The Locavore's Dilemma (21 page)

Apart from massive death and emigration, the Irish famine had at least two significant consequences. One was that it put an end to quasi-subsistence domestic food provisioning among the poorer classes of Irish people, a welcome development inasmuch as it ensured that serious failures of the potato harvests in the early 1860s and late 1870s did not increase mortality even though they did cause local hardship. The other was that it accelerated efforts to develop more productive and disease-resistant varieties that, together with the development of fungicides, laid the foundation for massive potato production in both Europe and North America in subsequent decades. Potato monocultures are found in many regions of the world today (being essentially water and extremely cheap, potatoes are not traded in large volumes between continents) and their producers are still struggling with a number of diseases and pests, but a repeat of the Irish tragedy is unthinkable in our globalized world.

Writing in the year following the end of the First World War, the American geographer Joseph Russell Smith observed that two generations of Americans and Europeans had become so used to an abundant
food supply that they no longer considered the possibilities of famine nor understood “the troubles of the past, nor as yet the vital problems of the present.” Dependence on world trade, he argued, had in the end given modern man “the independence of a bird in a cage, no more.” “The world market is excellent,” Russell Smith added, “when it is well supplied.” In wartime, however, the places where food is produced “determined the lives of nations.”
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This experience drastically shaped European food politics in later years. In Italy, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini launched a “Battle for Grain” in 1925 that, through high tariffs, farm subsidies of various kinds, “local content” milling requirements, newer seeds, and technical education, was supposed to free Italy from the “slavery” of food imports. In practice, however, his policy came at the cost of converting a lot of the Italian landscape from profitable export crops such as fresh produce, citrus fruits, and olives to grain production, resulting in a more monotonous and costlier diet for Italian consumers. In the words of the historian Denis Mack Smith, the battle for grain was ultimately won “at the expense of the Italian economy in general and consumers in particular.”
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Meanwhile, in Germany, national socialist ideology promoted both agricultural autarky, or self-sufficiency, and
Lebensraum
—the required vital space of Eastern Europe from which inferior races were to be cleared and food produced to supply the German Fatherland.
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We all know how this one ended. The leaders of the Soviet Union also pursued agricultural autarky until 1973 when confronted with a severe domestic grain shortfall that forced them to open up to food imports from their main competitor for world influence and domination.

The appeal of autarky for imperial and totalitarian regimes is easily understood. As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises observed several decades ago: “A warlike nation must aim at autarky in order to be independent of foreign trade. It must foster the production of substitutes irrespective of [economic] considerations. It cannot do without full government control of production because the selfishness of the individual citizens would thwart the plans of the leader. Even in peacetime
the commander-in-chief must be entrusted with economic dictatorship.”
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Many economists otherwise supportive of trade liberalization have also been willing to make an exception to their stance when national security was thought to be at stake. Perhaps the most famous was Adam Smith, who observed, “defence… is of much more importance than opulence.”
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In short, Smith implied, autarkic policies come at a significant price, but it pales in comparison to starvation in time of conflicts. We will now argue, contra Adam Smith himself, that the “autarky for food security” rationale doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

First, we currently live in what is undoubtedly the most peaceful time in human history.
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Reverting to autarky and, in the process, making life more difficult in countries not well endowed with agricultural resources is therefore more likely to promote military problems than prevent them. As the old saying goes, if goods don't cross borders, armies eventually will. Second, while geopolitics can always take a turn for the worse, nothing prevents a country from stockpiling large quantities of food and agricultural inputs purchased on the international market while ramping up local production if the threat of prolonged conflict becomes real. Third, putting all of one's food security eggs in a single geographically limited agricultural basket rather than purchasing food from multiple foreign suppliers is antithetical to any notion of spreading risks. Food policy observers are periodically reminded of this reality when protectionist countries experience domestic production problems. For example, Finland, a country with a grain self-sufficiency policy, suffered its wettest crop year in recorded history in 1987. Not only were yields low, but the wet grain that was somehow harvested in muddy fields soon sprouted in storage. The Finnish government then had no choice but to quietly purchase two-thirds of the country's yearly wheat supply on world markets (and for only half the price they would have had to pay their own farmers).
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Another problem is that reliance on long distance trade only proved a less desirable alternative than autarky in the context of prolonged blockades and stationary fronts. In the context of aerial bombing, however,
the destruction of critical local infrastructure would soon cripple locavore communities with no capacity to tap into the agricultural surplus of more distant regions. Autarkic policies also always mandate the use of more marginal agricultural lands whose long-term productivity is more likely to be affected by erosion and other problems. Finally, post-war reconstruction is much easier when distant resources can be accessed. While future world conflicts are always possible, distant and hopefully remote possibilities should not be invoked to maintain hundreds of millions of people in a state of hunger and malnutrition in the present time. In our opinion, it would be better to work towards world peace and greater global economic integration. Countless city walls were torn down in the last two centuries. Agricultural tariffs, quotas, and subsidies should meet the same fate.

This being said, the study of past military blockades and agricultural countermeasures is helpful in terms of getting a more concrete appreciation of the real world consequences of locavorism. True, in wartime many valuable resources are diverted towards destructive goals that would be put to good agricultural use in the locavores' utopia. Nonetheless, the basic trade-offs for increasing local food production would remain the same. For instance, in Europe over the last two centuries, the following substitutions in terms of both food production and consumption were widespread among warring countries that had been cut off to a large degree from international trade:
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A brief discussion of specific cases can also provide further insights. We begin with the Allied Blockade against Germany during the First World War,
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an Empire whose technical and scientific capabilities were comparable to any other country at the time; whose landscape was reasonably large and varied; and whose territory remained virtually untouched by opposing forces during the First World War. Most notable, though, is that while German political authorities had built up some food stocks before the beginning of the hostilities, they had not launched large-scale autarkic agricultural efforts.

In spite of some protectionist policies, before the beginning of the hostilities, the Reich's agricultural sector was, in the words of agricultural economist Karl Brandt, very much integrated in the “international co-operation and division of labor,”
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and, as a result, in 1913, German agriculture was more productive than ever before, some commentators even suggesting that the subjects of the Kaiser were perhaps even “better or more richly fed than the inhabitants of France or England.”
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To give a sense of progress in previous decades, between 1878 and 1912, Germany's total rye production rose from 6.9 million metric tons (MMT) to 11.6 MMT; wheat from 2.6 to 4.4 MMT; oats from 5 to 8.5MMT; barley from 2.3 to 3.5 MMT; and potatoes from 23.6 to 50.2 MMT. While some of this progress could be attributed to increased acreage, most of it could be traced back to greater yields. Because the German population grew from 41 million people in 1871 to 68 million in 1913, the Reich's inhabitants relied on foreign imports for approximately a third of their direct food supplies, and, through the importation of large quantities of fertilizers and high-protein animal feed, for much of their “local” crop and livestock production. Like many of their Northern European counterparts, many German producers had
reoriented their activities towards livestock and, when possible, fruits and vegetables.

Although they had made preparations for blockades and counter blockades, German military leaders never envisaged a prolonged conflict and were soon unable to find substitutes for imported phosphates (a critical fertilizer) while the absence of imported concentrated feeding stuff for livestock not only drastically reduced milk and meat production, but also the volume and quality of animal manure. Many animals eventually died from inanition despite attempts to develop substitutes for forage that included “drying lees, grinding straw, weeds, carcasses, fish [and] working up food refuse.”
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Making matters even worse were weather conditions so bad they “would have caused a large diminution in the agricultural yield of the country even if all other conditions had been normal.”
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Largely because of this, in 1916 the potato crop failed at a time when it occupied about a fifth of German arable land. From a prewar figure of 52 million tons, only 21 million tons were harvested which, due to bad handling and inadequate storage by government authorities, translated into only 17 million usable tons of potatoes. By 1917 they had been replaced by turnips and cabbage. Despite the introduction of meat ration cards and meatless days, valuable breeding stock that had been developed over decades was gradually gobbled up by starving individuals, often in a deliberate attempt to preserve for human consumption what had previously been considered substandard fare. All sorts of leaves, berries, roasted acorns, and beans were also at the time being steeped in hot water as tea and coffee substitutes.

By late 1917, a two-pound can of preserved marmalade made of apples, carrots, and pumpkins was sold to each German household during the Christmas season and was expected to serve the family for the following year. By the end of the war, malnutrition might have killed as many as 700,000 civilians on top of the Empire's 1,800,000 battlefield casualties. As one contemporary observer commented, in “the condition of dull apathy and mental prostration resulting from the deprivation of
food the course of the War no longer seemed of importance. Food filled [Germans'] thoughts by day and their dreams by night, and the only desire was to end the War by any possible means that might lead to a slackening of the blockade and the free entry of food into the country.”
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Things got even worse for the German population after the armistice as Allied occupying forces presented numerous obstacles to the re-opening of trading activities. While the partition of Germany that came out of the Treaty of Versailles is often blamed for later German belligerent attitudes and the rise of Nazism, the Allied food blockade both during and after the war played a crucial part in fueling future German aggressions.

Lest one thinks that the previous example was deliberately chosen because of its dire outcome, we will now turn to a brief discussion of what is generally acknowledged to have been the most successful case of local agricultural production under wartime conditions: Denmark during World War II.
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In their massive study on the
Management of Agriculture and Food in the German-Occupied and Other Areas of Fortress Europe
, Karl Brandt and his collaborators, Otto Schiller and Franz Ahlgrimm, observed that Denmark “received by far the most gentle treatment of all the German-occupied countries;” that there was no German military government; that “the Danish contributions to the German war-food economy were among the most important;” that the “production record of Danish agriculture in World War II is one of the most remarkable in the annals of world agriculture,” comparable to and probably even superior to “the achievements of American farmers;” and that the war actually “became a period of extraordinary prosperity for [Danish] agriculture.”
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This outcome can undoubtedly be traced back to the German “quasi-benevolent” attitude towards the country because of its racial profile (Danes were said to be Aryans), the country's military insignificance, and the fact that, proportionally speaking at least, the Danes did not need to devote many resources to the direct war efforts. Yet, this case is hardly a vindication of locavorism.