The Locavore's Dilemma

by Pierre Desrochers

  The Slaying of the Third Horseman (with Long Distance Trade)

  In advanced economies, what ultimately limited famines to wartime periods is long distance trade and economic development. Writing in 1856, George Dodd observed that in the “days of limited intercourse, scarcity of crops was terrible in its results; the people had nothing to fall back upon; they were dependent upon growers living within a short distance; and if those growers had little to sell, the alternative of starvation became painfully vivid.”14 In the classic Annals of Rural Bengal, published in 1871, William Wilson Hunter, the Scottish historian and member of the Indian Civil Service, noted that an important set of preventative steps against famines included “[e]very measure that helps towards the extension of commerce and the growth of capital, every measure that increases the facilities of transport and distribution… [and whatever tends] to render each part [of a country] less dependent on itself.”15 More recently, the economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda similarly observed that “the historical record suggests that the integration of markets and the gradual eradication of famine are linked.” By the late 19th century, he adds, even “disaster relief was truly globalized.”16 As a group of British food policy experts stated in 2010, “international trade is a key underpinning of food security at all levels” and in the relatively recent past “food crises have occurred, not simply because domestic production fails, but when financial resources are lacking, trade is blocked, distribution channels are inefficient or crippled, and governance is poor.”17

  In times of political stability and open trade, the provisioning of urban populations has always been more abundant and stable overall than that of subsistence farmers, a fact that can be inferred from the typical migration of rural peasants to cities in times of famine.18 (This is not to say that poor urban dwellers were necessarily well fed, but they were certainly better off than their rural counterparts.) In a 1768 essay promoting the liberalization of grain markets, the French economist and ecclesiast Nicolas Baudeau observed that even though no grain production took place in the heavily urbanized Netherlands, freedom to trade had long eradicated famine in the region. Inspired by the Dutch success, in 1689 English rulers adopted a similar policy and achieved beneficial results. Another success story at the time was the Republic of Genoa whereas, by contrast, government restrictions on commerce in the nearby Papal States and Sicily had resulted in the inhabitants of once exporting regions struggling to feed themselves.19

  The basic fact about food security, Baudeau argued, was that when freedom to trade was secure and goods could be moved between political borders, differences in physical geography and seasonal weather ensured that the surplus of regions that had enjoyed good harvests could be channeled to those that experienced below average ones. The Mediterranean basin has always been striking in this respect as, according to some classifications, it possesses no fewer than 64 climatic subtypes and experiences significant weather variability from one growing season to the next. As Aristotle observed more than two millennia ago: “Sometimes there is much drought or rain, and it prevails over a great and continuous stretch of country. At other times it is local; the surrounding country often getting seasonable or even excessive rains while there is drought in a certain part; or, contrariwise, all the surrounding country gets little or even no rain while a certain part gets rain in abundance.” 20 This is even more so on a planetary scale.

  Of course, the state of transportation and information technologies at any given point in time was also crucial in moving goods around in the right amounts and at the right time. Historically, regions that could rely on maritime transportation always had a clear advantage over landlocked ones. To give but one illustration, a 4th century AD observer noted that in the town of Edessa (modern Turkish Sanlıurfa) located more than 350 kilometers away from the nearest seaport:[t]here was a famine, the most severe within the memory of man. The city was in distress, but there was no help forthcoming from any quarter, nor any remedy for the calamity. The maritime cities support without difficulty occasions of want like these, since they can dispose of their own product and receive in exchange those which come to them by the sea. But we in the inland can make no profit on our superfluous products, nor procure what we need, having no means of disposing of what we have and importing what we lack.21

  In 1774, Benjamin Franklin observed that in “inland high countries, remote from the sea, and whose rivers are small, running from the country, not to it, as is the case of Switzerland, great distress may arise from a course of bad harvests, if public granaries are not provided and kept well stored.” It might also have been the case in ancient times, Franklin observed, that “before navigation was so general, ships so plenty, and commercial connections so well established,” that “even maritime countries might be occasionally distressed by bad crops.” In the second half of the 18th century, however, he commented that “an unrestrained commerce can scarce ever fail of procuring a sufficiency for any of them.”22

  This is the context one needs in order to appreciate the importance of the railroad in drastically improving food security in the last two centuries. As the historian Christian Wolmar observes: “France… had periodically suffered famines as a result of adverse weather conditions right up to the 1840s, but once the railways began reaching the most rural parts of the country, food could easily be sent to district[s] suffering shortages. Moreover, it was at a price people could afford.” Wolmar further quotes the journalist Nicholas Faith to the effect that “‘only’ half a million Chinese died in a famine in 1920/21 whereas 25 times as many had perished in a similar disaster fifty years earlier, before the railways had reached the regions involved.”23

  Agricultural Resilience: Diversification vs. Monocultures24

  Agricultural producers have long had to strike a balance between the greater resiliency and lower productivity of growing different types of food simultaneously and the greater productivity, but increased vulnerability, of focusing all of one’s efforts on a single lucrative commodity. Subsistence farmers the world over have understandably always elected to spread risks through crop and animal diversification. When you cannot easily tap other food sources, you better make sure that you have something to fall back on if a crop fails. In the words of agricultural economists George Norton, Jeffrey Alwang, and William Masters, in subsistence agriculture livestock acts as “a savings bank and an insurance plan.”25 In topographically diverse environments, farmers often deliberately used contrasts between various microclimates by, for example, working more than one parcel of land on different sides of a mountain. These strategies helped mitigate the impact of unpredictable weather, such as a late frost or an isolated hailstorm. Diversification was also eminently sensible in the presence of insect pests and diseases that targeted one or a few related plants and animals.

  Building on the incontrovertible fact that unbroken fields of a single crop increase predation, disease, and risk of crop failure, critics of modern farming have argued for decades that monocultures are by their very nature unsustainable. For example, in 1962 Rachel Carson wrote in Silent Spring that under “primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems. These arose with the intensification of agriculture—the devotion of immense acreage to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for explosive increases in specific insect populations. Single-crop farming does not take advantage of the principle by which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.”26 A few critics even take this argument to its logical conclusion, noting that, no matter how diversified, local agriculture can in theory never be as resilient as hunting and gathering, a point that is also often raised in controversies surrounding the development of agriculture some 10,000 years ago.27

  Despite its intuitive appeal, the notion that local polycultures are a
n inherently better way to improve the security of a community’s food supply ignores the fact that large-scale monocultures have always been part of a much broader geographical division of labor. In other words, despite their fondness for diversity in all its forms, locavores are oblivious to the fact that their prescription mandates that a community puts all of its agricultural eggs into one geographical basket while monoculture regions can rely on a broad range of distant suppliers in troubled times. As the historical record clearly shows, local polycultures have always been perilously unstable because they remained vulnerable to natural events that destroyed much in their path (from tornadoes and floods to hailstorms and earthquakes), highly contagious diseases that could affect a broad range of animals, and omnivorous insect pests. To give but one example, during the mid-1870s, Rocky Mountain locusts are said to have “launched attacks of such fury” that the governor of Missouri proclaimed a day of public prayer and fasting “for the interposition of Divine Providence to relieve the calamities cause[d] by [their] devastation.” Fortunately for the local inhabitants, the federal government was able to send emergency shipments of food, clothing, and seeds to hundreds of Mississippi Valley farmers.28

  And let’s not forget that not all monocultures are the same. Some, like the corn and soybean rotation in the American Corn Belt, involve deliberate efforts to reduce pest buildups. Others, like vineyards, will include different types of vines that will react differently to weather conditions. It is also worth remembering that the now-dominant varieties of most crops—which are not only higher yielding, but also much more resistant to disease and stress than most landraces (local varieties of domesticated animal or plant species that have developed largely by natural selection processes in response to their surrounding environments)—were bred from multiple types that originated from different locations.

  Most important, though, is the fact that, because of their lower productivity, local food systems can only support a much smaller fraction of the human intellect, capital, and sophisticated division of labor made possible by large monocultures and international trade. When things go wrong in the local polycultures of less advanced economies, only a few individuals with limited means can be called upon to perform such measures as crushing bugs by hands or diverting flood waters with picks and shovels. Large-scale monocultures, on the other hand, have long been able to rely on the work of numerous plant and animal breeders, researchers combating disease, and countless other experts whose very existence has always depended on the wealth generated by specialization and exchange. Despite low crop and animal diversity in commercial agriculture, highly skilled specialists continue to improve resistance to parasites, insect pests, diseases, and environmental stresses in monocultures over time. Unlike subsistence farmers who only ever had access to a limited number of local varieties of seeds, plant researchers can tap into large seed banks (which include hundreds of thousands of varieties for major crops like rice) and ever more sophisticated breeding technologies. As the economist Thomas R. DeGregori observes: “Monoculture today is in fact not only consistent with an incredible diversity of means for crop protection, it is the sine qua non for them, because it is not possible to have such resources for all the less widely planted crops.”29

  This basic fact of modern agricultural life should help put in perspective the claim that lethal “monoculture” disease outbreaks will inevitably force us down the locavores’ road. A case in point are Gros Michel bananas, the variety among a thousand that made a tropical fruit the most affordable fruit option in temperate advanced economies over the last century. At the beginning of the 20th century, they were exported in large quantities from tropical locations to North America and Europe because of their thick skin, year-round availability because of their nonseasonal character, ease of long-term storage without much packaging, and simultaneous ripening in ethylene-filled rooms. The variety was essentially wiped out of commercial production by fungus problems decades ago. Yet, our supermarket shelves are still stocked with bananas because Gros Michel were replaced by the more resistant Cavendish variety (which, despite its name, is of southern Chinese origins) while resistance to the diseases that had plagued banana production was finally found in New Guinea.30

  Of course, bananas were neither the first nor the last monoculture to suffer significant setbacks and recover in one form or another thanks to scientific research. To give a few additional illustrations, in the West Indies and Java in the late 19th century, the main variety of cane used on sugar plantations suffered dramatic disease outbreaks (especially from the sugarcane mosaic virus) and consequent yield reductions. In time, though, new varieties were bred that introduced genes from a wild relative, Saccharum spontaneum L., that were not only more resistant, but also richer in sucrose.31 In the United States, a rust epidemic destroyed most of the wheat crop in the northern plains in 1878 and struck again periodically afterwards, but the problem was brought under control at the time through better breeding and the eradication of wild barberry bushes that hosted spores capable of creating new strains of the disease. The grape phylloxera, a small North American insect pest of commercial grapevines, destroyed between two-thirds and nine-tenths of European vineyards in the late 19th century. At first, chemicals such as carbon bisulfide were used to curb its impact, but in time the pest was dealt with more successfully through the grafting of cuttings onto resistant rootstocks of North American origins and through hybridization efforts.32 More recently, the Southern corn-leaf blight of the early 1970s destroyed 15% of the American corn harvest, but the problem was quickly resolved through scientific research.33 In 1970 coffee rust made its first appearance in Latin America and in 1994 damaged a significant portion of the Brazilian crop. Coffee breeders then turned to wild-growing coffee plants found in Uganda and Mauritius for resistance genes and were able to address the problem.34 In the early 1970s, leafspot disease inflicted huge losses on California alfalfa producers, but a genetic solution was eventually found in 1974 in a single wild alfalfa plant (Medicago hemicycla Grossheim), and was soon transferred to a cultivated type of alfalfa by a team of scientists at the University of California-Davis.35

  Large “monocultural” herds and flocks of farm animals have similarly suffered from various epidemic diseases long before the advent of modern agribusiness.36 For instance, in the 19th century the railroad and steamships not only facilitated the movement of livestock, but also of diseases which rapidly spread among animals in different locations that until then had been relatively isolated from each other. Rinderpest (or cattle plague, an infectious disease of cattle, buffalo, yaks and numerous wild species) in particular became more endemic than it had ever been. Between 1857 and 1866, “Europe was almost denuded of cattle” while in later decades Indonesia, the Philippines and much of East Africa would experience cattle losses ranging between 90 and 95% that caused widespread famine and deaths, especially among pastoralist groups such as the Maasai. In time, though, medical advances in combination with older procedures, such as quarantine and culling, made eradication of this plague a reality.37 In 1914, a foot and mouth disease outbreak in the United States became rampant after it turned up in the Chicago stockyards, affecting over 170,000 cattle, sheep and swine. It was nonetheless swiftly controlled at a cost of U.S. $4.5 million (approximately $100 million in today’s dollars). (Interestingly, some contemporaries first suspected terrorists “equipped with hypothermic syringes” whose objective would have been to prevent U.S. meat shipments to “warring countries in Europe.”38)

  While it is true that monocultures, like any other commercial line of work, have always been subjected to financial risks, suffered major setbacks, and will remain plagued by various problems in the future, their alleged shortcomings in terms of crop failure and food security should be contrasted to those of traditional “localized” polycultures. The basic facts here are unambiguous. Subsistence farmers periodically starve while commercial agricultural producers who rely on monocultures for their livelihood don’t—and th
ese days, when subsistence farmers in poor economies escape famine, it is typically because relief efforts were able to deliver the products of large-scale monocultures grown in distant locations. The best way to improve the security of humanity’s food supply is therefore not to revert to inherently unstable systems, but to press forward with constant research, development, adaptation, and reliance on the broad range of genetic material conserved in the cold storage vaults of the world’s approximately 1,400 gene banks. Nature is a powerful and extremely creative foe against which many more generations of agricultural scientists and commercial producers will struggle. Despite this, however, past successes—ranging from ever more sophisticated pest control technologies to more resistant crop and animal varieties—have clearly demonstrated that, paradoxically, large-scale monocultures backed up by scientific research and international trade are significantly more resilient than more diversified but less technologically sophisticated local food systems.

  Overspecialization and Food Security

  In the first edition of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798),39 the English clergyman and economist sought to debunk the view that standards of living could be constantly improved through scientific and technological advances. Although he later adopted a more nuanced stance, his general argument is now widely understood to be that human populations have a tendency to grow more rapidly (geometrically or exponentially) than their means of subsistence (arithmetically or linearly). Population growth will therefore inexorably outstrip food and other supplies, resulting in ever increasing misery, famine, disease, war, environmental destruction, and population crashes.40