs the multi-layered tragedy of the lynching of Leo Frank.
When the Broadway musical Parade began its previews this February, it was met with neo-Nazi protesters. As ticket-holders lined up outside the door, about a dozen masked figures waved signs and tried to distribute antisemitic pamphlets.
“You’re about to pay $300 to go in there and worship a fucking pedophile,” said one.
The neo-Nazis felt compelled to protest because, it seems, Parade, which was first produced on Broadway in 1998 and is now scheduled to run in revival through early August, is about a historical antisemitic lynching. It tells the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent who lived in Atlanta and in 1913 was convicted — almost certainly wrongfully — of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl.
Even at the time, it was clear that the prosecution’s case against Frank was flimsy, so much so that it sparked national outrage and appeals traveled all the way to the Supreme Court. Eventually, the constant publicity pressured the governor of Georgia to commute the sentence against Frank from death to life imprisonment. A few months after the commutation came in, an antisemitic mob broke into the prison, kidnapped Frank, and hanged him.
All of this chronology appears in unsparing detail in Parade, which makes much of the bureaucratic wrangling that led to Frank’s ruin. But what is more central to Parade, and what perhaps makes it still powerful enough to worry a neo-Nazi, is its attention to the way antisemitism fits into a broader system of white supremacy. Parade is an intersectional show, and what it parades before the audience is a case study in how antisemitism sits alongside anti-Blackness and misogyny, each system of oppression strengthening the other.
Parade does not begin with Leo Frank. Instead, its first scene depicts a young Confederate soldier singing farewell to his sweetheart as he prepares to leave home to go to war. (All the music and lyrics are by Jason Robert Brown, and the book is by Driving Miss Daisy playwright Alfred Uhry. The current Broadway revival is directed by Michael Arden.) By the time the song ends, 50 years have gone by, the soldier has become a wounded veteran, and the town is honoring him in a parade for what was then known as Confederate Memorial Day.
“Praise those who fight for the old hills of Georgia,” the townspeople sing, as children jubilantly wave Confederate flags and the few Black residents look on from the back of the stage in silence. This is the context, we are shown, in which Leo Frank was murdered: in a city barely 50 years removed from slavery, where the southern Lost Cause is recalled not just romantically but with an almost religious fervor.
Yet Parade never allows that fervor to transfer to the audience. Always, when white characters begin to speak longingly of the antebellum south, the staging draws our attention to Black characters going rigid in response, skirting themselves away from the topic and toward someplace safer.
“Hangin’ another nigra ain’t enough this time,” the corrupt prosecutor Hugh Dorsey concludes after he whips the town into a vengeful frenzy over the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan. “We gotta do better.” Leo Frank is the superintendent of the factory where Mary’s body was found, and his cosmopolitan New York Jewishness, Dorsey continues, makes him a more interesting suspect. He is alien to the south and as such could surely easily be a monster. “You want evidence? Look at those clothes and that big fancy talk.”
Scandal-mongering reporters rapidly adopt Dorsey’s angle. “Take this superstitious city, add one little Jew from Brooklyn, plus a college education and a mousy little wife, and big news!” one concludes.
As the publicity storm over the trial mounts, the press transforms Mary from the everyday giggly 13-year-old who appeared onstage at the beginning of the play into a child saint. “Who will restore the angel’s honor?” demands the Christian politician Tom Watson as he calls for Mary’s murder to be avenged. Periodically her ghost descends wordlessly from the rafters on a swing, a visitation from the Virgin Mary in a lavender pinafore. In a misogynistic court system, a sexual assault victim is only useful if she is inhumanly pure.
In turn, the man who destroyed such an angel must be monstrous, Satanic. “Give ’im fangs, give ’im horns, give ’im scaly, hairy palms,” crows a reporter. The old medieval libel that Jews are out to rape Christian women comes back, with interest: “Sure, that fella’s here to rape the whole damned south!”
Meanwhile, as Dorsey builds his case against Leo, the brutal Jim Crow regime gives him plenty of targets to pressure into giving false testimony. The Franks’ Black maid, Minnie, testifies against him, and so does the Black janitor at Leo’s factory. “What was I supposed to do?” Minnie asks when Leo’s wife, Lucille, confronts her about her false testimony. Lucille has no answer.
After Leo’s conviction becomes a cause celebre in the north, it does not escape the notice of Minnie or of the rest of the Black company that none of the righteous liberal anger lavished on Leo’s case ever seems to appear over their daily horrors. “I can tell you this, as a matter of fact, that the local hotels wouldn’t be so packed if a little Black girl had gotten attacked,” one of them sings as the rest cheer him on sardonically. “There’s a Black man swingin’ in every tree, but they don’t never pay attention.”
Those Black characters are also maddeningly underwritten, in one of the major flaws of Parade. This show tends to depict all its characters outside Leo and Lucille as allegorical figures rather than as real human beings, but the issue becomes especially vexed with the Black characters, who seem to exist solely to comment on the south’s racism.
Oddly symbolic, too, is one of the additions Brown and Uhry make to the historical record. In real life, the teenage girls who worked at Frank’s factory were character witnesses for the defense, testifying that Frank never attempted to seduce them and so was unlikely to have tried to attack Mary Phagan in a sexual frenzy. In Parade, they become witnesses for the prosecution, lying that Leo sexually harassed them on a regular basis. As they testify, on the side of the stage, nebbishy Leo transforms himself into a comically incompetent harasser. The result is muddled, an attempt to deal with the complicity of white women in white supremacy that winds up suggesting that if a group of girls accuses their employer of harassing them but the employer is nerdy, then the girls are probably lying.
Parade is caught in the systems it examines, which is part of what makes the show so fascinating. Since 1998, it has worked to address its flaws, and in some cases has exacerbated them; underwritten Minnie, for instance, is a late addition to the show. Despite its occasion missteps, it remains committed to depicting the way all of these systems together led to the tragedy of Leo Frank: the antisemitism, the anti-Blackness, the misogyny, all of them interlocking. What Parade has to offer us is a portrait of how all these different forms of oppression can fit together in a single case — and the results are powerful enough that they’ve got neo-Nazis riled up.
The Netherlands’ hyper-efficient food system is both a triumph and a cautionary tale.
Part of Against Doomerism from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
An hour north of Amsterdam, some of the world’s largest seed conglomerates — the first step in a long journey that brings food from the farm to our plates — occupy what the industry calls “Seed Valley.” It’s a play on Northern California’s famous tech hub, but there is no actual valley here — the Netherlands is notoriously flat — and there are no Google buses or towering redwood trees. Instead, in this quiet, rural pocket, rows of pristine greenhouses stand beside small experimental farm plots and low-slung office buildings, all without a ping-pong table in sight. While touring a few seed companies there last month, I couldn’t even order an Uber.
Despite their differences, both regions share the belief that the best way to overcome humanity’s pressing challenges is through innovation. In California, it’s software and semiconductors, but in the Netherlands, it’s something even more elemental: improved fruit and vegetable seeds that can produce more food per acre for a growing population while withstanding ever-evolving threats to agriculture. And just as Silicon Valley has put its stamp on the global tech sector, Seed Valley has done the same for farming: Wageningen University and Research (WUR), an hour southeast of Amsterdam, is the nucleus of the country’s agricultural sector and is widely considered the world leader in agricultural science.
Going back nearly 80 years, anxieties over food security have driven the tiny Netherlands to become a global leader in agriculture despite having just half the land area of South Carolina. After a horrific famine during World War II killed more than 20,000 Dutch, the government heavily invested in its agricultural sector through subsidies, rural infrastructure, and industrialization. Two decades ago, it pledged to grow twice as much food with half as many resources, a goal it has already far exceeded. Today, the Netherlands produces 6 percent of Europe’s food with only 1 percent of the continent’s farmland.
Gerthon Van de Bunt, a senior plant breeder with the seed company Pop Vriend, is one of countless scientists in Seed Valley tinkering away to further boost agricultural output. When I met him in the company’s greenhouse complex, he showed me a few trays of small green bean plants he had infected with anthracnose, a fungal disease that’s killing green beans around the world.
Several days after infection, some plants looked perfectly healthy, while others were shriveled and discolored. After I’d spent hours poring over news articles and academic papers trying to better understand plant breeding, this small experiment made its power unmistakably clear. Plant the wrong seed and it could fall prey to disease, ruining an entire crop and wreaking economic and environmental damage, while newer varieties, bred through years of painstaking experimentation by scientists — many of them in Seed Valley — can make all the difference.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24483987/IMG_4675.JPG)
Kenny Torrella/Vox
Van de Bunt will go on to breed those resistant varieties with ones that meet all the other desired green bean traits, such as color, size, texture, and yield. But before his anthracnose-resistant beans can make it to supermarket shelves, it’ll take six or seven years of testing in Pop Vriend’s climate-controlled greenhouses and in the field. Years ago, Van de Bunt developed a heat-tolerant variety of green beans this way, making them better able to tolerate rising temperatures that one year had killed as much as 80 to 90 percent of the harvest for some farmers in the southeastern US.
Thousands of such small improvements to food production add up, helping us grow more food on less land and feed a population that’s more than doubled in the past 50 years. We’ve largely been winning the race to feed humanity, but it’s a race that will only get tougher. Countless more innovations will be critical to feed the nearly 10 billion people projected to be alive in 2050, all against the backdrop of a changing and worsening climate.
In part because of its unique role in the global food system, the Netherlands in recent years has also become an emblem of ascendant debates over the future of food. After decades of doggedly chasing efficiency, many Dutch politicians and agriculture experts are now questioning the ills of the intensive farming style that drives that efficiency, calling for drastic changes in how the Dutch eat and farm in order to reduce pollution, improve biodiversity, and meet climate targets.
In the effort to stake out a middle ground between intensification and environmental conservation, I continually heard an updated version of their 20-year slogan throughout my trip: “Grow twice as much food with half as many resources — sustainably.”
Silicon Valley, but for seeds
Rapid world population growth over the past century has repeatedly fueled fears of mass starvation. But that hasn’t come to pass, in part because fertility levels began to decline sharply beginning in the mid-1960s, but also because advancements in agricultural technology, like the spread of tractors, synthetic fertilizers, and more sophisticated plant breeding, helped us squeeze more food out of less land.
To take one example, if the yields of staple crops like wheat, corn, and rice remained frozen where they were in 1961, we would have had to deforest an additional area of land close to the combined size of the US and India to provide the world with enough food. That would have been catastrophic for global biodiversity.
Much of that growth in yield is attributed to the Green Revolution, a US-led agricultural shift from the 1960s to ’80s to adopt synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, better irrigation, and hardier, higher-yield seeds in the Global South (Latin America, Africa, and Asia). The revolution spread harmful pollutants around the globe, but it also led to a dramatic reduction in death rates and immense economic growth, helping lift millions out of extreme poverty and hunger. No revolution is fought without casualties, but in the case of the Green Revolution, the benefits far outweighed the costs.
But despite decades of progress, as many as 811 million people — one in every 10 — still go to bed hungry. The coming century will bring new challenges for food production, some similar to what we’ve experienced before, some that we’ve never faced. We’re not doomed to suffer climate change-induced famine, but we’ll need a combination of improved technology and smarter, more just farm policy that prioritizes more resource-efficient foods — something tantamount to a second Green Revolution.
One of the most pressing problems is closing what’s termed the “yield gap” — the difference in agricultural productivity between high- and low-income countries. If every country had farms as productive as those of the Netherlands, we’d have no problem feeding the world. But they don’t — while the Green Revolution significantly narrowed the yield gap, it stubbornly persists. A potato farmer in the Netherlands will harvest almost twice as many potatoes from an acre of land as a farmer in India, or three times as much wheat as a farmer in Brazil, to name just a few examples.
On top of the deadly bacteria and viruses like those Van de Bunt battles with his green beans, plants can also be devoured by insects, withered by drought, or drowned in a flood. Up to 40 percent of global crop production is lost to disease and insects alone. Too much salt in the soil and poof — plant growth is stunted. Strong winds can carry seeds away or knock down plants, and extreme temperatures can kill crops or prevent them from ever sprouting.
All this will be amplified by climate change, said Xana Verweij, manager of research and application of cell technologies at Enza Zaden, a top seed producer located just a few miles from Pop Vriend. In an unstable climate, “sometimes it’s drought and the next week it rains cats and dogs,” Verweij said. “Putting that into the [plant’s] genetics, that’s a really big challenge.”
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24483996/Xana_Verweij_220602Enza_032Bew_HR.jpg)
Enza Zaden
Agriculture experts say we’re still far from getting the most food out of each seed. One way of strengthening agricultural resilience in the face of climate change is by shortening the time it takes to develop new seed varieties that can adapt to the latest threats.
This is high-tech work, but it’s a continuation of something humans have been doing since the dawn of agriculture some 10,000 years ago: selectively breeding plants by crossing one variety that has a particular trait, like size or color, with another, like resistance to a disease or insect. Scientists like Verweij can speed up the process using what’s called molecular marker technology, by simply tearing off little pieces of a plant and quickly scanning its DNA for a genetic marker associated with a particular trait. This and other technologies have enabled breeders to significantly shorten the number of years it takes to develop a new variety.
“It’s almost like a race against the clock,” Verweij said. It previously took seven or eight years to breed a new lettuce variety; now it’s more like three or four. It usually takes eight to 10 years to develop a new tomato variety, but Enza Zaden recently created one in just five that is resistant to ToBRFV, a virus that first appeared in Israel in 2014 and has since destroyed tomato crops across Europe, the Middle East, and North America.
A suite of technologies to make seeds go further, known as seed enhancement, is also in the works in Seed Valley.
Newly planted seeds are especially vulnerable, since exposure to extreme temperatures can prevent them from sprouting, which depresses yields. So some Seed Valley companies, like Incotec, enhance them for seed companies through “priming.” They begin the germination process in the seed to shorten the vulnerable period and expand the temperature range in which seeds can grow. Priming dates back to ancient Greece — companies like Incotec are simply advancing the technique.
Priming also increases seed uniformity, according to Maria Vermeer, a germination specialist at Incotec, which can improve yield because when plants grow at uneven rates, farmers are forced to harvest some before they’ve reached their full size.
Inside Incotec’s germination lab, the power of priming is obvious to the naked eye. Vermeer showed me a priming test of lettuce seeds — in the photo below, on the left are regular, unprimed seeds, and on the right are primed seeds that had also been pelleted, meaning covered with a coat of liquid and powders to give the seeds a uniform size, which makes planting more efficient.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24484003/IMG_4680.JPG)
Kenny Torrella/Vox
Incotec can also coat seeds with a thin film that contains a fungicide or other solution to prevent disease, or coat especially tiny seeds, like carrot or flower seeds, to make sure they don’t blow away in the wind.
The company also feeds an artificial intelligence program images of healthy and unhealthy seeds that it then uses to scan through massive batches of its customers’ seeds, tossing out the ones that have a lower likelihood of sprouting and maturing.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24484052/pelleting_general.jpeg)
Courtesy of Incotec
Treated seeds are already routinely used among farmers in high-income countries, but if the technology can be deployed globally, it could be a critical tool in closing the yield gap. A 2022 meta-analysis found seed treatment can reduce crop disease incidence or severity by an astounding 48 percent, and it increases yield by 6 percent on average. These effects vary by crop, geography, and farming practices.
The Netherlands has too many cows
Improving crop yields and resilience is only one part of the agricultural revolution that we’ll need to confront the climate crisis — we’ll also need to change what we farm and eat. As a result of decades of government policy that promoted efficiency and intensification above all else, the Netherlands now has the most densely concentrated livestock population in Europe. To meet climate and conservation goals, this will have to change.
Meat and dairy production account for around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and while the Dutch eat less meat than many of their neighbors, their huge livestock population has led to immense nitrogen pollution that’s contaminating the country’s water and air and destroying its biodiversity. The solution to that challenge primarily isn’t technological advancement, but political and behavioral change.
“If we reduce our meat production and dairy production 50 percent, actually, that’s the solution,” said Wijnand Sukkel, an agroecology researcher at WUR. “That’s the biggest step we can take forward.”
You’ll hear similar sentiments from some Dutch politicians. When policymakers around the world suggest cuts to meat and dairy production or consumption, it’s often met with backlash. But the Netherlands has been far more receptive to calls for dietary change, even though this is a country where cheese is a national point of pride and cheese shops put Roomba-size Gouda wheels on window display.
In 2018, an environmental advisory board for the Dutch government recommended that the country transition 20 percent of its protein intake from animal- to plant-based sources by 2030. Ever since, the recommendation has been seeping into local and national policy, with strong public support.
The world’s first lab-grown or “cultivated” hamburger was created by Dutch scientist Mark Post, and last year, the Dutch government invested $65 million into cultivated meat research, with plans to invest at least another $272 million. Six months later, the city of Haarlem banned meat advertisements, and last month, the city of Altena — in partnership with WUR — launched a “Plant-Based Together” pilot program to influence its 55,000 residents to opt for more vegetarian meals.
Also last month: the Ministry of Agriculture — also in partnership with WUR — announced the goal of doubling legume consumption by 2030. It’s no wonder, then, that the country has been described as a “plant-based protein powerhouse,” with more than 60 companies and research institutions working to make better-tasting meat and dairy alternatives.
Consuming more legumes and less meat and dairy as a way to conserve land is a lesson we could stand to learn in the US. Three-quarters of US cropland is dedicated to growing corn and soy to feed farmed animals, even though meat and dairy only account for about one-third of our calories.
The comparatively positive reception to such policies in the Netherlands might be explained in part by how the Dutch seem less driven by the ideologies that typically dominate food fights — organic versus industrial, vegan versus carnivore, local versus global — and more by their national goal of growing twice as much food with half as many resources.
The focus on outcomes over ideology is in part a result of what the Dutch call the polder model, an approach to decision-making employed in the Netherlands that emphasizes broad consensus and compromise among stakeholders. Much of the country is under sea level, and one theory says that the origins of the polder model date back to the Middle Ages when its polders — the Dutch word for the country’s low-lying parcels of land protected from flooding by dikes — required shared responsibility and cooperation to maintain.
The philosophy is palpable at WUR, the country’s agricultural R&D giant, where sometimes clashing agricultural experts share space and collaborate: Plant breeders, livestock researchers, environmental scientists, plant-based advocates, organic farmers, and social scientists.
But the Netherlands’ sky-high nitrogen pollution, which has plagued the tiny country for decades and has now turned into a full-blown crisis, is testing the peacekeeping model. In 2019, the European Union’s highest court ruled that the country’s system for permitting construction and farming that emits high levels of nitrogen, which can cause respiratory distress in people and trigger mass die-offs in plants and fish, puts it in violation of EU environmental law. The Dutch Council of State agreed and put thousands of construction projects on hold, including new livestock farms.
The government now aims to slash its nitrogen emissions 50 percent by 2030, and most of the cuts will have to come from the livestock sector, the largest emitter. It plans to do that by spending over $26 billion to pay farmers to change their practices, or buy them out, leading to a potential 30 percent reduction in livestock.
The decisions have polarized a populace that enjoys an incredibly high rate of social trust and cohesion. Livestock farmers have jammed up highways with tractors in protest, set fire to manure and hay bales, and blocked access to supermarket distribution centers. The farmers benefit from high levels of public sympathy, though that appears to be slowly waning.
Upside-down Dutch flags, a symbol of protest against the livestock regulations, lined the highway on my way out to rural Leeuwarden to visit WUR’s dairy research campus, where scientists are working to reduce nitrogen from the country’s 3.8 million cows. That’s where I met with manager Kees de Koning, a dairy veteran, who handed me overalls and boots before we headed into the first research barn.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24484075/JB19_0517_1459.jpg)
Jeroen Bouman
Most dairy cows are raised on cement flooring, where their urine and feces, both high in nitrogen, fall through slats and mix into a slurry, creating ammonia — a more potent form of nitrogen. De Koning’s research center has tested new flooring that separates the urine and feces early on to reduce ammonia emissions. WUR researchers also say they can cut cows’ ammonia levels 15 percent by reducing the protein in cows’ diets by 10 percent — another project at the dairy campus.
One of the more elaborate approaches to reducing nitrogen from dairy farms is the CowToilet, a machine developed by the agriculture equipment company Hanskamp and tested by WUR. The cow enters a feed station, and after she’s finished eating, a bucket rubs a nerve above her udder that triggers a urinating reflex. The bucket catches the urine, which is then stored in a tank. Hanskamp says this can catch about 50 percent of a mature dairy cow’s 3.75 to 5 gallons of daily urination, as they also urinate elsewhere.
It’s unclear how much of a role these techniques will play in solving the country’s nitrogen crisis, as some are still in the research phase and others will be costly to scale up. The most affordable option — altering cows’ diets — only has a modest nitrogen reduction and is difficult to monitor and verify, while the CowToilet is so convoluted it borders on satire.
The reality is that we’re never going to make 1,500-pound animals more resource-efficient than plant-based foods, and for ethical reasons, we should hesitate before endlessly engineering them for efficiency like we do with plants. At the same time, demand for dairy and beef isn’t likely to fall globally, especially as more people from the Global South become rich enough to adopt a more Western diet. The most obvious and effective solution is simply raising fewer cows, but given how politically fraught the proposal to buy out farmers has been, anything that can shave off nitrogen emissions will help.
“I’m pretty sure at the end, we will find the balance,” de Koning said. “That’s the Dutch way of thinking.” But he’s worried about how polarized the issue has become. Some Dutch farmers unions, “now they call themselves the Farmers Defense Force,” he said. “That’s also something I would have thought never would happen.”
Combining old farming methods with new tech
Not everyone in the Netherlands’ agriculture sector, or at WUR, agrees the intensive, industrialized farming model is best.
“We need some quite drastic system changes,” said Wijnand Sukkel, who manages WUR’s Farm of the Future, after rattling off the ills of conventional, chemical-laden farming that dominates the Netherlands and other high-income countries: soil degradation, pollution, biodiversity loss. His agroecological approach seeks to find a better balance between agricultural productivity and environmental conservation. At Farm of the Future, Sukkel and other staff experiment on small farm plots to figure out how to wean Dutch farmers off monoculture farming without sacrificing crop yield.
One solution is strip cropping, which dates back thousands of years. Instead of planting crops in a monoculture fashion, Sukkel said that planting numerous crops in alternating strips can increase biodiversity and reduce the need for synthetic pesticides.
Crop diversity can also slow the spread of plant diseases. After implementing strip cropping, a large organic farm that worked with Sukkel slowed the spread of a potato disease that had afflicted its crops in the past, increasing yields by up to 25 percent.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24484024/unnamed.png)
Courtesy of ERF BV
But Sukkel cautions that right now, it wouldn’t be wise for conventional farmers to adopt a highly diverse strip cropping model, as it’s still more labor-intensive and could increase production costs by up to 20 percent. But that increase in cost has to be weighed against rising costs of conventional farming, he added. The cost of nitrogen fertilizer, for example, which can account for around 10 percent of European farmers’ input costs, has more than doubled over the past two years.
Planet-friendly agroecological methods might seem low-tech, but they actually need new technology to work at scale. That’s the biggest bottleneck, Sukkel said. For example, he uses robots to detect where pesticides are needed and to spray them in a targeted way, rather than the indiscriminate use typical in conventional agriculture, which he compares to using a cannon to shoot a mosquito. But it’ll be some time before techniques like this can scale affordably.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24484028/unnamed__1_.png)
Courtesy of Wageningen University and Research
Sukkel’s work is still limited to the Netherlands, but many of his WUR colleagues are devoted to working with farmers around the world to ensure their breakthroughs can make a difference where they’re needed most.
The global effort to close the yield gap
The Netherlands is a rich country that exports much of the food it produces, so its agricultural system will weather climate change more easily than most — especially compared to countries in the Global South, which will face an increasingly precarious farming environment in the decades ahead. And they’re standing on a much shakier foundation, in large part because of the yield gap that remains for many crops and animals.
One barrier to closing the yield gap for crops is cost. The expensive, high-performing seeds that most seed companies sell will drop in yield over time if saved and reused, so farmers have to buy new ones each year to keep yields high. Many countries limit the exchange of seeds, per World Trade Organization policy, and major seed companies that sell genetically modified and bioengineered seeds seek to protect their intellectual property by prohibiting farmers from saving or exchanging seeds.
Another barrier is a mismatch between what subsistence farmers need and which seeds big seed companies develop. The seed industry, which is highly consolidated and concentrated in Europe, focuses on high-margin, internationally traded vegetables and fruits — not the staple crops that so much of the Global South relies on for calories, like cassava (yucca), yams, and millet. The lack of resources devoted to developing new varieties for these foods has earned them the nickname “orphan crops.” That’s especially unjust considering that the Global South is far less responsible for climate change than rich countries, yet will suffer disproportionately from it.
Governments across the developing world, as well as on-the-ground research centers like those run by the global agricultural development organization CGIAR, are working to close the yield gap by developing higher-yielding seeds and working with farmers to improve practices. A number of teams and programs at WUR are doing similar work.
WUR’s international reach starts with who studies there. Almost half of its graduate students aren’t Dutch — as of 2017, the number of students from Asia was almost higher than the entire non-Dutch European student population. Many WUR alumni end up working in their home countries.
Walter de Boef, a senior adviser at WUR’s Centre for Development Innovation, works with experts in low-income countries to develop their seed systems. In 2021, WUR and a local consultant in Nigeria compared challenges in the country’s seed registration and approval process to other African countries and found that Nigeria’s was too slow, unclear, and expensive, costing the equivalent of $8,500 to $21,000-plus to register a new seed variety.
As a result, new higher-yielding, climate-adaptive seeds from Nigerian breeders and elsewhere weren’t coming on the market for Nigerian farmers, so agriculture experts from Nigeria and WUR brought case studies to the government.
“This is the reason why you don’t close this huge [yield] gap,” they explained to regulators, de Boef said. “This is one of the reasons why farmers still have varieties that are not doing well.” They worked with regulators to run pilot trials for new tomato, rice, maize, and cassava varieties, learning from how Kenya and other African countries go about approving new seeds to make the process more efficient and affordable.
In the first year, three new tomato varieties and one new maize variety were released in Nigeria under the new pilot rules. They’re in talks to pilot onions next. Other WUR programs include developing Ethiopia’s seed sector and legume production across Africa.
The stakes of improving yields and other aspects of farming in Nigeria and across Africa couldn’t be higher, according to Kenton Dashiell, a plant breeder and a deputy director at Nigeria’s International Institute of Tropical Agriculture — part of CGIAR.
“We have to produce our own food,” he said. “Africa imports over 100 million metric tons of food per year, at a cost of $75 billion annually. This is $75 billion governments could use to develop their countries. To kind of put it in blunt terms, Africa is making farmers in other parts of the world rich.”
Lack of access to higher-yielding seeds is just one of many barriers subsistence farmers face, Dashiell said. They also need increased access to financing, fertilizer, and information on best practices.
De Boef acknowledged that while some of WUR’s corporate seed partners want farmers in the Global South to source their seeds from the formal market — which includes both companies and public institutions — this is not necessarily just or realistic. Upward of 90 percent of seed production among small-scale farmers in Africa is informal, coming from sources like local markets and fellow farmers.
“We are not [the industry’s] consultants,” de Boef said. “We have to work with informal markets.”
The world should learn from both the Netherlands’ ingenuity and its willingness to make hard policy choices to rectify the harms of agricultural intensification. But climate change and food insecurity are global challenges fueled by global inequality, and solutions to feeding nearly 10 billion people by 2050 — with most of that growth coming from the Global South — will need to be much more inclusive and democratic. It’s no longer the 1960s, when the countries of the Global South lacked economic and political influence. The second Green Revolution will need to come primarily from within, not just be imported from abroad.
Dashiell, for one, has hope. “The challenges can be overcome,” he said. “And I believe they will be overcome.”