Causality, according to Wittgenstein, is the ultimate superstition. While he probably wasnt thinking about the global food system when he said that, he may well have been.
The story of the modern global food system is the story of unintended consequences. Its the story of a causal logic run amok. Its the familiar story of how were all intimately connected without quite grasping just how intimately. Its the deeply disturbing story of a system characterized by historic injustice that continues to produce injustice today. Its a story that goes to the throbbing, bleeding heart of sustainability. Finally, its the worldchanging story of what we do when faced with the reality of such a narrative. It can, without being hyperbolic, be called the mother of all systemic problems.
In the coming weeks I'll be sending worldchanging a number of "postcards" from my on-going journey through the global food system.
Ive been struggling, as part of my work over the last year, to figure out exactly how and why the global food system is unsustainable and to get my head around the logic of the system. This is easier said than done. Two of my colleagues at the Sustainable Food Lab, Hal Hamilton and Don Seville, have articulated the dilemma as follows,
Nobody intends for their decisions to result in a system that is unsustainable overall. Decisions are made by individuals trying to do the best job possible within their context. Some must please a boss or increase shareholder value. Cost cutting is frequently necessary in order to compete successfully. All of these decisions are usually rational within the context of the decision-maker, but the net result of all these decisions includes problems ranging from soil erosion to low quality nutrition.
[Thanks to Larry P. for the photograph.]
The Multiple & Conflicting Logics of Food
Its clear that many thousands of decisions are made everyday about food and agriculture that, in aggregate, give rise to the global food system. Each of these decisions is obviously part of a particular culture, paradigm and worldview. Each of these decisions is also congruent with a very particular logic, a way of reasoning out a decision about food. As Hal and Don point out, none of them are per se, illogical or irrational. They all have their own reasons. The word "logic" is a precise description of the chain of reasoning that drives decisions.
The Indian activist and biologist Vandana Shiva explains that even though the complex socio-ecological phenomena of the food system may well have been conceived in technological deterministic frameworks of single cause single-effect they cannot be understood by this logic. (My italics) Rather the best one can strive for is contextual causation, in which indicators and suggestions are made of how the creation of certain contexts creates overwhelming conditions for certain processes to be unleashed. Or to put it another way, when dealing with complex, systemic problems causal analysis only works in hindsight. If were interested in insight, that is, innovation and foresight then we must start with the specific cases and build contextual causation from specific socio-historical cases.
In trying to grasp the food system, my initial, rather simple-minded, mistake was to assume that just because a single system existed there must also be a single, universal logic to go with it, and all I had to do in order to understand food was to grasp that logic. Through a grindingly painful process I came realized that there actually isnt a single over-riding logic but rather there are multiple, conflicting and sometimes faulty logics which together produce the incredibly complex global food system. (Like most a-has I wondered why someone hadnt simply told me this at the start.) Whats more, many of these logics are profoundly disconnected from each other. So for example, the logic that gives rise to the decisions of an urban consumer is a universe away from the logic of a small farmer living twenty miles away. The only connection between them is the hard to discern food supply chain. Its more obvious that the logic of the same urban consumer is even further disconnected from that of a small farmer living five thousand miles away, even though a piece of fruit picked by the farmer on Monday may well be eaten by the consumer on Tuesday. In other instances, where logics do somehow meet, more often than not the engagement is violent, with logics seeking to exploit, de-legitimize or even destroy the other.
As is obvious, the process of globalization is pushing these logics up against each other in a way which means, like it or not, theyre going to engage. Marx described such engagements as akin to a train crashing into a wheel-barrow and while that perhaps describes the trajectory of the current system, it also describes a possible future that we could avoid. The question of how we can avert the wheel barrow scenario is one that I carry with me through this ongoing reconnaissance of the global food system.
The State of the System
James Ridgeway, in his recent study on the control of global resources, Its Not For Sale, makes the point that Perhaps the single most important problem for American foreign policy since the building of the railroads and the opening of prairie agriculture in the middle of the nineteenth century has been how to dispose of farm surplus, notably grain.
The Sustainability Institute in a study on the long term effects of corn prices put their finger on the dynamic emerging from the Second World War.
[It] unfolds as follows: In the struggle to maintain income in the face of falling prices, producers attempt to maximize their yield. They do this by adopting any new, yield-boosting technology as long as the anticipated income gain from yield increases is greater than the cost of the new technology. Technology suppliers carefully price new technologies so that, most of the time, new technologies will pass this cost-benefit test and be purchased. While higher yields can potentially increase individual incomes, the net effect of many producers making the same decision is higher overall production, which tends to decrease price and therefore reduce incomes.
This story [of corn farming] is typical of commodity agriculture. Farmers have increased their yields and lowered their per-unit costs for many decades, but this productivity has been won at the cost of higher taxes for citizens in Europe and the United States (to pay for subsidies and other programs), a decreasing standard of living for farmers and rural communities, and the degradation of the rural landscape. Yet because the underlying dynamics are not clearly understood, well-intended but nevertheless ineffective solutions are applied over and over again.
Currently, the globalised food system is deeply stratified. At least as far as consumers and producers are concerned the West has an over-abundance of food whereas the South is characterised by a scarcity of food. (When I say 'food' I mean what gets sold in retail stores or otherwise consumed by people, when I say 'produce' or 'crop' I mean the raw product that farmers produce.)
This means that in the West retailers are in fierce competition for consumer dollars, in effect, a constant mission impossible to try and deliver more for less. The bulk of food retailers are large, public multi-nationals, and must demonstrate year-on-year growth in order to keep their share prices up.
Retail sales of food covers a relatively small range of food stuffs. This includes fresh produce such as dairy and meat, as well as fruits and vegetables of which relatively limited varieties are sold. (For example of maybe 2,500 varieties of apple available in England, supermarkets will sell, at most, a dozen.) Then there are the many thousands of processed products sold in supermarkets which mainly consist of processed commodities such as sugar, salt, corn, corn syrup and soya.
The over-abundance of commodities translates into producers being constantly squeezed on price. New Internationalist reports how, "In 2000, [British] supermarket giant Tesco introduced international reverse auctions for its suppliers all over the world. They were asked to bid against each other until Tesco got the lowest price..."
The best way to bring the price of produce (fresh & commodity) down is through mono-cropping, volume production and large scale processing. Large monocultures farms can deliver produce for cheaper. They can leverage scale. Small or even medium size farms (ranging in size from 50-2000 acres) cannot deliver single-crop volume at the price that large farms can. This is not simply because of yield but also because of complex systems of credit and subsidies that benefit large commodity farms.
The dominance of market logic means that small & medium farms have been steadily going out of business in the last fifty and being replaced by large farms, many owned by corporations. The closure of small & medium farms, which contributes to the decline of rural culture, is one factor contributing to the growth of urban populations. Farmers are abandoning their farms, rural populations are joining urban communities increasing the demand for food while simultaneously decreasing production and self-sufficiency in food. The remaining farms, in response to this increased demand for food, are increasing food production. In doing so, theyre flooding urban communities with food, decreasing the cost of food and dramatically heating up competition for the same consumer dollar. The solution for how to win more of that consumer dollar is through simultaneously decreasing the cost of produce while somehow adding value, that is, processing the produce and turning it into food.
Into this situation comes the middle-man, or whats become the multi-billion dollar industry of food processing. The food processor buys produce from farmers, processes it in various ways and then sells it on for a mark-up. An over-abundance of produce generally means that the producer is losing out on price (and trying to gain on volume) and the food processor can go to whomever is offering the most competitive price.
The function of the food processor is to somehow translate this general over-abundance of produce into a profit. Enter branding. Enter packaging. Enter frozen dinners. Enter pre-cooked gourmet meals. Enter hundreds of breakfast cereals. Food processing companies include some of the largest corporations in the world, such as Nestle, Unilever, Kellogg's and General Mills. Increasingly, supermarket chains are joining the ranks of food processors by producing their own, cheaper, in-house versions of the most popular products.
The relationship between producer-food processor-consumer forms the DNA of the global food supply chain.
To summarise, the basic cycle of the food system in the West, set up over the last fifty years, looks something like this. The system is characterized by slow, steady increases in demand for food; producers respond by over-producing which in turn results in an over-abundance of crops; food processors buy crops, integrating and consolidating in order to pass on the lowest price to consumers; more and more crops are being grown in mega-farms driving more small farms out of business; the price of food in retail stores is falling; small producers are steadily going out of business; there is an overall increase in urban populations which drives on-going and steady increases in the demand for food. This is the dominant logic of the food system, and it drives patterns in the global food system.
As one critic put it "most farmers are becoming producers of raw materials for a giant food manufacturing system. They are really not in any sense producing food anymore."
Next week: Postcard #2 - The Road From Green Revolution To Fatal Harvest
