Local Foods are Subsidized

Given some of the things I've written about local foods, people often get the impression I'm against the movement.  But, as I like to remind people: I'm not against local foods - I'm against bad arguments for buying local foods.  And I am in no way convinced we should subsidize local foods.  When I say that people often retort that local foods aren't subsidized.  That's baloney.  Aside from the various calls for additional subsidies, this news release reminds us that local foods are indeed subsidized.  

“Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack Tuesday announced more than $5 million in grants for 82 projects spanning 42 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands that support the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) efforts to connect school cafeterias with local farmers and ranchers through its Farm to School Program. The program helps schools purchase more food from local farmers and ranchers in their communities, expanding access to healthy local food for school children and supporting local economies.”

If the goal is to help schools expand access to healthy food, why not give them money to do that?  Why add the extra restriction that it needs to be local?  You can get more healthy food for a lower cost without the constraint that it must be local.  If the goal is to enrich certain farmers, why not simply give the money to them? Why add the further restriction that it needs to go to schools?  If the goal is rural development, why not let rural communities decide what is the highest value use of additional grant dollars rather than tying it to a particular cause?  The idea that local foods are "good for the economy" is one that has been thoroughly debunked in chapters in my Food Police book and in Norwood's soon-to-be released Agricultural and Food Controversies book.  For more general critiques see The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet by Pierre Desrochers  and Hiroko Shimizu or Just Food:  Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly by James McWilliams.

In praising the latest announcement, U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, Chairwoman of the Committee on Agriculture said, somehow without the slightest hint of irony:

“As I visit schools with local farm to table programs, I continue to be impressed to see students enjoying broccoli and pineapple from salad bars”

Unless you happen to live in Hawaii, I doubt the program is supporting local pineapple.  And, unless you live in California or Arizona, there isn't a sufficient amount of broccoli grown to support local schools either.  All of which goes to show, if you really want kids to eat a diverse, nutritious diet, it pays to look a little further away from home.  

In the grand scheme of things, this isn't all that big a deal.  An extra $5 million on local food grants isn't going to be the thing that breaks the bank.  And, there are likely much more distortion policies that could be picked on.  But, I think what bothers me the most about this one is that so many people buy into really poor economic arguments for promoting local foods.  It makes me think we haven't done a very good job as economists educating our students and the public.

Local Food Bad News

The New York Post ran a story this weekend on toxic metal content in several community gardens in NYC (HT Jeff Stier).  The article was based on a paper published in Journal of Environmental Pollution.  

“Tainted vegetables — some sold in city markets — were found in five of seven plots tested, according to data obtained from the study by The Post through the Freedom of Information Law.”

and

“A previous soil study by the same researchers found lead levels above federal soil guidelines at 24 of 54 city gardens, or 44 percent of the total, and overall toxic soil at 38 gardens — 70 percent of the total”

The findings led to reactions like the following:

“Shoppers at a farmers market outside East New York Farms in Brooklyn — where a carrot was tested with nearly three times the safe amount of lead — were stunned by the study.
“I thought it would have been more natural getting it from here than anywhere else,” said one 38-year-old grazer.

Donel Lykes, 68, said he noticed something funny about the veggies there.

“Their vegetables, for whatever reason, are not as tasty as the ones you get in the store,” he said.”

This isn't some kind of overall condemnation of local foods, and no doubt such results might be found in non-local food sources.  However, the results do suggest caution in ascribing hype to foods or production practices that aren't firmly based in scientific evidence.

While we we're at it, here's other news on the local food front confirming that we've known for a while (and yet still doesn't seem to be widely acknowledged): fewer food miles do not equate with lower carbon emissions.  

“A Bangor University-led project into the social and environmental benefits of food grown locally and overseas has found that no straightforward relationship between the transport distance and the overall environmental impact of the commercial life-cycle of crops exists.”

and

“The results show that transport or ‘food miles’ was only a very small percentage of the CO2 expenditure related to any crop. “The emerging picture was a highly complex one of inputs and outputs concerning everything from the type of soil on which a crop is grown, to where and how it is stored and packaged for sale to the customer. It’s true to say that the picture is far from complete, with current interest focusing on the CO2 released from different soil types.””

This echos what I've long said: carbon emissions are likely to be lowest when we grow food where it can be most efficiently produced and then shipped to the final consumer.

A Foodie Repents

That's the subtitle of an interesting article at the New Yorker by John Lanchester.  He drives home the point I also made in the Food Police that food choices have often become political statements.  Here's one snippet:

“I’m thrilled by this notion [that food choices are charged with political significance], and yet I find that I can’t submit to it. For a start, we can’t feed the whole world this way. Today, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities—which is a positive development, because, from an environmental point of view, density is good. At the same time, that world population, according to the United Nations, is heading for a total just below eleven billion by the century’s end. We can manage this, probably, but we can’t do so without industrial agriculture. This doesn’t negate the individual virtue of our consumer choices, but it does mean they take us only so far toward making a better world. If shopping and cooking really are the most consequential, most political acts in my life, perhaps what that means is that our sense of the political has shrunk too far—shrunk so much that it fits into our recycled-hemp shopping bags. If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives, perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale. Imagine that you die and go to Heaven and stand in front of a jury made up of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Your task would be to compose yourself, look them in the eye, and say, “I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal.””

Competition for supplying local foods

This is from a new paper in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics looking at Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)"

“For farms considering entry into a CSA market and policymakers exploring policy scenarios to encourage local foods growth, this may serve as a cautionary note about the ability of the existing demand for local foods to sustain a substantial number of new entrants.”

A related footnote:

“We should note that several CSAs were excluded from our hedonic sample as a result of having ceased operations, suggesting that profitability could be a concern.”

The authors also find the interesting result that organic CSAs do receive a price premium over non-organic CSAs, answering the question which serves as the title of their paper, "Does Organic Command a Premium When the Food is Already Local?"  However, they only estimate about a 7% premium, which is much lower than that found in many other studies. I would interpret this to mean that local and organic are demand substitutes, but not perfect substitutes.

Is Local Food More Environmentally Friendly?

As should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it a bit, the environmental impacts of consuming a local food depends on how efficient your particular locale is at producing the particular food.  One of the ironies of this insight is that areas that have more intensified livestock operations may, at least in some dimensions, be more environmentally friendly than areas with less intensified production (because greater intensity often means more efficient).

Some empirical support for these these insights was recently provided in an article by  Misak Avetisyan, Tom Hertel, and Gregory Sampson just published in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics.   

The abstract:

“With the increased interest in the ‘carbon footprint’ of global economic activities, civil society, governments and the private sector are calling into question the wisdom of transporting food products across continents instead of consuming locally produced food. While the proposition that local consumption will reduce one’s carbon footprint may seem obvious at first glance, this conclusion is not at all clear when one considers that the economic emissions intensity of food production varies widely across regions. In this paper we concentrate on the tradeoff between production and transport emissions reductions by testing the following hypothesis: Substitution of domestic for imported food will reduce the direct and indirect Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions associated with consumption. We focus on ruminant livestock since it has the highest emissions intensity across food sectors, but we also consider other food products as well, and alternately perturb the mix of domestic and imported food products by a marginal (equal) amount. We then compare the emissions associated with each of these consumption changes in order to compute a marginal emissions intensity of local food consumption, by country and product. The variations in regional ruminant emissions intensities have profound implications for the food miles debate. While shifting consumption patterns in wealthy countries from imported to domestic livestock products reduces GHG emissions associated with international trade and transport activity, we find that these transport emissions reductions are swamped by changes in global emissions due to differences in GHG emissions intensities of production. Therefore, diverting consumption to local goods only reduces global emissions when undertaken in regions with relatively low emissions intensities. For non-ruminant products, the story is more nuanced. Transport costs are more important in the case of dairy products and vegetable oils. Overall, domestic emissions intensities are the dominant part of the food miles story in about 90 % of the country/commodity cases examined here.”