The Locavore's Dilemma (18 page)

True, growing cities have always been surrounded by lower density suburbs (
suburbium
originally referred to the area beyond the walls of Ancient Rome), but these always become denser in good economic times.
⁵⁴
This phenomenon has arguably accelerated in the last few decades with the development of “edge cities” (or suburban downtowns) and row housing and garden apartments in new residential developments located far from older urban centers. Actually, for quite a few years the densest metropolitan area in the United States (including both downtown and suburban areas) has been Los Angeles—and by a fair margin—a result that can be traced back to its numerous high-rise buildings spread out over its territory, high population numbers per individual housing unit, and costly water supply infrastructure. Overall, though, cities, suburbs, roads, and highways cover perhaps less than 5% of the land area of the lower 48 American states, and for several decades, because of high yield technologies, far more American agricultural land has been reverting to wilderness than has been converted to suburbia. Worldwide, cities occupy approximately 2% of the earth's surface, an area that should double to 4% in the next half century.
⁵⁵
If the world's
7 billion individuals were living at a density comparable to New York City, all of them could be housed in Texas.
⁵⁶
Provided that economic growth is strong and local governance reasonably effective, large metropolitan areas will prove to be significant environmental assets rather than liabilities.

 

Although agriculture will continue to have a major impact on the landscape, what is clear from the available evidence is that the world envisioned by locavores would have a significantly larger surface area devoted to growing food (and therefore a much more severe impact on the landscape) than a world where farming is practiced in the most suitable production zones. Moving ever closer to a world dominated by modern agriculture technologies and international trade will not eliminate our impact on the environment, but will nonetheless drastically curtail it. Because of increased competitive pressures, food producers will have no other choice but to constantly find new and better ways of doing things, including generating economies of scale and relocating their operations or increasing their purchases from businesses located in more suitable areas, in the process sparing nature and increasing output. Because it would be inherently wasteful in its use of resources, the world of locavores can only, by contrast, deliver greater environmental damage.

We have had unmistakable warnings, too, in the last few years, that we cannot afford to be dependent for the staples of our food and industry on any single place or production. The potato disease was one of those warnings.

—THOMAS EDWARD CLIFFE LESLIE. 1862.
“The Reclamation of Waste.”
The Saturday Review of Politics,
Literature, Science and Art
356 (14) (AUGUST 23): 225

One of the greatest benefits to be expected from the improvements of civilization is that increased facilities of communication will render it possible to transport to places of consumption much valuable material that is now wasted because the price at the nearest market will not pay freight. The cattle slaughtered in South America for their hides would feed millions of the starving population of the Old World, if their flesh could be economically preserved and transported across the ocean.

—GEORGE PERKINS MARSH. 1864.
Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action.
Charles Scribner, p. 37

 

 

 

 

“F
ood security” has traditionally been defined as providing access at all times to enough sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to allow people to maintain healthy and active lives.
¹
This goal long remained elusive as historically most people were malnourished most of the time and frequently struggled with food shortages and famines.
²
These perennial worries have disappeared from the collective memory of the citizens of advanced economies and are now confined to the least developed and more conflict-prone parts of our planet.
³
Even wartime tragedies such as the
hongerwinter
(hunger winter) of 1944–1945, in which at least 20,000 Dutch citizens and one in six babies starved to death, and the roughly 100,000 individuals who suffered the same fate in Tokyo in the three months that followed the Japanese surrender in 1945, are now almost completely forgotten.

True, important food challenges have yet to be met. For instance, even if in the aggregate enough food is produced to feed each human being substantially more than the minimum caloric intake required for survival, close to a billion people remain malnourished and approximately nine million reportedly die every year of hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases.
⁴
Significant food price spikes have also made a noticeable comeback in recent years.
⁵
Not surprisingly, locavores blame these problems on unfair international trade and the greed of large multinational corporations. Along with so-called “food sovereignists,” their preferred solution is that “people and community” should be given the “ability to sustain themselves” and the right “to define their own agricultural, labor, fishing, food and land policies” without outside interference.
⁶
What these activists envision, however, is not increased individual freedom to patronize either domestic or foreign suppliers, but mandatory government policies to subsidize and protect local producers (with the proviso that their policies do not hurt other countries) despite the wishes of individual consumers or taxpayers.
⁷
Moving in this direction, they claim, will not only make the provisioning of vulnerable communities more secure, but also more “culturally appropriate,” “dignified,” respectful of the environment, and “socially just.”
⁸

The case for increased food sovereignty now essentially revolves around three basic “security” claims. First, because local food systems must not only be smaller in scale but also more diversified (after all, you cannot feed a community a healthy diet by producing only a few commodities), they are inherently more resilient to pests of all kinds than large monocultures. Second, the sudden decline in the demand for or collapse in the production of an agricultural commodity in which a community has overspecialized means that it will be left unable to import the nonlocal food on which it has come to depend. Finally, in times of rapidly rising commodity prices, political turmoil, or all-out war, no community will be better served than by itself. In addition to these claims, many locavores further promote their prescription by invoking an impending oil shortage and drastic climate change. Better anticipate and prepare for the unavoidable, they argue, by accelerating the inexorable transition towards local food systems. We will examine each argument in turn, but before we do so a brief overview of the history of famines in mostly “self-sufficient” local economies is warranted.

The third horseman of the
Apocalypse of John
(otherwise known as the
Book of Revelation
) famously carried a pair of weighing scales, which would have been used to weigh bread during hungry times. Like his fellow riders (conquest, war, and death from pestilence), he was until recently a familiar presence in most human societies. As the geographer Brian Murton observes, famines have plagued humankind for at least 6,000 years and have long been used by scholars and chroniclers to “slice up history into manageable portions.”
⁹
While researchers still disagree on the widespread, recurring, and severe character of prehistorical hunger, there is a general consensus that, with the invention of agriculture, famines typically resulted from a succession of mediocre harvests rather than from an isolated crop failure. Some could be traced back to human factors such as wars, ethnic and religious persecution, price controls, protectionism, excessive taxation, and lack of respect for private property
rights. Others were due to natural origins, such as unseasonable temperatures, excessive or insufficient rainfall, floods, insect pests, rodents, pathogens, soil degradation, and epidemics that made farmers or their beasts of burden unfit for work.
¹⁰
In many cases, a number of these factors were involved.

To give a glimpse of past horrors and calamities, suffice it to say that during the Hundred Years War in Medieval Western Europe (1337–1453), a combination of crop failures, epidemics and warfare is thought to have reduced the population by two-thirds. Chinese inhabitants suffered an average of perhaps 90 famines per century in the last two thousand years. Between 1333 and 1337, approximately six million Chinese died of starvation whereas perhaps as many as forty-five million perished in the first half of the 19th century. In the 1920s, Chinese peasants “recalled an average of three crop failures during their lifetimes that were serious enough to cause famines. These famines lasted on average about ten months, and they led up to a quarter of the affected population to eat grasses and strip bark from trees” while forcing “one in every seven people to leave their hungry villages in search of food.”
¹¹
In the recent past, at least forty-three million people are now thought to have died during the famine of 1959–1962 as a direct result of the “Great Leap Forward” policies of Mao Zedong, making it the single largest famine of all time.
¹²

Political and individual strategies for coping with famines have always been similar the world over. In the absence of charitable giving and emigration opportunities, authorities could call upon heavenly assistance, impose price controls and seize private reserves, lower import tariffs, expel strangers, identify and make an example out of scapegoats and “profiteers,” and dispatch envoys to find additional supplies. Among private citizens, wealthier individuals could reduce discretionary spending and tap into or stop accumulating savings in order to purchase increasingly scarce and expensive food while poorer people were more likely to stretch available resources by temporarily lowering their food intake. Whenever possible, too, individuals would borrow money to purchase
food. Much harder times would command the consumption of seed grains, farm animals, and famine foods, including grass, leaves, bark, clay, and dirt; the selling or mortgaging of familial assets, from clothes and furniture to animals, land, and children (once a famine had receded, children were sometimes sold into slavery so that parents could buy back their land
¹³
); reducing the number of mouths to feed through infanticide or senilicide; and cannibalism. In most places the burden of food shortages historically fell disproportionately on the shoulders of the elderly, pregnant and lactating women, and poor and landless people. In many cultures, too, the survival of boys was given priority over that of girls.

In advanced economies, what ultimately limited famines to wartime periods is long distance trade and economic development. Writing in 1856, George Dodd observed that in the “days of limited intercourse, scarcity of crops was terrible in its results; the people had nothing to fall back upon; they were dependent upon growers living within a short distance; and if those growers had little to sell, the alternative of starvation became painfully vivid.”
¹⁴
In the classic
Annals of Rural Bengal,
published in 1871, William Wilson Hunter, the Scottish historian and member of the Indian Civil Service, noted that an important set of preventative steps against famines included “[e]very measure that helps towards the extension of commerce and the growth of capital, every measure that increases the facilities of transport and distribution… [and whatever tends] to render each part [of a country] less dependent on itself.”
¹⁵
More recently, the economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda similarly observed that “the historical record suggests that the integration of markets and the gradual eradication of famine are linked.” By the late 19th century, he adds, even “disaster relief was truly globalized.”
¹⁶
As a group of British food policy experts stated in 2010, “international trade is a key underpinning of food security at all levels” and in the relatively recent past “food crises have
occurred, not simply because domestic production fails, but when financial resources are lacking, trade is blocked, distribution channels are inefficient or crippled, and governance is poor.”
¹⁷

In times of political stability and open trade, the provisioning of urban populations has always been more abundant and stable overall than that of subsistence farmers, a fact that can be inferred from the typical migration of rural peasants to cities in times of famine.
¹⁸
(This is not to say that poor urban dwellers were necessarily well fed, but they were certainly better off than their rural counterparts.) In a 1768 essay promoting the liberalization of grain markets, the French economist and ecclesiast Nicolas Baudeau observed that even though no grain production took place in the heavily urbanized Netherlands, freedom to trade had long eradicated famine in the region. Inspired by the Dutch success, in 1689 English rulers adopted a similar policy and achieved beneficial results. Another success story at the time was the Republic of Genoa whereas, by contrast, government restrictions on commerce in the nearby Papal States and Sicily had resulted in the inhabitants of once exporting regions struggling to feed themselves.
¹⁹

The basic fact about food security, Baudeau argued, was that when freedom to trade was secure and goods could be moved between political borders, differences in physical geography and seasonal weather ensured that the surplus of regions that had enjoyed good harvests could be channeled to those that experienced below average ones. The Mediterranean basin has always been striking in this respect as, according to some classifications, it possesses no fewer than 64 climatic subtypes and experiences significant weather variability from one growing season to the next. As Aristotle observed more than two millennia ago: “Sometimes there is much drought or rain, and it prevails over a great and continuous stretch of country. At other times it is local; the surrounding country often getting seasonable or even excessive rains while there is drought in a certain part; or, contrariwise, all the surrounding country gets little or even no rain while a certain part gets rain in abundance.”
²⁰
This is even more so on a planetary scale.