The Locavore's Dilemma

by Pierre Desrochers

  Truth be told, however, the higher prices paid by the British Columbia couple were only a small fraction of what they would have been if the other local people they bought various goods and services from had also engaged in their experiment. This is because the extra time and money these other merchants and farmers would have had to devote to local food purchases and preparation would have forced them either to increase the costs of the services they provided or cut down on their capacity to offer them. Furthermore, because locavores will buy less from foreigners, the latter will have fewer resources available to purchase other goods and services made wholly or partly in the locavores’ community, thus destroying a number of “local” jobs in the process.

  Although this should go without saying, higher consumer prices always and everywhere mean greater poverty and a lower standard of living for all. True wealth and job creation do not flow from consumers paying more to obtain less, but rather from innovative developments that deliver better products at lower prices, in the process allowing individuals to increase consumption and to invest in the creation of new ways of doing things and of new useful things to do.

  In the realm of food production, significant advances in the volume, quality, and affordability of items created would have been impossible without the development of long distance trade, regional specialization, and economies of scale. In the long run, these not only improved the living standard of consumers, but also of agricultural workers who remained in this sector and those who left it for better opportunities. Unfortunately, locavores typically misconstrue the real economic impact of each of these factors, as we will now illustrate.

  Physical Geography and Agricultural Specialization

  As with all economic activities, a range of factors affects the profitability of agricultural endeavors, from the costs of various inputs (from diesel to insurance) and tax policies to consumers’ shifting demands and producers’ marketing abilities. More than any other sector, however, the success or failure of agricultural productions depends on where they take place. True, innovative behavior can sometimes overcome the shortcomings inherent to poorer, rockier, or less leveled soils; unsuitable climate for certain crops; less abundant water; or the poor quality of pastureland. Yet, as Adam Smith observed over two centuries ago, in many cases the “natural advantages which one country has over another in producing particular commodities are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them.” For instance, with the help of the greenhouse technologies of his day, Smith observed, decent grapes could be grown in Scotland from which a very good wine could be made—but “at about 30 times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries.” He then asked rhetorically if it would be reasonable to adopt a law “to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland?” Doing so, he points out, “would be a manifest absurdity” inasmuch as Scottish people would have to use thirty times as many resources than if they were to import wine from Southern Europe, resources which would then be no longer available to create wealth in other activities more suited to local conditions.8

  Smith’s example was deliberately extreme in order to make his point, but many significant productivity differences between locations are often not obvious to nonspecialists. For example, fruit and vegetable producers located in more humid regions typically face more serious fungus problems than those located in drier ones. Some apple varieties are less resistant to cold weather than others. Dairy farmers whose pastureland is chock full of clover and high quality grass have less need to buy additional feed for their cows than competitors whose animals graze on poorer vegetation. Producers who benefit from a substantially longer growing season can justify massive investments in the development of new plant varieties that yield more berries over longer periods of time.

  Whether obvious or more subtle, however, the most glaring shortcoming of the locavores’ economic rhetoric is that it ignores productivity differentials—and therefore production costs—between agricultural locations. As all of agricultural history illustrates, trade between regions that specialize in products for which they have significant advantages (say, wine or wheat) delivers more food for less money than if producers in both regions tried to grow a range of crops unsuitable to their soil and climate. Though this is a basic fact of agricultural life, a growing number of local food activists argue that present-day regional specialization is largely the result of agricultural subsidies that benefit a few select crops such as corn. Get rid of these “comparative advantage mirages,” they argue, and the economic profitability of monocultures will quickly be overtaken by those of polycultures—plots of land on which multiple and complementary plants and animals are produced.9 These arguments, however, do not stand up in light of the available historical evidence.

  First, large-scale monocultures long predate modern subsidies and are as ancient as urbanization and maritime transportation—as is attested by, among other evidence, the large grain and olive-oil trade of Mediterranean antiquity. For instance, during Ancient Athens’peak period, its soft bread wheat supply was imported by ships from production zones located in what is now southern Russia, the Aegean islands, and the Greek mainland. Because of their poorer soil and drier climate, producers in Athens’ hinterland could not compete with these foreigners and instead focused their efforts on growing barley (mostly for local consumption) and replanted lands formerly devoted to grain production with vineyards and olive and fig orchards, the output of which was both consumed domestically and exported over long distances.10

  The case made by food activists on behalf of polycultures is similarly weak. In short, polycultures—thanks to the supposed positive effects of the interactions of their attendant species—are said to deliver large amounts of food from little more than “soil, water, and sunlight.”11 To bolster their case, proponents of alternative agricultural systems often point to the Japanese farmer Takao Furuno who, on his seven-acre Kyushu farm, produces enough rice, vegetables, duck meat and eggs, fish, and vegetables to feed 100 local families.12 How this approach fundamentally differs from old-fashioned subsistence agriculture—now often labeled “globally-important ingenious agricultural heritage systems” (GIAHS) by activists and sustainable development theorists13—isn’t clear to us. After all, subsistence agriculture (GIAHS) is built on “natural ecological processes” rather than “against them; . . . endowed with nutrient-enriching plants, insect predators, pollinators, nitrogen-fixing and nitrogen-decomposing bacteria, and a variety of other organisms that perform various beneficial ecological functions;” and characterized by “small farm size” and “diversified production based on mixtures of crops, trees, and animals with high genetic variability, maximum use of local resources, and low dependence on off-farm inputs” (such as synthetic chemicals manufactured in distant locations).14 Or, as the historian Peter Garnsey observed in 1988, the ancient Greek and Roman small farmer “traditionally practiced mixed farming, the poly-cropping of arable and trees on the same land with the addition of a little livestock.”15 Nice indeed, unless one remembers that subsistence farming everywhere always delivered very little return and low standards of living for all the hard labor required.

  Of course, what really sets Furuno and other modern polyculture “pioneers” apart from their predecessors is that they benefit from much more advanced technologies and knowledge—agricultural machinery, electricity, carbon fuels, refrigeration, transportation, electric fences, the help of agricultural extension scientists, etc.—and much wealthier customers, thanks to the fact that they ply their trade in societies in which long-distance trade, urbanization, and commercial agriculture have long displaced subsistence agriculture. Like all subsistence farmers before them, however, practitioners of “modern” polycultures exhibit comparatively low productivity and thus entail many more man-hours per unit of output. According to one sympathetic report, Furuno’s approach “requires far m
ore intensive and continuous management than does its industrial counterpart” and he “must carefully monitor the performance of each crop and apply any new insights the following season—requirements that add considerably to a farmer’s labor hours.”16 According to Matt Liebman, Iowa State University’s cropping system diversification and polyculture expert, this method can require almost twice the labor hours as that of a conventional agribusiness approach. Lower productivity and longer hours are then translated into higher price tags for consumers.17 There are good practical reasons why subsistence agriculture systems were supplanted by large-scale monocultures in all developing economies a long time ago and they are still very relevant today. The importance of differences in soil and climate, along with the overall resources (including manpower) required to produce food, cannot be overlooked.

  In the end, the fact that many otherwise prosperous locations are not amenable to a locavore lifestyle is too obvious to be ignored by proponents of locavorism, although they sometimes find a simple way around it. Perhaps the most telling example in this respect is that of writer Barbara Kingsolver who left her home outside of Tucson, Arizona, and relocated full-time with her family to a farm in Washington County in rural Virginia, “a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the grounds.”18 She chronicled their experiences in a book that became a bestseller, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. We have no doubt that life in Washington County is pleasant if you can make a go of it. To most people, however, a location like Tucson—despite the fact that it was in its third year of drought when the Kingsolvers left and residents wouldn’t last long without massive food imports—offers more opportunities for personal development.

  The Importance of Latitude

  Latitude is another geographical consideration whose importance and benefits are widely misunderstood and underappreciated. The key issue here is that otherwise comparable production locations situated some distance from each other on a north-south axis will experience different ripening periods for the same commodity. Latitude was of comparatively little economic importance until the development of transportation and preservation technologies that could move perishable items quickly and cheaply over long distances, but it became crucial as soon as this was accomplished. To understand why, however, one must first understand the typical problems of “local” markets in perishable food items before these developments.

  In short, neighboring farmers everywhere always grew similar things that reached maturity simultaneously. In good years, local producers would flood area markets with their produce, severely depressing prices and wasting much of their crops in the process. In bad ones, when insects, plant diseases, bad weather, or floods had taken their toll, very little if anything might be available.

  In what might be termed a typical case of the “curse of good years,” the historian Blake McKelvey observes that, at the beginning of the 19th century, settlers in the greater Rochester region in upstate New York knew perfectly well that “theirs was a great fruit country,” but unfortunately the “slow and costly transport facilities practically prohibited the shipment of fruit.” Knowing they couldn’t make a living specializing in their production, they instead directed most of their efforts to less perishable items like forest products and grain—by 1838, Rochester was the largest flour-producing city in the world and consequently nicknamed the “Flour City.” Nonetheless, a fair number of apples and peaches were produced in the area. While apples could always be turned into cider, peaches were more problematic. In good years, the local markets were “glutted . . . during the ripening season” and, often enough, “unwilling to sell at twenty cents a bushel,” farmers would “dump . . . wagon loads into the Genesee [river].”19 In following years, grains produced more efficiently in the American Midwest became available at cheaper prices than could be produced in the region. On the other hand, improvements in transportation made it possible to deliver fresh produce to more distant consumers and a number of farmers profitably switched from growing grain to cultivating orchards. In the meantime, other local entrepreneurs had developed a thriving nursery industry (where plants are propagated and grown to usable size), which also relied on a much broader geographical customer base. The Flour City had become the Flower City. Lower consumer prices, a wider range of products, new job creation, and better overall standards of living had been made possible by improvements in transportation and the regional specialization of agricultural productions.

  Similar developments occurred all over North America and Western Europe. Regional specialization in perishable products mirrored what had happened earlier with grain markets. As observed in 1838 by George Richardson Porter, the head of the Statistical Department of the British Board of Trade, new forms of transportation were “stimulating production and equalizing prices” of perishable items:Before the establishment of steam-vessels, the market at Cork [Ireland] was most irregularly supplied with eggs from the surrounding district; at certain seasons they were exceedingly abundant and cheap, but these seasons were sure to be followed by periods of scarcity and high prices, and at times it is said to have been difficult to purchase eggs at any price in the market. At the first opening of the improved channel for conveyance to England, the residents at Cork had to complain of the constant high price of this and other articles of farm produce; but as a more extensive market was now permanently open to them, the farmers gave their attention to the rearing and keeping of poultry, and, at the present time, eggs are procurable at all seasons in the market at Cork, not, it is true, at the extremely low rate at which they could formerly be sometimes bought, but still at much less than the average price of the year.20

  The statistician then observed, “a like result has followed the introduction of this great improvement [in transportation] in regard to the supply and cost of various other articles of produce.”21 True, because of “external” demand local farmers could now extract a higher price from local customers than had previously been the case at harvest time. On the other hand, consumers whose access to fresh produce had been limited to a few weeks each year could now purchase these commodities over much longer periods of time at ever more affordable prices. Now, commodities identical to those produced locally were not only being produced on a large scale elsewhere, but they reached maturity at a different time of the year.

  To give a striking illustration of these processes, in American cities at the turn of the 20th century, the earliest supplies of new potatoes to hit the market before Christmas came from both southern Florida and the islands of Bermuda, which, although at a more northerly latitude, benefited from the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream. Potatoes produced from further north in Florida all the way up to the northern potato belt that stretched from Maine to Minnesota would then reach maturity between March and early September. (See map on next page.)

  Of course, what was true for American potatoes was also true for countless other crops. For instance, in 1880 in England, the city of Manchester’s supply of green peas first came from Algeria, then from Spain and later on France. These were followed in time by English-grown green peas, first from southern regions and then all the way up to the Scottish border. The local onion market was supplied, depending on the variety, by Bedforshire in southeast England (from August to May), Holland (between July and April), Germany (September to June), Belgium (August and September), Bordeaux, France, (from October to January), and Portugal (May to July).22 In time, seasonal products also came to be shipped in from the southern hemisphere where seasons are inverted (meaning that summer months in countries like Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand coincide with the winter months in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany). This pattern also historically applied to nonedible agricultural commodities such as cattle hides that were of higher quality in summer months in both the northern and southern hemispheres.23 Shipping fresh produce grown in certain latitudes to distant consumers located in other latitudes provided
not only superior alternatives to local produce when not in season, but also drastically reduced the energy costs and waste due to spoilage inherent to long-term storage.

  Source: V. C Finch and O. E. Baker. 1917. Geography of the World’s Agriculture. US Government Printing Office, page 66.

  Unfortunately, local food activists and agri-intellectuals seem to be unaware of the economic rationale underlying the export of most of a region’s perishable products at harvest time and of importing similar products from growing areas located in different latitudes the rest of the year. A case in point is the food commentator Barry Estabrook, who, upon learning that 99% of produce grown in Santa Barbara County is exported while more than 95% of the produce eaten there is imported, coined the expression “Santa Barbara Syndrome” to express how “completely dysfunctional our modern food system” has become.24 The data mentioned by Estabrook had been compiled by David Cleveland, a University of California at Santa Barbara professor of environmental studies, 25 who, during a talk in which he presented his results, reportedly stressed the absurdity of “two produce-laden tractor-trailers passing on the highway, one bringing food into the county; the other hauling it out.” Two crucial facts not mentioned by Estabrook, however, are that according to Cleveland’s data, Santa Barbara County produces roughly nine times the amount of produce it consumes each year and that much of its imports come from countries located in the southern hemisphere, such as Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand.