The Locavore's Dilemma (2 page)

We should care because ideas have consequences. Many, many more people will pledge allegiance to the local food movement than will actually pay a premium in price or inconvenience for local food. They'll support politicians who pay fealty to the latest trends and complain about conventional food to pollsters. Consumers and voters are willing to show support for local food while letting others pay the bill for their good intentions. The notions that the past was better, local is important, technology should be feared, and trade is bad are powerful, and extremely dangerous.

After the January, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the biotech company Monsanto donated 475 tons of seed to Haitian farmers. Monsanto is not known for being nimble in its relations with the public, but the company made sure that none of the donated seed was genetically altered.
That gesture wasn't enough; protests quickly erupted all over Haiti and the U.S. You would have thought Monsanto was passing out free cigarettes to teenagers. “Peasant groups” in Haiti marched under banners of “Down with GMO and hybrid seeds.” Hybridization has been around since Gregor Mendel experimented with peas in the 1850s. Hybrid crops have saved the lives of billions of hungry people. Farmers in the U.S. began adopting hybrid seeds in the 1920s, and hybrids have increased yields for every crop that lends itself to hybridization. Donating hybrid seeds is not exactly pushing the envelope of food or farming technology, but breeding and producing hybrid seed is a complicated process typically done by large firms and never by individual farmers. That was enough to set off the protests.

The Organic Consumers of America sent 10,000 emails damning Monsanto. Doudou Pierre, the “grassroots” National Coordinating Committee Member of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security, said: “We're for seeds that have never been touched by multinationals.”
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U.S. writer Beverly Bell explains: “The Haitian social movement's concern is not just about the dangers of chemicals and the possibility of future GMO imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local food for consumption, in what is called food sovereignty.”
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Church groups in the U.S. donated some 13,300 machetes and 9,200 hoes to, I guess, encourage traditional agriculture in Haiti. It's worth noting that defenders of “traditional agriculture” are usually several generations removed from its practice. The romance of swinging a hoe or a machete is largely lost on people who've actually spent some time on the business end of those “traditional” technologies.

One in four Haitians was hungry before the earthquake: local food for local people was and is sentencing Haitians to a life of misery, disease, and all too often death. The position of the groups protesting Monsanto's donation is that brown people should starve rather than plant seeds touched by the hands of multinationals. Desrochers and Shimizu write not because it matters what the residents of Berkeley or
the Hamptons eat, but because it matters that the residents of Haiti don't eat. It is the worst kind of cultural imperialism for wealthy and well-fed Americans to sentence their neighbors to a life of hunger and machete swinging. Bad ideas can have terrible consequences, and hopefully this book will help to put some of those bad ideas to rest.

Only three countries in Africa allow the use of biotechnology because of the reluctance of international organizations to approve the technology and the fact that the European Union will not buy most genetically modified products. While U.S. yields are increasing at 2% a year and Asian yields have quadrupled over the past 50 years, African yields haven't increased at all. There are many reasons for Africa's lagging yields, but the refusal of most of the continent to adopt biotechnology explains much of the disparity.

On my farm in Missouri, we use genetically modified seeds that control insects. African farmers have not had the opportunity to plant similar genetically modified varieties, and can't afford insecticides. Consequently, each year African farmers lose a large portion of their crops to insects.

Rice varieties genetically modified to prevent blindness have been tied up in the regulatory equivalent of purgatory for 13 long years. The Swiss biologist who invented the technology is furious, as well he should be. The delay, according to him, has been “responsible for the death and blindness of thousands of children and young mothers.”
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African farmers are aware of what is happening to them, and they aren't happy. Matthew Ridley, writing in the
Wall Street Journal:
“In Uganda, where people often eat three times their body weight in bananas a year, a GM banana that is resistant to a bacterial wilt disease, which causes $500 million in annual losses and cannot be treated with pesticides, is being tested behind high security fences. The fences are there not to keep out anti-GM protesters, as in the West, but to keep out local farmers keen to grow the new crop.”
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It's clear that something more than a debate about health and science is going on here. The EU recently allowed the planting of a genetically modified potato, and even though this tuber was intended for paper production
and not for human consumption, the Italian Agriculture minister protested, vowing to “defend and safeguard traditional agriculture and citizen's health.” It is no coincidence that the mention of “traditional agriculture” was given precedence in the Minister's statement. The reluctance of much of the world to adopt biotechnology is not about the safety of the seed, but rather the preservation of “traditional agriculture” and what the Haitian protesters called food sovereignty. In large parts of the world, local trumps science, and people suffer as a result.

The Obama administration has had much to say about local food. The First Lady has planted a garden, organic, of course, and the Department of Agriculture is spending 50 million or so on a program called Know Your Farmer. The effort is likely to disappoint: in fact, a suburban housewife determined to know this corn farmer is likely to be mortified by my looks, the way I smell, and my opinions. I can't imagine why any resident of Manhattan would want to know me, and, trust me, some of my neighbors are even worse.

This is all right with us. There's a certain comfort that comes from never having to make a sales call. I raise #2 yellow corn, and it's worth no more or no less than any other farmer's corn. As a producer of commodity corn and soybeans, the fact that I'm wearing bib overalls and am the antithesis of charming doesn't affect my success at all. One of the assumptions implicit in all this local food stuff is that we farmers are dying to make a connection with our customers. In many cases, nothing could be further from the truth. All we want is to sell corn and be left alone.

Political leaders are telling farmers to grow and sell local, traditional, and even organic foods, and the culture and the intelligentsia are telling us much the same. As the authors point out, Michael Pollan is a rock star, and Oprah Winfrey spent a lot of time criticizing our present food system. Food Inc. was nominated for an Academy Award and has become part of the curriculum for an untold number of college courses. Everybody that matters advises me to find a farmers' market and set up a stall. I should concentrate on marketing directly to consumers, including computing the food miles I have to travel to reach that market.
Perhaps Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) would be just the thing—I'll arrive on your front porch once a month, with corn, soybeans, and maybe even a geranium or two.

There is a problem with this plan. “Think local” may be what the culture prescribes, but the market is sending a markedly different message. Farm income was up 28% in 2010, topping 100 billion dollars for the first time. There's no better way to make a farmer mad than to accuse him of making a profit, so please don't quote me, but many “industrial” farmers are thriving. Corn and soybean exports are booming; beef and pork exports are at record highs. It is a very good time to be a monoculture growing industrial farmer using genetically modified seeds. Come to find out, the world desperately needs what we industrial farmers produce, and doesn't seem to care very much how we raise it.

This is exactly the opposite of so much of what we read about farming. One of the mainstays of the literature on the corruption of our present food system is that we farmers are mere grit in the gears of the industrial food system, ground to nothing by the ring gear of corporate greed and the pinion gear of concentrated markets, ruthless advertisers, and a political system controlled by Big Food. Michael Pollan spends a few days with an Iowa corn farmer in one of the early chapters of
The Omnivore's Dilemma
. By the end of the chapter, I felt like sending the farmer a bus ticket to the nearest homeless shelter. The combination of monopolistic purchasers of his products, price gouging suppliers, and the general tendency of everyone in our economy to stick it to the small farmer made Pollan's aggie quite a sympathetic character. Except the book gives just enough information for me to estimate his income in the past year, and if he didn't make $150k in 2011, I'll eat my hat.

The long-term trend for food demand is up. The U.N estimates that we'll have to increase food production by about 70% by the year 2050 in order to keep pace with the expected worldwide growth in population and income. Increases in food production will undoubtedly occur where it's most efficient to produce that food, which is often not where the hungry people live. International trade will have to grow and grow
rapidly. Food is destined to become less local, not more. This book makes the important and irrefutable case for why all these things are so, and marshals fact, quotation, and anecdote in a relentless march toward that inescapable conclusion.

The following beautifully written excerpt from Rod Dreher's book,
Crunchy Cons,
perfectly illustrates the idealized, romantic vision of farming that has captured the imagination of so many well-educated, high-income consumers:

It's almost impossible to read this passage without breaking into laughter if you've ever actually had to grow food, and deal with “the earth” in anything more than a metaphorical sense. Thanks to Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu for helping bring some hard truths to the conversation about food. I hope their book is read far and wide.

 

–
Blake Hurst
Tarkio, Missouri

 

 

Blake Hurst farms in Northwest Missouri with his family on a four-generation family farm. He and his wife Julie also own and operate a greenhouse business selling flowers in four states (Hurst Greenery
http://www.hurstgreenery.com/
). He is currently President of the Missouri Farm Bureau. His essays have appeared in
The American
, the
Wall Street Journal
,
Readers Digest
,
PERC Reports
,
The Wilson Quarterly
, and several other national and regional publications.

A few years ago, we attended a lecture by a distinguished environmental studies professor that was in large part a hymn to “locavorism.” By producing an ever-increasing portion of our food supply closer to where we live, he argued, we would simultaneously heal the planet, create jobs, ensure a more reliable and nutritious food supply, and improve physical, spiritual, and societal health. Strangely, though, he did not address why the globalized food supply chain had developed the way it did in the first place, an omission that we—economic policy analysts who know a little bit about the history of famines and the economic rationale for international trade—found rather myopic.

Had the speaker limited his talk to questionable generalizations about food production and availability, we would have likely not felt the urge to issue a detailed rebuttal. At one point during his speech, however, he opined that Japan was the most “parasitical” society on Earth because of its unparalleled dependence on food imports. Suddenly, the discussion was getting personal, as one of us was born and raised near Tokyo. True, her people made their home on a few crowded islands whose limited agricultural potential is periodically subjected to natural disasters and therefore had no choice but to rely on others to help them obtain a decent diet. Were they to revert back to the insular self-sufficiency of their ancestors, present-day Japanese citizens would have to get by with minute quantities of rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, buckwheat, and vegetables, and would periodically struggle with malnutrition, hunger and starvation.
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