Cheap (30 page)

There are more than 6 billion people on this planet and billions more to come, thanks in part to a food system built on twentieth-century technology. Without chemical fertilizers and herbicides, advanced irrigation systems, and modern animal husbandry, the world would be a far hungrier place. We need large farms to grow and process the enormous quantities of grain necessary to feed the world’s exploding population. And like it or not, the world is not going to lose its taste for meat. But it is time to acknowledge that food grown on the factory model is costly—directly in the form of inputs, and indirectly in long-term erosion of our health, environment, and humanity. We need to be more honest about these costs and bear them bravely, rather than externalize them and pass them down to our children or impose them on the poor here or overseas. And we need to build a system in which small farm producers can survive and thrive.

Given the opportunity, many of us would buy naturally grown pork and wild-caught shrimp. We would likely prefer their taste, and we would certainly prefer their life story. But as Drenowski makes clear, not all of us have had the opportunity. Julie Guthman, a food scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said a narrow focus by some advocates on local and organic food tends to underrate both history and most people’s needs. “Everyone has a right to quality food, but we must address the inequalities that make some reluctant—and others unable—to pay more,” she said. “There are historic reasons why some people don’t seek out better food, and we won’t get anywhere by ignoring them.”

Guthman pointed to what she called our bifurcated system in which most people get their food at Wal-Mart or low-price-driven supermarkets, and a small and committed elite grow their own food, graze at farmers’ markets, or patronize high-end specialty grocery chains.

“Some people believe that they are morally in the right to shop at Wal-Mart, that they are saving money, being prudent, making sure that their family gets enough,” she said. “Others say they are morally right for buying organic or local. But the question to ask is this: How can it possibly be cheaper to buy garlic from China rather than local garlic from California? What are the economic structures that have made that happen? Issues of land use, labor, subsidies—all this needs to be addressed. We have to get beyond the food to what’s behind it.”

The recent spurt in food prices is a wake-up call. The phenomenal successes of the Green Revolution made us believe that technology would solve all the world’s food problems, but as it turned out, it was only part of the solution. Given higher grain prices, we may want to consider how it is that producers manage to keep pork and beef prices relatively low, and profits relatively high. That is, really think about the compromises they are making, the corners they are cutting. Price is important—critical—but so are many other factors. Regulation, research, and long-term investment are key. We need to make sure that people can afford the basics beyond grain and grain-fed animal products. To that end we should reconsider reinstating the historical system of price supports by which farmers were guaranteed a certain price for their wares. Price supports encouraged farmers to diversify, potentially lowering the price of fruits and vegetables, and making imports less attractive. And by reducing subsidies on grain, we could afford to subsidize consumers more generously with vouchers or food stamps—giving everyone more control over what they eat and feed their families.

International trade in food is critical. Life would be far less lovely for Americans without imported coffee and bananas, and many other nations need what we have to offer. But it makes no sense to dump large amounts of cheap grain on grain-exporting nations or to dump cheap Thai shrimp on Florida. The global food distribution system needs reigning in. Rather than flooding markets in developing countries with cheap food, thereby weakening incentives to grow and process food locally, aid should be given directly to the poor to help them purchase food at fair prices, be it local or imported. And local governments and world development organizations need to help farmers capitalize on high prices when they can, by investing in sustainable growth of local agriculture.

Change, when it comes, will begin with consumers. Take Guthman’s garlic example. Since the 1990s, California farmers have complained vociferously about the flooding of American markets with cheap Chinese garlic. Environmentalists, too, have warned that the transportation-related pollution from importing Chinese garlic amounts to thirty-nine times more particulate matter and six times the global warming impact of transporting the California variety. Still, Chinese garlic is cheaper, and for that reason American markets stock as much of it as—and home cooks buy more of it than—the homegrown variety. But scientists recently confirmed what serious cooks knew all along: Chinese garlic lacks the intensity of American garlic, therefore requiring that we use more of it. Meanwhile, the unpredictability of fuel costs have made exporting Chinese garlic to California (and, for that matter, exporting California garlic to Europe) increasingly less prudent. Whether Americans will reconsider their penchant for cheap garlic is hard to say, but the reasons to do so are mounting.

Food reflects our values, traditions, and beliefs. Nothing is more personal or more intimate. Americans like to think that we put our money where our mouth is, but recently our mouths haven’t had all that much to say about it. Money has driven the argument. We eat what is put before us, what we know, and what we can afford. But here is something to consider: Has price become a bully? Recently, I was at a restaurant celebrating a birthday with friends. I studied the menu and considered a shrimp dish, flavored with chorizo, a Spanish sausage. I love spicy food, and the waitress assured us that this was the house “signature dish.” I hesitated, in some ways not wanting to know. It sounded great, after all. But of course I had to ask: Where did the shrimp come from? The waitress looked puzzled and then amused. If I was expecting gulf shrimp, she said, I was out of touch with reality. “No one gets those anymore. We get our shrimp frozen from Asia just like everyone else.” I thanked her and ordered the chicken. My friends ordered the frozen Asian shrimp, and polishing it off, they swore it was the best they had ever tasted . . . for the price.

Look, I know that Americans have a hard time accepting that sweatshops can help people.

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NICHOLAS KRISTOF, “WHERE SWEATSHOPS ARE A DREAM”

A cheap price is a shortcut to being cheated.

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ANCIENT CHINESE PROVERB

 

 

 

 

 

China was not always factory to the world. Until the middle of the last century the laborious process of moving large shipments from Asia was so costly as to be prohibitive. Loose cargo was baled or bundled and piled high on the backs of longshoremen to be loaded and unloaded from truck, barge, train, or ship, a slow process plagued by inefficiencies and corruption. Pilferage was so common that shipping items of value—watches, whiskey, radios, gold—was avoided. Perishables—like shrimp—spoiled. Breakage was also a factor, as was the insurance to cover it. Wages were rock-bottom low in East Asia, South America, and India even then, but for most Americans the exorbitant cost of shipping—10 to 25 percent of the total cost—put most imported goods out of reach. Back then, buying local was not a virtue, it was a necessity.

Shipping containers changed all that. The rectangular steel and aluminum boxes enabled a seamless flow of goods from truck to train to ship and back again. They reduced theft, spoilage, delays, and over 90 percent of the cost. Unloaded by crane from boat to truck to train to barge, no backs were wrenched, no whiskey or watch or gold gone missing. Today, a skeleton crew of a dozen hands can navigate a vessel freighted with up to six thousand containers, each the size and shape of a railroad car. Containers made shipping fast and predictable, enabling the just-in-time delivery system that retailers have come to depend on. In the estimations of some economists, containers made the transport of goods so cheap as to be essentially free. They certainly help make many things from China unbelievably cheap. Big Boxes, Category Killers, Bargain Basements, and Dollar Stores all owe their existence to fast boats from China and the containers they carry.

The Port of Los Angeles is the busiest container port in the United States, a veritable Ellis Island for stuff. Every year the equivalent of 8.3 million twenty-foot-long containers arrive here, the vast bulk of them from China. Some of these get loaded onto trucks and then on trains headed straight across the country. For others the journey is much shorter. I followed one truckload just half a dozen miles or so to Concord Enterprises in Vernon, California.

With fewer than one hundred residents, Vernon is the smallest incorporated city in southern California, only 5.2 square miles. This “industrial Mayberry” is a blur of furniture assembly shops, car part distributors, meatpacking plants, and taco stands. Concord Enterprises, one of the largest import/export dollar store distribution centers in the country, seems right at home here. Concord supplies dollar stores from Alaska to Panama with pallets of cosmetics, razors, toothbrushes, underwear, panty hose, turkey basters, soybased fruit drinks, and an impressive assortment of bongs thinly disguised as vases. The prices of these and the roughly nine thousand other items on display bring new meaning to the word “affordable.” A pair of boys’ kung fu shoes—black with a red lining—cost 41 cents. A package of twenty-four disposable razors was selling for 65 cents; a trio of toothbrushes—one each in purple, blue, and green—for 18 cents. David, a dapper man in his mid-fifties, had, when we met, worked at Concord for six years. Before that he owned a textile factory in Iran. “My wife would never have dreamed of shopping at a dollar store there,” he said, declining to give his last name. “But now she does. Eventually, we all go to the dollar store.”

Without China there would be no dollar store: Those 41-cent kung fu shoes, the 6-cent toothbrushes, and more than 70 percent of the rest of Concord’s merchandise come straight out of the box from China. The story of China’s explosive growth and the cheap labor that powers it is, of course, a familiar one. Still, how human-made objects can travel all that distance and be sold for next to nothing seems a wonder worth exploring.

China may be the factory to the world, but it is not the world’s largest manufacturer. It makes only one-twentieth of the world’s manufactured goods. Nor is China the only low-wage or even the lowest-wage country. A number of Latin American nations come close, and the labor in Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, and Vietnam is cheaper. Labor in many African nations is cheaper still. But no other low-wage country can match China’s efficiency and reach. Germany, the world’s largest exporter, is known for its quality. China makes many beautiful, sturdy, and useful things, but it is not the quality of its goods that drives business to its door. The strength of the booming Chinese export markets rests on the “China price,” made possible by the country’s determination to manufacture and sell shoes and toothbrushes and almost everything else at a price no developed nation can touch.

The China price has come to mean the lowest price imaginable, minus a bit. Beyond that, the China price has transformed the way we think about
things
. In
A Year Without “Made in China,”
author Sara Bongiorni chronicles her family’s experience of surviving just one year without purchasing Chinese-made goods. The author’s struggle to find affordable sneakers, small appliances, sunglasses, and mouse traps offers apt illustration of the power of low price to direct our behavior and thinking. Thanks to the China price we have come to expect once weighty and consequential purchases—blenders, DVD players, microwave ovens, photo albums, linens, and even shoes—to be hardly more than an impulse buy. Not even a book contract could cure Bongiorni’s addiction to cheap stuff: Before the year was out, she was coercing friends and family members to “gift” her household with Chinese imports.

Despite spectacular economic growth, China is not yet a prosperous country. Yes, wealth has soared there in the past couple of decades, but the wealth is not evenly shared. In what I’ve seen strolling the back streets of Shanghai and Beijing and their outskirts, the poverty is palpable. In the countryside, where incomes are about a third of what they are in the city, matters are even worse. Officially, 42.3 million people live in poverty, but that figure underestimates the problem. In China the official poverty line is drawn at $156 a year, just over a third of the World Bank poverty limit of $456 a year. China’s centralized government holds less sway than it might in outlying regions where corruption is a way of life. But the government’s focus is not on social justice and equity for its citizens but on political stability, and to achieve that it must keep its business humming and its booming population occupied.

At a seminar I attended in Shanghai, a government official warned a roomful of foreign businessmen that the country was not interested in purchasing the latest labor-saving devices, even machines that would reduce occupational risks. There were, he said, too many hands to keep busy to allow machines to take their place. No matter the official policies about modernization and worker safety, those 1.3 billion pairs of hands could not be allowed to grow idle. China regards economic progress as the solution to most of its ills and is therefore committed to economic growth at all costs. This focus has led to incredible advance, but also to blind spots and to a policy of public defensiveness that encourages the papering over of inequities and injustice. Hu Jindou, a professor of economics at Beijing University of Technology, put it bluntly in an interview with the
International Herald Tribune:
“In order to achieve modernization, people will go to any ends to earn money, to advance their interests, leaving behind morality, humanity and even a little bit of compassion, let alone the law or regulations, which are poorly implemented. Everything is about the economy now, just like everything was about politics in the Mao era, and forced labor or child labor is far from an isolated phenomenon. It is rooted deeply in today’s reality, a combination of capitalism, socialism, feudalism and slavery.”