The Locavore's Dilemma (12 page)

The basic logic of what Bastiat enthusiasts have dubbed the “broken window fallacy” similarly applies to the short-sighted reasoning of local food protectionists. By forcing people to buy more expensive local food, locavorism impoverishes consumers who will then have less money to spend on other things, including other locally produced goods and services. For instance, a few years ago, one (admittedly, industry funded)
food analyst observed that for $12.25 he could purchase at a nearby supermarket items comparable to the 7 ears of corn, 7 jumbo apples, 6 tomatoes, and loaf of multigrain bread he had bought for $29 at a Washington, D.C. farmers market.
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In the original “100-mile diet” experiment,
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in 2005 a couple based in southwest British Columbia had to spend significantly more money on purchasing locally grown products (both organic and conventional) than if they had bought comparable substitutes at their local supermarkets. For example, a locally grown organic salad mix cost $17.99 a pound compared to about $7.00 a pound for a conventional salad mix and honey, $11 a kilo instead of $2.59 for a kilo of sugar. (Of course, a beekeeper friend of ours insists that these are really not substitutes, but bear with us…) In addition, the time spent acquiring and preparing food (for both immediate and later consumption) was comparable to holding a part-time job.

Truth be told, however, the higher prices paid by the British Columbia couple were only a small fraction of what they would have been if the other local people they bought various goods and services from had also engaged in their experiment. This is because the extra time and money these other merchants and farmers would have had to devote to local food purchases and preparation would have forced them either to increase the costs of the services they provided or cut down on their capacity to offer them. Furthermore, because locavores will buy less from foreigners, the latter will have fewer resources available to purchase other goods and services made wholly or partly in the locavores' community, thus destroying a number of “local” jobs in the process.

Although this should go without saying, higher consumer prices always and everywhere mean greater poverty and a lower standard of living for all. True wealth and job creation do not flow from consumers paying more to obtain less, but rather from innovative developments that deliver better products at lower prices, in the process allowing individuals to increase consumption and to invest in the creation of new ways of doing things and of new useful things to do.

In the realm of food production, significant advances in the volume, quality, and affordability of items created would have been impossible without the development of long distance trade, regional specialization, and economies of scale. In the long run, these not only improved the living standard of consumers, but also of agricultural workers who remained in this sector and those who left it for better opportunities. Unfortunately, locavores typically misconstrue the real economic impact of each of these factors, as we will now illustrate.

As with all economic activities, a range of factors affects the profitability of agricultural endeavors, from the costs of various inputs (from diesel to insurance) and tax policies to consumers' shifting demands and producers' marketing abilities. More than any other sector, however, the success or failure of agricultural productions depends on where they take place. True, innovative behavior can sometimes overcome the shortcomings inherent to poorer, rockier, or less leveled soils; unsuitable climate for certain crops; less abundant water; or the poor quality of pastureland. Yet, as Adam Smith observed over two centuries ago, in many cases the “natural advantages which one country has over another in producing particular commodities are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them.” For instance, with the help of the greenhouse technologies of his day, Smith observed, decent grapes could be grown in Scotland from which a very good wine could be made—but “at about 30 times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries.” He then asked rhetorically if it would be reasonable to adopt a law “to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland?” Doing so, he points out, “would be a manifest absurdity” inasmuch as Scottish people would have to use thirty times as many resources than if they were to import wine from Southern Europe, resources which
would then be no longer available to create wealth in other activities more suited to local conditions.
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Smith's example was deliberately extreme in order to make his point, but many significant productivity differences between locations are often not obvious to nonspecialists. For example, fruit and vegetable producers located in more humid regions typically face more serious fungus problems than those located in drier ones. Some apple varieties are less resistant to cold weather than others. Dairy farmers whose pastureland is chock full of clover and high quality grass have less need to buy additional feed for their cows than competitors whose animals graze on poorer vegetation. Producers who benefit from a substantially longer growing season can justify massive investments in the development of new plant varieties that yield more berries over longer periods of time.

Whether obvious or more subtle, however, the most glaring shortcoming of the locavores' economic rhetoric is that it ignores productivity differentials—and therefore production costs—between agricultural locations. As all of agricultural history illustrates, trade between regions that specialize in products for which they have significant advantages (say, wine or wheat) delivers more food for less money than if producers in both regions tried to grow a range of crops unsuitable to their soil and climate. Though this is a basic fact of agricultural life, a growing number of local food activists argue that present-day regional specialization is largely the result of agricultural subsidies that benefit a few select crops such as corn. Get rid of these “comparative advantage mirages,” they argue, and the economic profitability of monocultures will quickly be overtaken by those of polycultures—plots of land on which multiple and complementary plants and animals are produced.
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These arguments, however, do not stand up in light of the available historical evidence.

First, large-scale monocultures long predate modern subsidies and are as ancient as urbanization and maritime transportation—as is attested by, among other evidence, the large grain and olive-oil trade of Mediterranean antiquity. For instance, during Ancient Athens'peak period, its soft bread wheat supply was imported by ships from production
zones located in what is now southern Russia, the Aegean islands, and the Greek mainland. Because of their poorer soil and drier climate, producers in Athens' hinterland could not compete with these foreigners and instead focused their efforts on growing barley (mostly for local consumption) and replanted lands formerly devoted to grain production with vineyards and olive and fig orchards, the output of which was both consumed domestically and exported over long distances.
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The case made by food activists on behalf of polycultures is similarly weak. In short, polycultures—thanks to the supposed positive effects of the interactions of their attendant species—are said to deliver large amounts of food from little more than “soil, water, and sunlight.”
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To bolster their case, proponents of alternative agricultural systems often point to the Japanese farmer Takao Furuno who, on his seven-acre Kyushu farm, produces enough rice, vegetables, duck meat and eggs, fish, and vegetables to feed 100 local families.
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How this approach fundamentally differs from old-fashioned subsistence agriculture—now often labeled “globally-important ingenious agricultural heritage systems” (GIAHS) by activists and sustainable development theorists
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—isn't clear to us. After all, subsistence agriculture (GIAHS) is built on “natural ecological processes” rather than “against them; . . . endowed with nutrient-enriching plants, insect predators, pollinators, nitrogen-fixing and nitrogen-decomposing bacteria, and a variety of other organisms that perform various beneficial ecological functions;” and characterized by “small farm size” and “diversified production based on mixtures of crops, trees, and animals with high genetic variability, maximum use of local resources, and low dependence on off-farm inputs” (such as synthetic chemicals manufactured in distant locations).
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Or, as the historian Peter Garnsey observed in 1988, the ancient Greek and Roman small farmer “traditionally practiced mixed farming, the poly-cropping of arable and trees on the same land with the addition of a little livestock.”
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Nice indeed, unless one remembers that subsistence farming everywhere always delivered very little return and low standards of living for all the hard labor required.

Of course, what really sets Furuno and other modern polyculture “pioneers” apart from their predecessors is that they benefit from much more advanced technologies and knowledge—agricultural machinery, electricity, carbon fuels, refrigeration, transportation, electric fences, the help of agricultural extension scientists, etc.—and much wealthier customers, thanks to the fact that they ply their trade in societies in which long-distance trade, urbanization, and commercial agriculture have long displaced subsistence agriculture. Like all subsistence farmers before them, however, practitioners of “modern” polycultures exhibit comparatively low productivity and thus entail many more man-hours per unit of output. According to one sympathetic report, Furuno's approach “requires far more intensive and continuous management than does its industrial counterpart” and he “must carefully monitor the performance of each crop and apply any new insights the following season—requirements that add considerably to a farmer's labor hours.”
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According to Matt Liebman, Iowa State University's cropping system diversification and polyculture expert, this method can require almost twice the labor hours as that of a conventional agribusiness approach. Lower productivity and longer hours are then translated into higher price tags for consumers.
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There are good practical reasons why subsistence agriculture systems were supplanted by large-scale monocultures in all developing economies a long time ago and they are still very relevant today. The importance of differences in soil and climate, along with the overall resources (including manpower) required to produce food, cannot be overlooked.

In the end, the fact that many otherwise prosperous locations are not amenable to a locavore lifestyle is too obvious to be ignored by proponents of locavorism, although they sometimes find a simple way around it. Perhaps the most telling example in this respect is that of writer Barbara Kingsolver who left her home outside of Tucson, Arizona, and relocated full-time with her family to a farm in Washington County in rural Virginia, “a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the grounds.”
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She chronicled their experiences in a book that became a bestseller,
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
. We have no doubt that life in Washington County is pleasant if you can make a go of it. To most people, however, a location like Tucson—despite the fact that it was in its third year of drought when the Kingsolvers left and residents wouldn't last long without massive food imports—offers more opportunities for personal development.

Latitude is another geographical consideration whose importance and benefits are widely misunderstood and underappreciated. The key issue here is that otherwise comparable production locations situated some distance from each other on a north-south axis will experience different ripening periods for the same commodity. Latitude was of comparatively little economic importance until the development of transportation and preservation technologies that could move perishable items quickly and cheaply over long distances, but it became crucial as soon as this was accomplished. To understand why, however, one must first understand the typical problems of “local” markets in perishable food items before these developments.

In short, neighboring farmers everywhere always grew similar things that reached maturity simultaneously. In good years, local producers would flood area markets with their produce, severely depressing prices and wasting much of their crops in the process. In bad ones, when insects, plant diseases, bad weather, or floods had taken their toll, very little if anything might be available.

In what might be termed a typical case of the “curse of good years,” the historian Blake McKelvey observes that, at the beginning of the 19th century, settlers in the greater Rochester region in upstate New York knew perfectly well that “theirs was a great fruit country,” but unfortunately the “slow and costly transport facilities practically prohibited the shipment of fruit.” Knowing they couldn't make a living specializing
in their production, they instead directed most of their efforts to less perishable items like forest products and grain—by 1838, Rochester was the largest flour-producing city in the world and consequently nicknamed the “Flour City.” Nonetheless, a fair number of apples and peaches were produced in the area. While apples could always be turned into cider, peaches were more problematic. In good years, the local markets were “glutted . . . during the ripening season” and, often enough, “unwilling to sell at twenty cents a bushel,” farmers would “dump . . . wagon loads into the Genesee [river].”
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In following years, grains produced more efficiently in the American Midwest became available at cheaper prices than could be produced in the region. On the other hand, improvements in transportation made it possible to deliver fresh produce to more distant consumers and a number of farmers profitably switched from growing grain to cultivating orchards. In the meantime, other local entrepreneurs had developed a thriving nursery industry (where plants are propagated and grown to usable size), which also relied on a much broader geographical customer base. The
Flour City
had become the
Flower City
. Lower consumer prices, a wider range of products, new job creation, and better overall standards of living had been made possible by improvements in transportation and the regional specialization of agricultural productions.