The Locavore's Dilemma (16 page)

If one is willing to consider that something along the lines of doubling the world's food output by 2050 is required, and that, as the molecular biologist Nina Fedoroff observes, agriculture is always “ecologically destructive, whether it is performed at the subsistence level for a single family or on an industrial scale,”
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then the most environmentally sensible course to pursue is to minimize the amount of land devoted to food production by increasing agricultural yields. In other words, the smaller the total area in active human use, the more environmentally friendly is the landscape.
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If past achievements and trends provide any indication, this is a realistic goal
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—as long as one embraces long-distance trade and rejects locavorism, as we will now argue.

An article of faith among locavores is that because their impacts are so concentrated in a few locations, modern industrial agriculture does more damage to the environment than smaller-scale and less technology-intensive operations. Ironically, the low productivity practices now advocated by locavores are the ones that previous generations of environmental activists believed were the cause of problems such as deforestation, massive soil erosion, depletion and compaction, and outright ecological collapse.

In an often quoted passage, Plato complained more than 2000 years ago that if Athens' hinterland hills had once been “covered with soil,” the plains “full of rich earth,” and the mountains displaying an “abundance of wood,” by his time many mountains could “only afford sustenance to
bees” while, as in small islands, all the “richer and softer parts of the soil [had] fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land [was] being left.”
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Even though some scholars now suggest that the Greek philosopher was exaggerating to make a point,
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fears of widespread land mismanagement and irremediable top soil losses recurred from then on. To give but one more recent illustration, in their 1939 classic
The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion
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(a book which reviewed the vast literature of the time on the topic), British writers Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte argued that “as the result solely of human mismanagement, the soils upon which men have attempted to found new civilizations are disappearing, washed away by water and blown away by wind;” that the “destruction of the earth's thin living cover is proceeding at a rate and on a scale unparalleled in history, and when that thin cover—the soil—is gone, the fertile regions where it formerly lay will be uninhabitable deserts,” just as had happened to “former civilizations and empires whose ruined cities now lie amid barren wastes that once were the world's most fertile lands.”
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Erosion, they proclaimed, was the “modern symptom of maladjustment between human society and its environment. It is a warning that nature is in full revolt against the sudden incursion of an exotic civilization into her ordered domains.”
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As is now obvious, although much damage was done in some areas, the global catastrophe predicted by past activists never materialized because of the adoption of a number of tools and strategies, from contour plowing, windbreaks, legume fallow crops, mulching and alley cropping to deferred and rotational grazing, drip irrigation, re-vegetation and no-till agriculture. Unfortunately, one of the greatest advances in combating erosion in the last decades—“no-till” agriculture, which leaves the root systems of previous crops undisturbed, thereby retaining organic matter and greatly discouraging erosion—is decried by many activists because of its reliance on rDNA-modified plants and synthetic herbicides.

Be that as it may, the key point is that by concentrating the growing of crops in ever more suitable locations, long distance trade not only
maximized output and drastically lowered prices, but also significantly reduced the environmental impact of agriculture. For instance, the agricultural economist Dennis Avery observes that with the rise of the American corn and wheat belts in the 19th century, grain growers in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley could no longer compete with producers whose yields were three times higher than theirs and whose farm machinery didn't get damaged by buried rocks. In short order they had no choice but to switch to cattle grazing and wood production for which their land was better suited. As a result, in today's Shenandoah Valley wildlife is more common than in colonial and pre-colonial times, the area has gained beauty and the “huge soil erosion losses that cropping inflicted on its steep, rocky slopes” has long ended. True, the ecosystems of grain producing states from Indiana to Montana have been profoundly altered, but because their land is more productive and less prone to erosion, more grain is now being produced on fewer acres and, overall, more habitat is available for wildlife. Avery further argues that, because of similar land use changes in many other locations, severe erosion problems are now largely confined “to poor countries extending low-yield farming onto fragile soils.”
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Of course, Avery was far from being the first agricultural analyst to observe this phenomenon.
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To quote but one other writer, the Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky observed in 1899 that “as long as any rural economy is self-sufficient it has to produce everything which it needs, irrespective of whether the soil is suitable or not. Grain has to be cultivated on infertile, stony and steeply sloping ground as well as on rich soils.” In time, however, the emergence of commodity production and overseas competition meant that “it was no longer necessary to carry on producing grain on unsuitable soils, and where circumstances were favorable it was taken off the land and replaced by other types of agricultural production,” such as orchards, cattle, and dairy farming.
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International trade is also beneficial in terms of overall water usage, as exporting food from locations where it is abundant to regions where it isn't reduces the need to drain surface waters and aquifers in these
less-productive areas. For instance, a country that imports one ton of wheat instead of producing it domestically is said to save about 1,300 cubic meters of local (or “indigenous”) water. As food production represents approximately 70% of human water use, the issue is not insignificant. Trading agricultural products grown in water-rich regions to drier ones is now often subsumed under the labels of “virtual,” “embedded,” “embodied,” or “hidden” water
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to describe the environmental benefits of the practice, but it has long been a reality because of simple economic incentives.

Perhaps the least heralded triumph of high-yield agriculture and international trade is that, along with urbanization, they have played a crucial role in the expansion of forested areas in significant parts of the Earth in the last two centuries. Contrary to the common belief that massive deforestation is a recent occurrence (with the bulk of it taking place in the tropical regions of the world during the last five decades), it is now acknowledged by specialists that perhaps as much as nine-tenths of all deforestation caused by human beings since the emergence of civilization occurred before 1950 as people needed to clear vast tracts of forested land in order to provide themselves with shelter, food, warmth, and a multitude of implements.
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A reversal of these trends (not attributable to wars, epidemics, or collapse of civilizations) began in the early decades of the 19th century in certain European countries through a process since labeled “forest transitions.” In France, the forest area expanded by one-third between 1830 and 1960, and by a further quarter since 1960. Similar processes, although of varying intensity and scope, have been occurring in all major temperate and boreal forests and in every country with a per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) now exceeding U.S. $4,600 (roughly equal to the GDP of Chile) and in some developing economies, most notably China and India.
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While in some cases this outcome can be traced back to aggressive governmental policies,
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these efforts would have been unthinkable without drastically improved agricultural and forestry productivity (including the development of tree or “fiber farms”) that reduced harvesting
pressures in other locations. Of course, this transition also owed much to the more efficient transformation of wood into various products and to carbon-fuels that were the basis of substitutes for organic fibers, dyes, and animal feed (when automobiles, tractors, and trucks became substitutes for horses).
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Turning our back on the global food supply chain, and, in the process, reducing the quantity of food produced in the most suitable locations will inevitably result in larger amounts of inferior land being put under cultivation, the outcome of which can only be less output and greater environmental damage. Such problems would obviously be made worse by the locavores' rejection of technology-based approaches such as no-till farming. Unfortunately, these considerations are never addressed by locavores, whose primary focus is on reducing the distance that foodstuff travels between producers and final consumers.

The locavores' only original addition to the rhetoric of past generations of food and environmental activists is the concept of “food miles”—the distance food items travel from farms to consumers—which they use as a proxy for greenhouse gas emissions. In short, the more distance traveled, the more greenhouse gases emitted and the more overall environmental damage. Despite its popularity, the concept and its underlying rationale have been convincingly debunked in numerous Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies, a methodology that examines the environmental impact associated with all the stages of a product's life cycle, from raw material extraction to disposal of the finished product. Not surprisingly, it turns out that food miles can only be taken at face value in the case of identical items produced simultaneously in the exact same physical conditions but in different locations—in other words, if everything else is equal, which is obviously never the case in the real world.
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What follows is a brief summary of the most relevant findings of LCA researchers.

The fact that retailers are able to sell profitably food items that have traveled long distances clearly indicates that they can be produced more economically elsewhere for reasons that range from better growing conditions to cheaper labor costs. If this were not the case, transportation costs would act as an insurmountable trade barrier.

In the most comprehensive literature review to date, in 2007 New Zealand researchers Caroline Saunders and Peter Hayes
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surveyed 27 studies (17 of which were funded by U.K. sponsors) that all unambiguously demonstrated the relatively insignificant carbon dioxide emission impact of transporting food. For instance, in 2005, researchers associated with the U.K. Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) published
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a comparison of U.K. and Spanish tomatoes sold in the U.K. that factored in both the production and delivery by land transportation of Spanish tomatoes to British consumers. According to their estimates, U.K. tomato producers emitted 2,394 kilograms of carbon dioxide per ton compared to 630 kilograms per ton for their Spanish competitors. This huge gap could be traced back to differences in the climate between the two locations. Because they live in a much cooler and overcast part of Europe, producers in the United Kingdom had no choice but to use heated greenhouses. Their Spanish competitors, by contrast, are located along the much warmer Mediterranean coast and can obtain much higher yields in non-heated greenhouses, which emitted much less carbon dioxide, thanks to nature providing the heat free of charge.

Tomato production is but one instance of a much larger phenomenon. As American researchers have documented, in their country the “food miles” segment (from producer to retailer) contributes only about 4% of total emissions related to what Americans take home in their grocery bags, while 83% of households' carbon dioxide footprint for food consumption can be traced back to the production stages.
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Again, these credible LCA studies document the commonsensical
notion that producing food requires a lot more energy than moving it around. This is especially the case for food that requires significant heating and/or cold protection technologies when the same items can be produced elsewhere in much more favorable climates. A schematic overview of the globalized food supply chain can also help put the relative (un)importance of transportation in broader perspective: