Wishing It Were Simple

Richard raised a really good question in response to my last post, and drew my attention to the Lincoln University analysis of the concept of "food miles." If you want to dig into the issue for yourself, look at his comment in the previous post and follow the URLs. It is important to note that the study was done by economists in New Zealand who were motivated, in part, to defend Kiwi (as in from New Zealand) producers whose primary markets are in Europe--not exactly local, in other words. But the question is valid, and just because something is locally produced does not automatically mean it has a lower carbon footprint. And of course, how you count carbon footprints and food miles depends entirely on which factors are included--and excluded-- from the analysis. I've never met anyone as clever at manipulating variables in a computer model as an economist, and you really do have to look hard at the assumptions being used.


There are other reasons to buy local, however, besides simply wanting to fight global warming and lower the carbon footprint of your meal. Today I attended a summit on agriculture and food safety from the farm to the fork sponsored by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. I learned something there today that I frankly was stunned to find out, until I reflected on it further. We are, as a country, now importing more food than we are exporting. The last time food imports merely equalled our exports was 2003. And the trend is rapidly heading toward a day when the United States will be as dependent on foreign countries to produce our basic food stuffs as we are on foreign oil producers. That is staggering to me. And the single largest exporter of food products into the U.S. today is China.


It would be easy to go all xenophobic right at this point, but it truly is sobering to consider what that means. Today only 3% of the U.S. workforce is engaged in food and fiber production, and the average age of farmers in the U.S. is something like 60 years old. We are losing the producers, and that may actually be something we want to think about as a matter of national security. In the past year we have seen melamine added to food additives, antifreeze added to cough syrup and toothpaste, and lead-based paint on toys coming out of China. Less than 1% of imported products are inspected at the border, and less than 1/2% of products are analytically tested for chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics. Whatever you may think about modern industrial agriculture production practices, it is fair to say that foods produced locally in the United States have a better chance of being safer than many of the products coming in from countries that put less of an emphasis on food safety and product integrity than our producers do.


And, if you buy local produce from conscientious (perhaps also organic) farm producers, you may very well buy food with a lower total carbon footprint. That is not necessarily guaranteed, but it is certainly possible. It will also likely be a lot fresher. Something that was still on the vine this morning and bought this afternoon at the Farmer's Market is bound to be fresher than something packed, trucked, flown and moved about all over the globe before you took it home from the grocery store.


Before you decide I'm a raving anti-globalization lunatic, I have to admit that nothing about our modern food chain is simple, and I also worry about foreign producers. Last year I was in Guatemala, and I was really surprised to find out how hard it is to get a decent cup of coffee there. I was expecting (naively) that if you travel to the source, you will find amazing blends you can't get in the U.S. What I learned was that their best coffee was grown purely for export to Europe and the U.S. The locals are even having to mount a cultural campaign to teach Guatemalans about coffee and how to brew a good cup of coffee. When I saw the poverty and other social conditions there, of course my desire was to see their producers be able to grow a product and earn a living from it. As long as it is done fairly and safely, I do believe part of what America has to do to be good world citizens is to buy goods from overseas producers. I am just worried that we must do more to support our own producers, for lots of reasons, than we are doing today. And I do count my food miles a lot more straightforwardly than some economists might.