The Locavore's Dilemma (15 page)

No doubt, people can accomplish many things cheaply—such as, say, growing organic tropical products in Maine—if their time and extra trouble are not factored in. In real life, however, most of us are happy to buy a house built by other people who specialize in various trades. The same is true where our food is concerned. Sure, many people are currently (re)discovering the joys of gardening or supporting local farmers out of a sense of duty. Michael Pollan might wax poetic over the fact that, by the end of the Second World War “more than 20 million [ Victory]
home gardens were supplying 40% of the produce consumed in America,” but this relative success (after all, 40% was still not even a majority of the supply) owed much to a drastic reduction in the number of male farm workers and didn't last once more abundant and cheaper produce again became available through normal commercial channels.
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As a writer in the
Ladies' Home Journal
observed in 1929, “Primitive men spent nearly all his time getting, caring for, and preparing food. In a real sense, the aim of human progress has been to make these processes ever easier and easier. The less time we are forced to spend thinking about food, the more we have for higher things, so called.”
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Many people might be yearning to connect with nature, community, and local food, but much historical evidence suggests that most won't find it as rewarding as they first believed it to be.

As a result of urbanization and long distance trade in agricultural and other products, consumers in advanced economies now enjoy a much larger, diversified, and affordable year-round food supply than would have otherwise been the case. Because of the dramatically increased productivity that resulted from geographical specialization and economies of scale, numerous remunerative jobs were created in both the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors. For instance, according to 2000–2002 numbers, the average value of agricultural production per worker was about $50,000 in the United States and $40,000 for the United Kingdom compared to the much more “local” and labor intensive agricultural sectors of Nigeria and India, where these figures are respectively about $700 and $400.
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The United States and the United Kingdom could easily create the kind of jobs that Nigeria and India have in abundance, but much wealth would be destroyed in the process and a lower standard of living ensured for all. Besides, as the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain observes, the “labor-intensive pastoral vision” of local food activists implies that “either lots of the citizens of wealthy countries like America and Italy are going to have to take up farming again,” something which he rightly thinks unlikely, or else, “importing huge numbers of poor brown people from elsewhere—to grow those
tasty, crunchy vegetables for more comfortable white masters. So, while animals of the future might be cruelty-free ... what about life for those who have to shovel the shit from their stalls?”
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Why is it that American and British agricultural workers are so much more productive than their Nigerian and Indian counterparts and, as a result, enjoy a much higher standard of living? Hard work is not the issue, for if anything Indian and Nigerian subsistence farmers work even harder than food producers in the U.S. and U.K. Rather, the difference between the two groups is that those in more advanced economies—where people specialize in what they do best in the most favorable locations and trade extensively with each other—belong to a much more sophisticated and geographically extended division of labor than subsistence farmers enjoy. Greater self-sufficiency has always been a one-way road to poverty, even at the national level. As was obvious to the geographer Jacques Redway more than a century ago:

Of course, China's economic growth in the last few decades was entirely contingent on its becoming part of the international division of labor and on relying ever more on foreign goods and markets. Suffice it to say here that it is now the world's largest importer of soybeans (over 50 million tons a year as of this writing) to feed its hogs and chickens,
even though soybeans are native to China and the country is the world's fourth largest producer of this commodity (although it lags significantly behind the top three, the U.S., Brazil, and Argentina).
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True, increasing agricultural productivity and letting in cheaper imports will always hurt inefficient agricultural producers and their workers. On the other hand, cheaper prices mean that consumers have more income available to spend on other things—and all of us are consumers. In the end, if the economic case made by locavores was sensible, it would not stop at the “foodshed next door” but would revert all the way back to subsistence agriculture. And why stop there? Why not adopt a stance similar to that of the Horse Association of America a century ago? When faced with the advent of gasoline and diesel-powered engines, it “emphasized that reliance on horses kept money within the community whereas the use of tractors required an outflow of the cash required to purchase and operate the equipment.”
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The real key to economic development and improved standards of living, as Adam Smith identified so long ago, is to make “a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work.”
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Creating miserable “local” jobs is easy, but creating prosperity and a higher standard of living requires long distance trade.

Fire, the ax, the plow, and firearm have been the four fundamental tools of our modern culture, and in some of the most fertile and productive regions of the earth they have raised the environmental resistance to such a height that the carrying capacity has been brought nearly as low as that of the Gobi or the tundras of Siberia. Hundreds of millions of acres of once rich land are now as poor as—or worse than—the city gardener's sterile plot. Despoiled forests, erosion, wildlife extermination, overgrazing, and the dropping of water tables are unforeseen and unwanted by-blows of a vigorous and adolescent culture on the loose.

—WILLIAM VOGT. 1948.
Road to Survival
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William Sloane Associates, Inc., p. 33

 

 

 

 

L
ocal food activists who are willing to concede some usefulness to market prices nonetheless strongly believe that their prescription will deliver environmental benefits to which prices are oblivious. Once again, however, they fail to take a broad enough look at the relevant
issues to understand some inherent shortcomings of their prescription. Before we address these problems, though, we must first paint a more accurate portrait of natural evolution and of the true environmental impact of primitive agricultural production technologies.

Perhaps the most deeply-felt conviction of environmental and food activists is that “Nature” is a fragile and finely balanced web of interrelationships among living things upon which the first modern humans had little impact because of their small numbers and primitive technologies. By embracing industrialized civilization, however, we became nothing short of a deadly cancer to our planet. Although widespread, these beliefs are now known to be mistaken. Far from being “balanced,” landscapes and ecosystems are to the contrary dynamic environments where living and nonliving components constantly interact with each other. Because of factors such as keener predators, invasive species, animal diseases, tectonic processes, frost, lightning strikes, hurricanes, and ice ages, nature has always been in flux.
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Our ancestors have also long had a profound influence on all regions of the globe from the moment they developed technologies (such as seafaring vessels, warmer clothing and shelter, and better hunting tools and strategies) that made it possible for them to colonize habitats that had previously been too harsh or whose potential offerings (from large land, freshwater and seawater animals to small prey and grasses) had been too dangerous or too difficult to tap into profitably. In the process, not only did they become the ultimate “invasive species,” but also they profoundly reshaped their surroundings. For example, many large mammal and bird species disappeared soon after humans reached the shores of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, and countless small islands.
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Perhaps their most profound impact over time, however, was that they profoundly altered the natural fire regime of countless ecosystems through deliberate and regular burning of the landscape, a
practice which both opened and reduced forested landscape and created or “refreshed” prairies and meadows, the process resulting in a significant increase of large herbivores and better hunting conditions.
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With the invention of agriculture came the creation of cropland and pastureland out of forests and wetlands; the opening up of forest canopies through the cutting of tree sprouts and limbs for fodder and the grazing of animals; the removal of predators and competing wild herbivorous mammals; and the worldwide transfer and adaptation of domesticated plants and animals.
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In the words of Norwegian botanist Knut Faegri, apart from “some small and doubtful exceptions, all vegetation types were created or modified by man. . . . The ‘natural' landscapes of preceding generations,” Faegri tells us, “are now understood for what they really are: relics of earlier types of land-use, which were maintained by extensive methods demanding little machinery and much manpower and which therefore became uneconomical… By abandoning these methods and discontinuing traditional land-use, the landscape was left to regenerate in response to other uses or non-use.”
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Even much of the Amazon basin is now widely believed to be the recent evolution of massive orchards made up of hundreds of different crops of fruit, palm and nut trees that were created long ago by significant populations who were later decimated by European diseases and conquest. “Native” Amazonian agriculturalists, it turns out, not only profoundly altered local tree compositions and densities, but also their genetic makeup, just as wheat farmers had transformed wild wheat varieties into domesticated ones.
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Another widespread misconception is that human activities can only reduce species' richness; actually, landscapes created or impacted by human actions often display greater levels of biodiversity than natural ones. This is not controversial on a small scale, such as when inhabitants open a road in the middle of a forest and create a niche habitat for specific plants that would not otherwise be present in this location. The same effect can also be observed on a much larger scale, especially in environments where humans initially had little impact. For example,
non-native settlers introduced more than 4,000 plant species in North America in the last 400 years and were directly responsible for what is now nearly 20% of the continent's vascular plant biodiversity.
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Some, like kudzu, purple loosestrife, and water hyacinths, are problematic, but most are not. The state flowers of Vermont and New Hampshire, red clover and purple lilac, are of European origins. In New Zealand, Europeans added approximately 2,000 plant species to a roughly equal number of native species, with only three native plant species believed to have disappeared in the process. Even in the case of small island habitats, the later introduction of foreign species often brought back local bird biodiversity to levels comparable to those that preceded human arrival.
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According to biologist Mark Davis and his collaborators, the “introduction of non-native species has almost always increased the number of species in a region” and the only invasive species that might prove significant threats are pathogens and predators in lakes and on islands.
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(A related yet different complaint is that the last century has been a disaster in terms of commercial crop diversity losses, yet a case has been made that overall commercial crop diversity has been sustained by the creation and addition of thousands of new varieties.
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True, much like critics of globalization who disdain the increased homogenization of urban areas—which are becoming more similar by having each become more diverse in the same way, say by harboring the same or similar food and retail outlets, sushi joints, Irish bars, etc.—many landscape ecologists are not fond of what they refer to as the “homogecene” (i.e., humanity's homogenization of the world's flora and fauna through transport of species across once insurmountable barriers), arguing that richness is only one component of biodiversity and that invasive exotics can relegate existing populations of native species to marginal habitats, leading to genetic bottlenecks and eventual decline, extirpation, and/or extinction over time. Yet, no specialist denies that much human-caused biodiversity losses long predate the advent of modern agri-business and that only very wealthy societies can afford to care about the fate of native species with no direct economic value. As we see things, plants, insects,
and other animals that have a major negative impact on human health and economically valuable resources should obviously be kept under control, but whether they are “native” or “invasive” should be irrelevant, for, in the words of Davis and his collaborators, the fight against invasive species ultimately amounts to “an impossible quest to restore the world to some imaginary, pristine state.”
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