Does local food matter to sustainability? Ethan, in his post on food miles, asks some provocative questions about whether the carbon footprint of food raised in distant countries is really as bad or even as important as local food advocates claim. He makes some good points, and draws to our attention some interesting new research which may show that the environmental impacts of food shipment are a very small portion of the overall ecological footprint of the food we eat.
In particular, one New Zealand study (PDF) has drawn a lot of attention by making a strong case for NZ lamb being less energy intensive than European lamb, even after the transportation impacts were included.
This may not be the best example from which to take larger conclusions. For one thing, as I've written earlier, New Zealand has a strong commitment to energy efficiency and some of the most productive livestock grazing land in the world. It is not at all clear that the carbon efficiency of other agricultural goods from New Zealand and elsewhere is better (indeed, the study only makes the claim for dairy and sheepmeat, not all the other crops studied).
That said, though, the conclusion reached by the authors, that "it is not the distance that should be assessed but the total energy used, production to plate including transport," is a worthwhile caution, and we need more systems for gathering and comparing data in order to figure out whether the carbon footprint of a cheeseburger can best be shrunken by local or global production. That system also needs to take into account the backstory behind how food is actually processed and prepared. (Want to calculate your food's carbon footprint -- you could try this site.)
However, carbon output is not the only issue pushing the concept of local eating, and we must beware of carbon blindness in this debate. There are quite reasonable questions about preserving local food economies, not only for the benefit of the farmer, but for the preservation of farmland, traditional knowledge and local agricultural biodiversity. This is not protectionism, at least if done honestly.
There are also questions about what plants "want" to be farmed on any given plot of land. While botanic nativism is not the answer (most of the farmed world is already a melange of plants and animals from around the world, and climate change is rapidly transforming the landscapes in which other crops have been grown for centuries), neither is the current system of factory farming exotic high-value crops for export, especially where the costs in soil erosion and the spread of invasive species is high (though again, export crops like flowers can be done right and a bouquet of Kenyan flowers may come wrapped in less carbon than a Dutch one). Even high tech neobiological farming presumes a certain relationship to the historical ecosystem around the farm. Not every crop can be grown in every place without the risk of real ecological damage.
What's more, not all global food trade distributes benefits to local populations fairly (or even at all). Much of the global trade in bananas, for instance, is dominated by just five companies, companies which are notorious for bad labor conditions and malignant political influences, which grow vulnerable monocultures of plants nearly identical at a genetic level, requiring vast amounts of pesticides and fungicides -- and which leave a miniscule percentage of banana trade profits circulating in the local economy.
But overall, my preference would be for a sensitive and conditional approach here. When it works -- when the crop makes sense climatically, when it's transport is carbon-efficient, when growing that crop supports local farmers both at home and abroad, when the trade arrangements are fair -- let's by all means trade food.
Indeed, maybe the real task is inventing a model which would allow us to trade that food with a clear conscience. And here, I wonder if we might not mash-up community-suported agriculture, fair-trade models and the kind of international bridge-building we see in good-based remittance businesses like Mama Mike's. What if we could create fair-trade arrangements directly with local farmers or farming communities from distant places with different crops and climates? What if we got our bananas directly from a transnational CSA in Guatemala, rather than a banana cartel? What if we could utilize transparent practices and global communications to be much surer that our food dollars were going to farmers, directly supporting the sort of world we wanted to see?
Imagine then a network of such transnational CSAs, delivering great food from those places where export crops actually make ecological sense, so we get free-range lamb from New Zealand, organic plantains from the Carribean, coffee from a coop in Ethiopia and fresh flowers from a worker-run greenhouse in Peru.
What do you think? Do you know of any examples of these sorts of things (other than the ones linked to above)? How does such thinking play out in your kitchen?
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