For the Starving, 'Eat Local' Isn't an Option

That is the title of an opinion piece at the WSJ in which Adrienne Johnson warns that the local food movement isn't all it's promoted to be.  A few snippets:

More important, local foods do nothing to help the world's poor, who have long relied on export markets for their livelihood. American farmers likewise rely on foreign markets: About 25% of total crop production is exported, according to the Agriculture Department, representing a near $100 billion market that helps offset trade deficits in other sectors.

The "return" to local foods and yeoman farmsteads isn't just impossible. It misdirects political attention away from the problem of world hunger. Local foods simply cannot feed the world.

and

In this global sense, the often-heard eat-local slogan of "vote with a fork" is well-intentioned but naïve. It doesn't satisfy our moral obligations as global citizens. If you want to cast a food-related vote, find a candidate talking about global hunger and do it at the ballot box.

We shouldn't deny ourselves the privilege (if we have it) of a good meal, but let's not do so under the banner of political action. If you're eating free-range chicken from an organic farm down the road, with side orders of locally sourced arugula and kale, just remember you're not acting politically. You're just having dinner.

I'm glad to see these ideas in the WSJ.  They are many of the the same arguments I've made with Bailey Norwood at the Library of Economics and Liberty and in Chapter 9 of the Food Police.  If you want a whole book on the subject see The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet.

Are Local Foods Good for the Economy?

I addressed that question, among others, in chapter 9 of the Food Police. For myriad conceptual reasons outlined in the chapter, on my blog, and elsewhere, I do not find this sort of argument to be very compelling. Today, a colleague forwarded an article in the Economic Development Quarterly by some agricultural economists (the lead author was a student in one of my courses at Purdue) which provided some empirical evidence on the issue.

Here are the authors on the motivation for the study:

Local markets are believed to provide farmers with a higher share of the food dollar, with money spent at a local farm and nonfarm businesses circulating within the community, creating a multiplier effect and providing greater local economic benefits (USDA, 2012). Furthermore, agritourism generates additional dollars in the local economy as visitors spend money in associated regional travel. As a result, CFA is seen as a potential contributor to local economic growth.

What did they find?

Using Census of Agriculture data, regional growth models are estimated on real personal income per capita change between 2002 and 2007. We find no association between community-focused agriculture and growth in total agricultural sales at the national level, but do in some regions of the United States. A $1 increase in farm sales led to an annualized increase of $0.04 in county personal income. With few exceptions, community-focused agriculture did not make significant contributions to economic growth in the time period analyzed.

Rather, one of the factors they find to have the biggest effect on growth in per capita income is how "tradable" a county is - as measured by the share of business establishments that are in tradable sectors. A 1% increase in the share of establishments in tradable sectors was associated with a $3,235 increase in per capita in county personal income.

I've said it time and time again, but trade (facilitated by comparative advantage and specialization) is what makes us wealthy. Do what you do well and trade with others for what they do well, and both are better off. Policies or movements that seek to deny that basic axiom, even when applied to local food production, have dubious economic merit.

Wendell Berry - a Prophet?

Wendell Berry was recently featured on Bill Moyer's public television show.  Berry, for those who don't know, is a farmer and a long time critic of modern production agriculture.  He is something of a hero in the "food movement."  Indeed, Moyer's show is titled "Wendell Berry: Poet & Prophet".

There is much that could be said about Berry's views (the show is embedded below).  Berry seems like a nice grandfatherly sort of guy who would be fun to hang out with.  But, I think some of his views and prescriptions for the future are misplaced.  I'll pick just two examples.

First, Berry wants us - as a nation - to get back to the farm and to "resettle" America.  Here are a few back-and forths:

BILL MOYERS: When you and I were born in 1934 there were almost seven million family farms in this country. There are now roughly around two million family farms and most of us are further away from the foundations of nature than we’ve ever been.

WENDELL BERRY: Well, there’s another tough problem. And so you have to look ahead a little bit. I don't like to talk about the future very much because it doesn’t exist, and we don’t know anything about it. But one thing we know right now is that people want to be healthy and to be healthy you have to have a diverse diet and diverse agriculture employs a lot more people than monoculture. So you imagine people moving out into the landscape because it will pay them to do it. It’ll be what we now vulgarly call job creation.

. . .

BILL MOYERS: Resettling of America means….?

WENDELL BERRY: It means putting people on the land enough people on the land to take proper care of it and pay them decently for doing it. The fact that we and our families know the history of people having to leave the country because they couldn’t make a living there, is the history of rural America. But that they left because they couldn’t make a living is an indictment of our land policies. The idea that you have to go somewhere else, that you have to leave a fertile country in order to make a living is preposterous and it’s a result of the wrong idea of what we mean by making a living in the first place. To make a living is not to make a killing, it’s to have enough.

So, people left the countryside because of bad "land policies", and we should now "resettle" America and somehow pay people to do the resettling??

Putting aside the fact that most of the productive farm land in the US is already privately owned (the US government owns huge swaths of land in the West that it leases for grazing) by someone (most of them family farms if you look at the USDA data), and that farmers have been relatively profitable in the past decade, I think this take is a bad reading on history.  

People left the countryside because they found more profitable opportunities in town, and this transition is largely a positive development.  Technological development, to be sure, played a big role in the reduction of labor in agriculture, but so too did new opportunities off the farm.

The Harvard economics professor, Edward Glaeser, has written a book about the benefits of cities, cultural, economic, environmental, and otherwise, and he argues that the government has actually unduly subsidized rural (or suburban) living relative to city living.  

Take a look at a country like China.  As that country develops, hordes of citizens are trying to get out of the countryside and find factory jobs in town.  One of the biggest problems for the Chinese government's restrictive migration policies is keeping those people on the farms (or in trying to "manage" the transition).    

So, it can't be "our" land policies - because the rural to urban migration has happened in virtually every developed country, and it is unclear to me why or how we'd want to pay people to move back out to rural America.  

All this is coming from a guy who grew up in a town of 300 people, and who had to drive 15-20 miles to get to a grocery store.  There are some joys of small-town rural living, but I hardly think it is something many (perhaps most) Americans would enjoy.  By all means, if people want to move out and run farm, go for it!  But, why should taxpayers subsidize this activity?

A second, smaller observataion. 

Berry makes a big deal about "monoculture" and the value of diversity of diet:

WENDELL BERRY: But one thing we know right now is that people want to be healthy and to be healthy you have to have a diverse diet and diverse agriculture employs a lot more people than monoculture. 

But, there has never been a time in world history when citizens have had access to a more diverse diet than we do now.  Here is how I put it in the Food Police:

A person who restricts their diet to only those things grown locally is one restricting diversity in their diet – especially in the winter.  Walk in almost any supermarket in almost any town in America almost any time of year, and the diversity and abundance of fruits and vegetables is absolutely astounding.  Vidalia onions from Georgia, oranges from Florida, Californian lettuce, sweet corn from Iowa, mangos, bananas, and jalapenos from south of the border.   If you live in the right location, you might have access to such a cornucopia a few weeks or months out of the year but Wal-Mart offers it to us every day.  Fifty to a hundred years ago, the available transportation and storage technologies required people to eat a lot more local food.  Yet, despite weighting a bit less, people weren’t healthier then.  One reason, among many, is that our great grandparents lacked the diversity of diets that we enjoy by eating food from places that come from beyond our backyard. 

Farmer's Market Malfeasance

There is a lot of romanticism associated with local food, and farmers markets are often promoted as a may to promote trust in the food system.  I cautioned against some of these sentiments in chapter 9 of the Food Police:

As far as the environment goes, it is important to also recognize that “buy local” is a cause not a certifiable production practice. Some local producers use organic and low-tillage production methods, but many do not. At least with organic, there is a certifying body that requires adherence to certain standards to attain the label. There is no standardization with local. Some locavores think that’s a good thing. But, one consequence is that you can never really be sure (even if you ask) whether a local tomato was grown with more or less pesticides or in a way that causes more or less soil erosion than the one traveling cross-country.

 Now comes this story from a Southern California NBC affiliate.  

There are now more than 300 farmers markets in the LA area, with more opening every month. But an NBCLA undercover investigation has revealed that some farmers at these markets are making false claims and flat-out lies about the produce they're selling.

and

We found farms full of weeds, or dry dirt, instead of rows of the vegetables that were being sold at the markets. In fact, farmers markets are closely regulated by state law. Farmers who sell at these markets are supposed to sell produce they've grown themselves, and they can't make false claims about their produce.

We did find plenty of vendors doing just that, like Underwood Farms, which sells produce at 14 markets, all grown on a family farm in Moorpark.

But our investigation also uncovered vendors who are selling stuff they didn't grow, like Frutos Farms, which sells at seven different farmers markets in LA and Orange counties.

And as for trustworthiness:  

And during our investigation, NBCLA examined another big claim made at farmers markets -- that their produce is "pesticide-free."

NBCLA bought one container of strawberries, from five different vendors, at five farmers markets, including a vendor called "The Berry Best," at the Torrance farmers market.

NBCLA's undercover shopper questioned the Berry Best's owner about the strawberries:

"These are pesticide-free?"

Owner Mary Ellen Martinez responded, "Yes, they are."

To see if that's true, we took our five samples to a state-certified lab, and had them tested for pesticides.

Results showed three out of five samples we tested sold berries that did contain pesticides, including the sample from the Berry Best

Just because someone is selling something at the farmer's market doesn't mean they're telling you the truth.

Quote of the day

My university has a sustainability coordinator whose main message, as far as I can tell, is to go out and tell people to buy food grown locally…Why? What’s bad about tomatoes from Pennsylvania as opposed to Ohio?

—Richard Vedder. “The Real Reason College Costs So Much.” The Wall Street Journal. A9., August 24-25, 2013.