JEREMY: Hello and welcome to Eat This podcast with me, Jeremy Cherfas. Today, quinoa. That's the South American superfood that grows high in the Altiplano of the Andes Mountains. As you may know, between 2006 and 2014, the price of quinoa tripled or quadrupled. Some people grew alarmed. In January 2013, The Guardian newspaper published an article by Joanna Blythman, a food writer and activist based in Scotland.
Blythman wrote, and I quote, there is an unpalatable truth to face for those of us with a bag of quinoa in the larder, the appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it.
Imported junk food is cheaper. Less than a week later and half a hemisphere away, Doug Saunders in the Toronto Globe and Mail took precisely the opposite point of view. His headline read Killer Quinoa. Time to debunk these urban food myths. And in the article, he said the people of the Altiplano are indeed among the poorest in the Americas, but their economy is almost entirely agrarian. Their sellers, farmers or farm workers seeking the highest price and wage.
The quinoa price rise is the greatest thing that's happened to them. MARC: I just thought, let's write something about this, because one of those two things cannot be true. But then that thing went viral. JEREMY: Marc Bellemare is director of the center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. Where other people saw a heated debate about development and neocolonialism. He saw an opening for research.
SETH: I said, well, I think I know how we could answer it. JEREMY: Enter Seth Gitter, associate professor of economics at Towson University outside Washington, D.C.. SETH: You know, basically, I was the one who identified the data set. You know, Marc and I sort of talked about how to approach it. MARC: And so Seth and I started kind of just chatting informally about this over social media. And so that is what brought us together.
JEREMY: What knew about that Marc didn't was ENAHO the Encuesta Nacional de Hojas. SETH: Peru collects this really great data set, where every year they go and talk to 20,000 households across Peru, and they ask them all sorts of questions like, you know, what kind of crops do you farm? If you farm crops and what have you eaten in the last two weeks?
JEREMY: With the help of Johanna Fajardo Gonzalez, a co-author on the paper, they cleaned up ten years worth of data from 2004 to 2013 that allowed them to ask the important question: how do high prices affect quinoa farmers? SETH: Really, the the big conclusion we saw with the jump in prices is that the people who farmed quinoa, their, their, uh, you know, their well-being, uh, went up faster than, um, than anybody else in the country.
MARC: We're pretty confident that our result is robust and that what has been going on is or the change in welfare that we are observing can be ascribed to variation in the price of quinoa. SETH: There's not that many quinoa farmers, but only something like 3% of the the the whole country is quinoa farmers. But they saw a huge increase, you know, something on the order of of 20% increase in their, you know, their, their household well-being.
And there was maybe a really, really small decrease or maybe no change for those who bought quinoa. JEREMY: Seems like an open and shut case, but in some respects it's what you might expect. High prices should be good news for people who produce things. For an agricultural economist, this is no big surprise. MARC: No. Absolutely not. JEREMY: In fact, it was one of the things that brought Angus Deaton a Nobel Prize last year. MARC: Angus Deaton is known for several contributions.
One of which we we riff on in this paper is the net benefit ratio contribution. And that's it's a fancy name for something that is fairly intuitive. And it says that in the short run, if you are a net seller of something and the price goes up, you benefit in the short run. If you are a net buyer of something and the price goes up, your welfare decreases. It's an entirely obvious idea when you think about it.
But but you know, it required quite a bit of analysis and theory to show that that was true. And I've done quite a bit of work on that. JEREMY: But that's not to say there were no surprises. Seth Gitter, Marc's collaborator. SETH: The one thing that I was, I was kind of surprised at is that the price that farmers got actually went up faster than the purchase price. So in other words, as the price went up, farmers were getting a larger percentage of the price.
That was a little surprising to me. I thought, well, you know, I mean, maybe they would just get screwed by international companies or by middlemen and buyers. But no, I mean, the essentially the the price, the relative price of what the farmers sold it for to what people bought it for, the farmers were getting a higher percentage of it, something like instead of 40%, they were getting 60%.
JEREMY: So Bellemare, Fajardo Gonzalez and Gitter have provided solid evidence that No high prices did not hurt poor farmers in Peru. Quite the reverse. But that's dry economic analysis. How about on the ground? Well, one of the middlemen who somewhat surprised Seth Gitter by not screwing over the quinoa farmers is Sergio Nunez de Areco, whose company, Andean Naturals, is the largest importer of quinoa into the US.
Sergio is a Bolivian who saw quinoa as a way to help the farmers out of poverty, and on his visits to the farmers, he's seen the effects first hand. SERGIO: In the old times, they used to have to take their quinoa to the market and sell it for $0.30, and to get to the market, they would have to load it up on llamas, and they would have to travel about two days to get to the marketplace, depending on where they were.
Today they have and they were showing me this last week they have a pickup truck they were able to buy with their income and go to market in 45 minutes to an hour. So it's really as you start talking to them, you pull this information about how they use now bricks instead of Adobe on their homes. Keep warmer. They used to store their quinoa within their main room. Now they have an extra room to store the quinoa in.
A couple of the families we visited had solar panels, which was really exciting. They can charge your cell phones. You asked them about their children, and they tell you how after elementary school, as soon as they were tall enough, they would get him out of school to work in the fields, whereas now they're keeping them in school. JEREMY: Sounds like that supports the survey analysis. High prices have been good for farmers.
One of the other accusations levelled at high quinoa prices was that poor farmers were selling all the quinoa they had, and using the proceeds to buy nutritionally inferior foods. SETH: I do not see that. JEREMY: Seth Gitter. SETH: And we in fact, surveyed 150 households in a very heavy quinoa growing region. So, you know, something like over 100, 125 quinoa growers. And essentially in those areas, no one's eating processed foods or sodas or chips.
I mean, the amount of that consumption is so is so low that I'm not seeing that. JEREMY: Another myth busted . Quinoa farmers are not buying junk food. But how about other Peruvians? Maybe they can no longer afford quinoa. Again, there's evidence buried in the ENAHO survey data. Andrew Stevens, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, focused on the foods ENAHO tracks.
ANDREW: And so I look at 161 distinct food items that get consumed, and I sort of build each household's diet based on their reported food consumption and then those foods underlying nutritional characteristics. JEREMY: Knowing what foods they consumed. Andrew Stevens can build a nutritional profile for each household, at least for bulk nutrients like overall calories and protein, carbohydrates and fat.
He then compares Puno Region, which grows more than 80% of the country's quinoa, and where people have a much stronger preference for quinoa with the rest of Peru. ANDREW: The real crux of the story here is the Puno Region. I really focus on that region and how it differs from the rest of the country.
And I do find that, yes, consumers preferences in that region are significantly different, especially for quinoa, than the nation as a whole, but that when you take those preferences into account with this price spike, there aren't large there aren't large negative consequences when it comes to nutrition intake. JEREMY: No negative consequences. That's econ speak for well, they seem to be doing just fine. How about the people elsewhere? They may not have such a strong preference for quinoa,
but can they still afford it? Seth Gitter. SETH: You know, our measure of how much stuff a household consumes suggested that the people who went out and purchased quinoa were, you know, were twice as rich. They had to spend. Um, I'd say I think I calculated it back, back in the envelope, but it was, you know, on the order of like 50 to $100 more to buy all the quinoa they would buy for a year.
JEREMY: And there we could leave it. Poor farmers doing better than ever and mostly not getting screwed over by middlemen. Other people in Bolivia and Peru still well able to afford as much quinoa as they want. The rest of the world guilt free as we pursue our passion for the Andean superfood. Everything's just fine. Except that everything is not just fine. There are some problems, each of them in their different ways, about sustainability.
When you buy quinoa, for example, chances are you're getting what's known as quinoa real, larger, pale colored seeds. Or if you're lucky and keen, you may be able to find red seeded or even dark purple quinoa. But basically 4 or 5 varieties in the Andes, there may be as many as 3000 varieties. But because the export market wants only 4 or 5.
Many of those other varieties are no longer being grown, and that could be undermining the long term future of quinoa, because that biodiversity is absolutely essential to allow quinoa to evolve and adapt to changing conditions, for example, brought on by climate change. So here's the problem how do you persuade farmers to grow a variety that the market doesn't really want, even though that would be good for quinoa as a whole? Maybe you could just pay them.
SETH: We sort of did this little game where it was hypothetical. We said, well, for hypothetically, if we offered you $10 or basically $10 or we had them roll a die. So it was like basically multiples of $10. So if you rolled a six, we would hypothetically offer you $660. And people were very, you know, something like 83% of households were willing to plant a new variety of quinoa in exchange for a payment, you know, somewhere between 10 and $60.
JEREMY: So that was something that Seth Gitter and Mark Bellemare did in a follow up study. What they didn't know was that this approach is already being used by another economist, Adam Drucker at Bioversity International, in Bolivia and in Peru over the past several years. Drucker and his colleagues have used a kind of auction or tender to ask communities what kinds of rewards they would want.
Things like machinery or fertilizer, or school building materials, to grow quinoa varieties specifically for conservation. The communities got what they wanted and the quinoa got conserved. ADAM: We've shown that it it can work. We've shown that it is cost effective, and the potential to make such interventions sustainable over the longer term are there. I mean, I think the overall, it's quite promising that this is a useful tool for, for for promoting Conservation.
JEREMY: And that work's continuing right in the heart of the quinoa producing region of Puno. ADAM: We began to run another tender over this last agricultural season. That's from September 2015 to May 2016, and we identified five varieties of quinoa, which should be prioritized for conservation. And then we held an awareness raising event in Puno.
We had over 30 community representatives there, and we explained to them the process, and we had a number of sort of interactive activities which explain how a tender works and what happens if you bid too high or too low. And then we received bids from I can't remember now it's between 20 and 30 of them. And it was a good, good number. I think it was more like 30 of which unfortunately we only had funds to select six. JEREMY: That's the real problem. Quinoa diversity can be conserved.
Drucker's work has shown how much it will cost to reward communities to conserve agricultural biodiversity. All that's left is to find the funds. And although the governments of Peru and Bolivia are interested, they haven't quite made it happen yet. So the long term sustainability of quinoa diversity could be secured in the shorter term. There's the sustainability of how quinoa is grown.
As prices went up, farmers cut down on their herds of llamas, which used to supply manure that helped to bind the soil together. They could afford to mechanize, but they plowed badly and too often, so the soil blows away. They reduced the length of time the land lies fallow between quinoa crops, again resulting in severe soil erosion, all of which worries Sergio Nunez de Areco. SERGIO: So we think about soil health. We think about farmers incomes, obviously.
Are you making enough that it's worth it for you to stay here? Is it a good business for you? We really need to focus on technology. So we'll go ahead and take farmers from Australia who are experts in no till agriculture, taking them to Bolivia and see what's happening there. And they say, well that tractor you have the tilling and the disc plowing, that's the stuff they use in the dust bowls here in the 50s. It's proven to be disastrous. So don't do it.
Then they look and they say, well, you're extending way beyond what the llamas can fertilize. You need to supplement the fertilization of the soils. And then they look at the fact that we're farming in a desert area where there is no other crop alternatives and nothing else grows in this desert, so they can't have a crop rotations or another cash crop,
just quinoa. We need to increase their yields and at the same time assure them a market that recognizes the place they farm and them as smallholder organic farmers recognizes their hard work. JEREMY: And that's where we in the developed world have a real part to play. SERGIO: Consumer. When he goes to the shelf and sees $3.50 and and sees a $5 and says, well, which one do I pick? They're both quinoa. They're little, healthy, round things. Looks like bird seed. And I heard they're great.
So I'll pick the 3.50 one. Well, you have to read the back and see. Does it have a place and a face and is it truly organic? And what's the impact of your purchasing? JEREMY: And this perhaps is the most worrying aspect of all. Sure, the price of quinoa boomed, but if there's one thing economists understand, it's supply and demand. Greater demand reflected in high prices triggers increased supply.
MARC: It is not terribly sustainable to have situations where the price of something has tripled. The cost hasn't really changed, and you make extra normal profits that that draws in a lot of economic agents who are interested in competing that profit away. SETH: I think you see this across just about every agricultural commodity. I mean, whenever the price of something goes up, other countries say, oh, well, we could also plant this.
JEREMY: Not just other countries like India, China, Nepal, even the United States and Scotland, but Peru itself, where the coastal region of Arequipa suddenly came on stream after the price spiked in 2013, and the using intensive methods and getting 2 or 3 times the yield of traditional farmers. Quinoa is no longer an Andean superfood, it's just another commodity. SERGIO: This is the red flag you have to avoid is commoditization of something.
So my strategy for avoiding this, this commoditization is setting up niches. So on the top you have smallholder grown Andean. So you have the whole, um, origin story, uh, authenticity. And it's a fair trade product and it's organic. Then you have organic from other origins. It's still responsibly grown. It comes from other places. And then you have non-organic quinoa. JEREMY: And we the consumers get to choose where it comes from and what we're paying for.
That differentiated market is still off in the future. Right now, though, the poorer quinoa farmers are having to cope with a harsh reality. Prices are back down to where they were before the boom. SERGIO: This drop was the first ever seen by farmers. They had never seen a drop in price of quinoa. They had always seen, you know, pretty stable market where they barely made it. And then they saw an increase and they were making a fair return.
And then it was the heyday years, but they had never seen such a drop. And this drop is bringing a whole. And it's like a bucket of cold water of wake up. You're not the only one planting quinoa in the world. There's competition out there and you're getting your butt kicked by those guys, and we're the first to tell them they their fields are ten times to 100 times larger than yours. They pull out three times as much as you do, and they can sell way cheaper and take the market away from you.
What are you going to do now? MARC: That's what I kind of worry about, because what we see in our results is that the quinoa price increase has appeared to make those producers better off. What happens as prices go down right. What if if we're going to rejoice when price goes up, then by symmetry. Maybe we should worry. When price goes down, people are holding on to their grain in the hopes that the price of quinoa is going to go back up.
JEREMY: Unfortunately, they're holding on to their quinoa in burlap sacks. SETH: When you do that, there's mice and pests and stuff like that. And another thing that we looked into in that survey was to try to see if, if farmers would be willing or interested in having metallic silos. You know, I mean, it could really help households sort of keep quinoa on on hand longer and, and, you know, determine when they want to sell it.
JEREMY: And that's turned into a policy recommendation that maybe governments or development agencies might help poor farmers to invest in metal silos to store their quinoa, which could help them to ride out market fluctuations. So where are we? A close look at survey data and experience on the ground have shown that poor quinoa farmers did benefit from high prices, and that high prices did not result in poorer nutrition.
The big question, I suppose, is why did anyone think it would be different? Well, one reason is that people outside South America maybe don't fully understand the role of quinoa in the diet there. They think of it like rice or wheat or maize as a staple for whom it was once a nourishing staple. Food can no longer afford to eat it. Even in Puna, though, it just isn't that big a deal. Andrew Stephens. ANDREW: T hey're consuming somewhere around 22 or 23kg of of quinoa per year.
But in the country generally the overall average is only about five kilograms per household per year. What this this consumption means in terms of of overall food budget in 2012, quinoa was the 40th Most consumed product of my 161 products at a national level, but it was the fourth most consumed food in Puno and in Puno. In 2012, it still only took up 3.94% of the average households food expenditures. The the most important food in these these budgets tops out at somewhere between 6 and 7%.
There really isn't a big staple food, you know, that's taking up the lion's share of these households consumption. Like in other parts of the developing world. JEREMY: So although quinoa is clearly culturally important, it's just one part of a rather diverse diet, not a crucial staple. Sergio Nunez de Areco, who grew up in Bolivia, admittedly nowhere near the quinoa farmers. How much quinoa did he eat?
SERGIO: Very, very little. We used to get served at my home quinoa once a month in a soup, and it was really nothing that you would, um, serve a guest. If a guest came, you would serve them. Uncle Ben's rice. There was very little experimentation with quinoa. I'd say that Americans know how to eat quinoa in more ways than Bolivians do. JEREMY: But while urban Bolivians may not have known what to do with quinoa, we in the West may be doing it all wrong.
We should probably pay more attention to the quinoa farmers who eat it every day. SERGIO: So these guys, they're really quinoa connoisseurs. So they take the quinoa with the saponin coating on it. So it has a bitter, bitter coating that you need to rub off. But before they do that, they toast it with the saponin coating that helps it rub off easier and wash off so it has very little saponin on it, but also the heat. Initially, the pre toasting makes the seed really puff up like a rice.
So it's a fluffy dish. So your quinoa, when you have it shouldn't be crunchy like a fish egg. It should really the starch should come out of the. So break free from its fiber covering and if you don't do it properly, you'll just inflate like a balloon and it's not that digestible. So you really need this covering to break through and the starches and you get a fluffy dish.
JEREMY: If I've learned nothing else in researching this story, quite apart from debunking the myth of killer quinoa, which I never really believed in to begin with, it's that the commercial quinoa we're buying in Europe and America might have been washed clean of its bitter coating without being toasted. First wonder whether toasting would make it taste better. Something to try. The big question, of course, is whether all this research will actually make a
difference to anyone's lives. Seth Gitter. SETH: I mean, I think the thing that amuses me the most is that, you know, when I take my daughters on playdates and I tell the other families what I'm doing, they'll say, oh, yeah, I read that thing. Like, aren't you not supposed to eat it because of this? And I go, oh, actually, I have research that suggests it's good. It's good for the farmers. And then I've gotten, like I think about five people to start buying quinoa again.
So in some sense, this might be the biggest impact of my research is ever, you know, has ever had is to get five D.C. moms to start buying quinoa again. JEREMY: I just hope that choosing to buy slightly more expensive quinoa, and that the extra cost is finding its way back to those poor quinoa farmers helping to improve their lives. Were you feeling guilty about consuming quinoa? You made me feel better about it now. Leave a comment at Eat This Podcast.com or tweet me at Eat podcast.
For now though, thanks to everyone who talked to me about quinoa and to you for listening. If you enjoy the show, why not leave a rating at iTunes? And if you're not already a subscriber, you can sign up there or wherever you get your podcasts till the next time. From me, Jeremy Cherfas. Goodbye.