The Locavore's Dilemma (26 page)

Finally, let us address the claim that local food is inherently safer than similar items purchased in countries with less stringent health and environmental regulations. Again, what matters is how the food is produced, processed, shipped, and conserved, not where it is grown. While there are no ultimate guarantees anywhere, large-scale producers in foreign countries are visited by various purchasers and inspectors while food shipped to a country like the United States is regularly inspected at large transit points. Exporters also have greater economic incentives for shipping good products because having these items rejected would cost them more than if they sold them in their home market due to the additional shipping costs. Export operations established by producers from advanced economies in poorer parts of the world typically implement state-of-the-art technologies which are then implemented in the domestic market. Paradoxically, food produced by small operators and sold at local farmers' markets in advanced economies rarely if ever undergoes the same level of scrutiny.

Of course, distrust of foreigners is something local producers have long tapped into by invoking—often dubiously—that their production methods are inherently safer. For instance, between 1880 and 1891, Germany declared a “Pork War” on the United States. The implicit message was that America should “reform its slaughterhouses and packaging methods and, most important, that it introduce a reliable system of
microscopic examination for exported pork” in order to prevent the spread of trichinae—parasitic nematodes or roundworms, the reason for the widespread advice to cook pork thoroughly. (Again, this trade conflict began nearly three decades before Upton Sinclair published
The Jungle
.) As was widely known at the time, though, trichinosis was also a significant problem in Germany, as it had claimed at least 513 lives before 1880.
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Slightly more than four decades later, American exports of apples to the United Kingdom were blocked after arsenic-based pesticides had been discovered on some fruit. This ban on imports—pursued, of course, with only the best interest of consumers in mind—was fortuitous as the local apple industry was then struggling. As one commentator had observed in 1925:

With the development of the global food supply chain, consumers were given access to a more diverse and affordable diet that contained more fresh produce and animal products than was the case before. In localities where fresh produce was competitive, consumers benefited from excellent products (because of their freshness) for a few weeks each year and from very good ones (because they were shipped some distance) for the remainder of the 52 weeks. The safety of the food they consumed also drastically improved over time, as the wealth creation that resulted
from long-distance trade and urbanization paved the way for scientific advances that drastically curtailed the incidence of pathogens that had long plagued humanity.

Were we to turn our back on these advances, we would not progress towards a new system built around heirloom produce varieties and increased freshness, but rather regress towards the grain and potato-based diet that our ancestors eventually escaped from, for the priority of local food eaters, as it was back then, would have to be caloric intake over quality, diversity, and taste. As if this is not bad enough, the locavore's world food supply would not only be more monotonous and less nutritious, it would be inherently less safe as small producers would never be able to devise food safety protocols that require significant economies of scale to be cost- and capital-effective.

Many consumers might believe that agri-businesses only care about their profits and ignore consumers' nutrition and health, but the facts tell another story. Humans who benefit from the global food supply chain are now taller, healthier, and live longer than ever before. In the United States, deaths from foodborne illness have proportionally dropped by perhaps as much as 100-fold since 1900.
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Besides, as the food policy analyst Robert Paarlberg observes, approximately 700,000 people die every year from food- and water-borne diseases in Africa where “many foods are still purchased in open-air markets (often uninspected, unpackaged, unlabeled, unrefrigerated, unpasteurized, and unwashed),” versus only a few thousand in the United States.
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Our modern food system is not perfect, but it is a significant improvement over the past practices that locavorism would bring back with a vengeance.

Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is the most dangerous, and it is always worst in the time when men are most disposed to it: that is, in the time of scarcity. Because there is nothing on which the passions of men are so violent, and their judgment so weak, and on which there exists such a multitude of ill-founded popular prejudices.

—EDMUND BURKE. 1795.
Thoughts and Details on Scarcity
In Edmund Burke. 1800.
The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke
,
vol. 4, John West and O.C. Greenleaf, p. 235,
http://books.google.ca/ebooks?id=TaNCAAAAYAAJ

 

 

 

 

I
n the name of greater food security and economic benefits, countless political rulers have historically sought to increase local food production while keeping foreign imports at bay. Because people only bothered to import foodstuffs from great distances if they provided cheaper and better alternatives, however, protectionist policies have always and
everywhere resulted in a higher price tag. Not surprisingly, the available evidence strongly suggests that in most places and most of the time, “food patriotism” needed to be forced down consumers' throat with coercive measures. Although they might have said something different in public, given a choice, most people apparently always found the notion of paying more for lesser quality food rather unpalatable.
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Things have not changed all that much today. Sure, many consumers will interrupt their dinner to sing the praise of local food to pollsters. When a (typically much) higher price tag stares them in the face though, they sing a different tune.
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Like previous food protectionists, today's locavores and food sovereignists have therefore increasingly come to embrace old-fashioned coercive policies which they have similarly sugar-coated in alleged broader benefits. Sure, they tell us, forcing schools, prisons, university and military bases to spend more on local food might seem costly to taxpayers, but think of all the jobs created! Yes, preventing farmers from selling their land to build subdivisions might make housing a tiny bit more expensive, but isn't that a small price to pay for increased food security? As we have already argued, these claims can't withstand scrutiny. In the remainder of this section, we will briefly explain why other long-standing coercive policies that have been co-opted by an increasingly large numbers of food activists are similarly misguided.
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Trade barriers, production subsidies, supply-restriction schemes, government-run food reserves, prohibitions on food exports and price controls on agricultural products, we will argue, not only make everybody poorer and more food insecure, but also entail a significant environmental cost. First though, let us begin with a brief discussion of how ancient and pervasive such measures really are.

Political rulers have long intervened in food production and markets. Among the oldest measures are the building of infrastructure for transportation (such as ports, roads, and canals) and agricultural production
(such as water reservoirs and dikes), as well as the creation of government-run grain reserves, which have been in existence at least since Pharaonic Egypt and Han China (around 200 BC). In Babylon about 4000 years ago, the Code of Hammurabi specified the exact annual wage for a field laborer, a herdsman, and a shepherd, along with the annual rental fee for a draught ox and the price of a milk-cow. In ancient China, the
Official System of Chou
prevented food merchants from raising their prices above government-decreed levels during calamities and famines, while a whole class of bureaucrats surveyed fields and determined the amount of grain to be collected or issued in accordance with the condition of the crop. Several restrictions on the trade and profits in grain are found in the
Arthashastra
, an Indian treatise on statecraft published perhaps as early as the 4th century B.C. In ancient Athens, inspectors set the price of grain at a level the government determined to be just; the exportation of local grain was prohibited at any time and punishable by death; officially sanctioned grain buyers were authorized to raise public subscriptions and use private money to secure foreign supplies; and commanders of Athenian ships leaving a foreign port were compelled to carry grain as ballast and to leave two-thirds of their grain cargo in Athens (the rest could be sold or re-exported at their discretion).
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Punctual or stopgap food policy measures are still very much with us today. For instance, in the aftermath of the price spikes of 2008, the governments of 35 countries released grains from public stocks and subsidized sales of food. The government of Malawi announced that all maize sales would be conducted through its Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (ADMARC) that would fix the price at which maize was bought from farmers and sold to consumers. The governments of Thailand, Pakistan, and India enacted measures against speculation and harsh penalties against grain hoarders while the Filipino government went as far as enacting life sentences for “plunder” and “economic sabotage.” The Indonesian government implemented trade restrictions and regulations, such as “export bans, use of public
stocks, price control, and anti-speculation measures” on rice and palm oil. China imposed export taxes on grains and grain products. Russia raised export taxes on wheat and Argentina on wheat, corn, and soybeans. India banned exports of rice other than basmati.
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Of course, such measures were on top of numerous preexisting regulations and programs. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in 2009 government policies in advanced economies transferred more than $253 billion worth of income to farmers and approximately 22% of all farm earnings in these countries could be directly traced back to these programs.
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Policies take various forms and are often at odds with each other. For instance, the agricultural economists E. C. Pasour and Randal R. Rucker observed that in 2002 spending by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on initiatives designed to increase the prices received by farmers amounted to $37.8 billion, while initiatives to reduce producer prices cost taxpayers $11.4 billion.
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To give but one illustration, the price of corn was artificially lowered by some policies (primarily income supports to corn farmers) and artificially raised by a set of import taxes, tax credits, fuel mandates, and import restrictions on cane sugar that creates an artificially high demand for corn-based sweeteners. (Because these measures largely counteract each other, the evidence on behalf of the argument that heavily subsidized and therefore artificially low corn prices are the prime reason for the American “obesity epidemic” is actually rather weak.
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Needless to say, the “creativity” of U.S. politicians and bureaucrats is more than matched by their “(Agricultural) Fortress Europe” counterparts whose Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has long combined a maze of direct subsidy payments, guaranteed prices, and import quotas and tariffs. Among other wonders, the CAP has resulted in minimum prices for sugar beets which are processed into sugar costing twice that available from sugar cane. Surplus beet sugar is then dumped in foreign markets at only about a quarter of the real cost. Perhaps because defending the indefensible became increasingly challenging over time, the
CAP is now justified in the name of “guarantee[ing] the survival of the countryside as a place to live, work, and visit.”
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It is not only advanced economies that are knee-deep in counterproductive agricultural policies; many governments in less advanced economies are even worse in this respect, although unlike rich countries they tend to use trade barriers more than other means such as production subsidies and government-led supply management schemes and mandates. As the trade policy analyst Caroline Boin observes, barriers to trade in developing countries are on average four times higher than in richer countries while African farmers pay roughly 60% more in export taxes than other African businesses. While most activists rightly denounce the subsidies paid to large agribusinesses and the damage they inflict on poor countries, about 70% of the world trade barriers are actually between poor countries. Boin quotes a Nigerian presidential adviser as saying: “I can assure you that my pen is always ready to ban [importing] more items as long as they are available in Nigeria.” When in doubt, he “impose[s] high tariffs.” Not surprisingly, Nigeria's import bans have drastically increased the prices of such staples as maize, rice, and vegetable oil.
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