The Locavore's Dilemma (22 page)

Like their counterparts in Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium, 19th century Danish political authorities did not react to the “invasion” of cheap North American and Eastern European grains by imposing higher tariffs to protect their domestic producers. On the contrary, a majority of Danish farmers were opposed to the idea as they realized that cheap foreign animal feed would give them the opportunity to specialize in more lucrative livestock and dairy farming, making it possible to expand dairy production from summer to year-round. Although mostly comprised of small- and medium-sized independent operations, the creation of large agricultural cooperatives gave Danish farmers the capacity to develop significant economies of scale and a reputation for excellence that made their products highly sought after in lucrative foreign markets such as Great Britain. The result was that, from the mid-1870s to the mid-1920s, the Danish cattle herd doubled, the pig herd multiplied by more than six, and the chicken flock by four. Even more remarkable, Danish crop growers expanded their production by a factor of almost three as the five-year average of all crops expressed in a measurement known as barley equivalent (i.e., as if they had been converted to barley) went from around 27 million tons to no less than 74 million tons during this period.
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By 1938, the British and German markets absorbed more than 76% of Danish exports, which were mostly made up of livestock products such as butter, eggs, lard, and bacon.

As Karl Brandt argued in 1945, far from proving the assertions of agricultural protectionists that all trade liberalization “would financially ruin millions of European family farms and reduce the farmers to abject misery and poverty… [or a] general depression of their living standards,” Danish agriculture from the middle of the 19th century to the eve of World War II illustrated that, by embracing free trade, Danish farmers had not only learned to “discover the fields of production in which they had the best opportunity to compete successfully with the farmers of the world, but they also were able to develop their own abilities, their agricultural production and marketing plants to almost functional
perfection,” the result being “a most remarkable degree of culture and the art of decent living.”
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The Nazi invasion of Denmark in April 1940, however, quickly cut off the importation of foreign oilseeds and grains along with access to the British market. Based on their past experience, German administrators devised plans for the massive slaughter of dairy cows, hogs, and chickens in order to save as much grain as possible for human consumption. Danish farmers overwhelmingly opposed these measures and threatened to engage in general passive resistance if they were enforced. Meanwhile, Danish authorities let it be known to their occupiers that they weren't concerned with where food surpluses would end up (i.e., feeding members of the Third Reich) as long as the local population did not go hungry. Because of this and the difficulty of effectively rationing a large agricultural sector made up of numerous small production units, German administrators settled instead upon economic incentives such as export quotas, boosting the prices of farm products, and keeping the price of farm inputs such as nitrogen and potash fertilizers artificially low, thus ensuring that “farming was made exceptionally profitable.”
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As could be expected, Danish farmers responded by maintaining the land area devoted to grain to prewar average; increasing slightly the area devoted to root crops; converting perhaps as much as 16% of their pastureland to flax, vegetable seed, and vegetable production; reducing fallow land by about two-thirds; and hiring individuals previously unemployed or active in other lines of work. The end result was that, in terms of barley equivalent, the harvests during the last three years of the war were actually higher than the prewar average.

Reminiscent of the situation of the Second Reich during the previous conflict, however, phosphate fertilizer use fell to around one-tenth of the prewar level while the quality of animal manure declined because of poorer nutrition. German authorities also enforced a number of restrictions to ensure greater volumes of export surpluses, such as prohibiting the manufacture of margarine, full-fat cheese, fluid cream,
and beer with a high alcohol content; increased rates of extraction in flour mills; and a reduction in the fat content of fluid milk. The reduced availability of animal feed also meant that by 1942 the culling of two thirds of the hog and chicken population had become unavoidable, although by 1945 production levels eventually came back to above half of prewar levels.

At the end of the war, the per capita food consumption in Denmark was about 20% less than at its beginning and the country had experienced a decrease of 5% of its overall national wealth. True, these results were not bad considering the context, but still the Danish case does not support the notion that increased self-sufficiency delivers economic and security benefits. As one University of Copenhagen economist observed at the time, the Danish agricultural performance was only as good as it turned out to be because the “Germans paid for the war effort,” and, overall, the Danish economy consumed some of its accumulated capital and suffered “heavy financial loss[es].”
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In Denmark, as elsewhere, increased national self-sufficiency would have been unsustainable in the long run and the adoption of this policy on an ever smaller geographical scale (i.e., locavorism), even less so.

Another common belief among locavores in terms of food security is that their prescription prepares us for the unavoidable re-localization of our food system that will follow the imminent peak and later depletion of our supply of “cheap petroleum” in the next century. This argument, however, is fallacious, whether or not one believes in the peak oil rhetoric. For starters, even assuming a world in which hostile aliens have emptied all of our best oil fields, all credible analysts (there are always a few pessimistic outliers) tell us that, with minimal efforts to look beyond the ample economically recoverable reserves available at the moment, we could easily have enough coal to last us several centuries.
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It is true that rebuilding our global food supply chain around (mostly liquefied) coal would be more
expensive, inconvenien,t and environmentally damaging than around petroleum-derived liquid fuels (which is why they displaced coal in the first place), but it does not present any insurmountable problem—indeed, South Africa's Sasol, the world's largest producer of coal-based liquids, already manufactures a completely synthetic jet fuel. Locavores should remember that relatively inefficient and expensive coal-powered railroads and steamships laid the foundations of our global food supply chain. The world didn't simply go from a hearty diet of local organic deliciousness to eating globalized petroleum in one fell swoop—there was a substantial course of coal in-between.

Reverting to coal in the 21st century would also not mean reverting to 19th century engine technologies, but simply to a more expensive and inconvenient fuel that would compete with other unconventional sources (from shale oil to Canadian oil sands). Furthermore, because the liquid fraction of petroleum used to power container ships is for the most part the dirtiest and cheapest (so-called “bunker fuel”) for which there is at present little other demand,
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higher crude prices would have a much more pronounced effect on other segments of the food supply chain than on long distance maritime transportation.

At any rate, the Peak Oil rhetoric should not be taken seriously. Pessimistic energy forecasts have a long history—predictions of imminent petroleum shortages were even made before the first oil well was drilled in Western Pennsylvania in the middle of the 19th century—and a truly awful track record.
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The main problem historically is that energy doomsayers never quite understood that humans are not only mouths to feed, but also brains to think and arms to work, along with the fact that resources are not fixed and permanent things that exist in and of themselves, but instead are created by always renewable human intellect and labor.

Despite the obvious finiteness of their surroundings, humans have long been able to develop profitable new technologies to achieve the same or better results while using less resources; to extract valuable materials from more remote locations (for example, offshore drilling) or
from less interesting materials (such as less concentrated ores); and to create substitutes out of previously worthless raw materials and industrial residuals that proved their advantage over previous alternatives, such as being more powerful and/or abundant; stronger and/or lighter; and/or easier to produce, handle, transport, and/or store. For instance, because they did not burn cleanly without modern technologies, coal and petroleum were not very valuable for most of human history. In recent years, in North America alone, the advent of shale gas, increased onshore oil production from shale rock, new recovery techniques that make it economical to extract oil left in old wells, new oil field discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico, and advances that have drastically reduced production costs in the Canadian oil sands, have all ensured an abundant supply of affordable transportation fuels for at least several decades, if not for a few centuries.
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Sure, one day humanity will move beyond fossil fuels, but it will not be because we have run out of them, but rather because better alternatives have come along. Justifying a preemptive move towards locavorism because of irrational fears of an imminent energy shortage is an untenable proposition. At any rate, if one truly believes that economic resources are finite, then sustainable development becomes a theoretical impossibility, for humanity will unavoidably run out of everything and collapse at some future date. Saving for the future in this context is therefore nonsensical, for it at best delays the unavoidable. Better then to save farmers from labor-intensive toil now while also sparing future generations a horrible fate by making sure that we consume as much energy as we can in the present and collapse in style as soon as possible!

In the end, while the specific details of our energy future are unknowable, provided that current anti-technology sentiments and public finance insanity can be kept under control, past experience warrants an optimistic outlook. After all, if this hadn't been the case, how could a human population of a few million individuals at the dawn of agriculture now count nearly six
billion
well-fed individuals?

The fate of agricultural productions has always been dependent on and shaped by singular weather events (from droughts to torrential rainfalls) and more long-term climatic trends (from warmer to cooler and back). Not surprisingly, unfavorable events and trends were often attributed to human actions, be they insufficient offerings to climate deities, sinful behavior, swamp drainage, agriculture, and massive deforestation to the invention of lighting conductors, extensive gunfire during the First World War, the development of short-wave radio communication, nuclear explosions, supersonic transport, space traffic, and air pollution. Carbon dioxide produced through human activities—primarily the burning of carbon fuels—is now the focus of much policy attention, but it is just the latest suspect in a long line of potential large-scale “climate criminals.”
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(Of course, carbon dioxide is also plant food, and, as such, higher concentrations of this gas should ultimately prove beneficial for agricultural production, but we will not address this issue here.)

While we claim no expertise in climate science, we cannot imagine how locavorism can ever be considered more desirable in the context of a warming or cooling climate than the global food supply chain. First, as we illustrated in chapter 4, the fact that the international division of agricultural labor produces less greenhouse gas emissions per unit of food than less efficient “local” growers is pretty much “settled science.” Second, singular weather events and climate change will not stop even if humans drastically reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. As in the past, crop failures caused by hailstorms, floods, droughts, and other weather-related events will cause much harm to communities that cannot tap into the agricultural surplus of more distant regions that have enjoyed better growing conditions.

Last but not least, as the agricultural economist Dennis Avery observes, wheat, rice, and corn are all originally warm weather plants that, through thousands of years of modifications, are now able to withstand a wide range of conditions. Corn most likely originated in the hot and
wet lowlands of Mexico and required 4,000 years of careful seed selection to become acclimatized to the conditions of the U.S. “Corn Belt.” Wheat is native to the hot and dry Fertile Crescent, and, in locations like the Punjab, can now tolerate summer temperatures as high as 100 degrees F. Domesticated rice was developed in Chinese regions with summer heat comparable to those of the Punjab, but now also thrives in locations like Manchuria with summer temperatures of only 80 degrees F. (The real enemy of crops, Avery notes, is not heat but droughts, which have historically been more often associated with cooler than warmer periods.)
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Given enough freedom and adequate incentives, agricultural producers have long demonstrated that they can adapt to warming and cooling trends and provide consumers the basic necessities of life. For instance, in England during the Roman Warming period (250 BC to 450 AD), grapes were produced where none are to be found today. In colder times, though, farmers reverted to grain production (thus ensuring that alcohol remained available in the form of beer and whiskey). Another fact worth pondering is that Canada is now largely recognized as a net marijuana exporter. Clearly, humans can achieve much when they put their minds to it…