Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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How Locavores Could Save the World
The latest yuppie craze could do more than just cut emissions -- it might 
also help feed the poor.
BY FELIX SALMON | FEBRUARY 26, 2010
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/26/how_locavores_could_save_the_world

Locavorism, the latest trend in yuppie food politics, is clearly a boon for 
the environment. Eating vegetables from local farmers and small farms cuts 
down on emissions from transporting foods; reduces chemicals in the soil 
because small farms are more likely to be organic; and invariably tastes 
better, too. But locavorism may be about more than smug new-wave chefs 
blissing out over Vermont ramps and heirloom garlic: "Locavorism" might be 
the key to food security and better nutrition for all.

You may say, of course, that locavorism is far too expensive to feed anyone 
who lives outside the privileged confines of Berkeley or Brookline: Who can 
afford $3 tomatoes and $12 loaves of bread? But in fact, the costs of the 
modern agriculture industry are far greater, and more insidious, than the 
costs of returning to a more localized model of farming would be.

For the last several decades, farmers in places such as the United States, 
Europe, Brazil, and India have concentrated on growing just a handful of 
staple crops -- wheat, soy, rice, corn. International agribusiness 
conglomerates now produce these grains in quantities that individual farmers 
could have once barely comprehended. From there, these staple crops -- corn 
especially -- are transformed into all manner of secondary foodstuffs, from 
chicken and beef to Coca-Cola, at ever-decreasing prices. Yet though this 
certainly does help make more food, it can also serve to increase the risks 
associated with such industry, most of which come down to one thing: 
monoculture, or growing just one crop at a time.

There are three big problems with monoculture, all of which can be addressed 
with a more sensitive, bottom-up, heterogeneous, small-scale agricultural 
model.

First, monocultures are, by their nature, prone to disastrous bouts of 
disease. Ireland's population was decimated by the potato famine; France's 
vines were wiped out by phylloxera; a disease called huanglongbing now 
threatens all of California's citrus crop. If you only grow one crop, the 
downside of losing it all to an outbreak is catastrophe. In rural Iowa it 
might mean financial ruin; in Niger, it could mean starvation.

Big agriculture companies like DuPont and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), of 
course, have an answer to this problem: genetically engineered crops that are 
resistant to disease. But that answer is the agricultural equivalent of 
creating triple-A-rated mortgage bonds, fabricated precisely to prevent the 
problem of credit risk. It doesn't make the problem go away: It just makes 
the problem rarer and much more dangerous when it does occur because no one 
is -- or even can be -- prepared for such a high-impact, low-probability 
event.

A more natural and heterogeneous system, by contrast, is inherently much more 
resistant to disease because few (if any) diseases can successfully wipe out 
a wide range of crops. Natural resistance is also much more likely to be 
found where there are a wide range of native varieties growing in the same 
place. Nature abhors a monoculture, and a system of smaller farms growing a 
large number of crops will be able to resist any disease in a way that no 
single crop can. If one or two of them gets hit, the damage done is 
manageable rather than devastating. It doesn't have the same economies of 
scale, of course, and it might not have magical flood-resistant properties. 
But it works, all the same.

The second problem with monoculture is that new, high-tech, disease-resistant 
crops tend to come with something that is just as unwelcome as disease: 
patents. Many of these high-tech crops can't reproduce organically and need 
to be bought afresh each season from the patent holder. And all of them come 
with layers of intellectual-property laws too complex for most non-lawyers to 
decode. So how do we expect impoverished and often illiterate populations in 
some of the most remote areas of the world to take advantage of them? 
Non-engineered crops, the natural ones that replicate themselves, are 
patent-free.

Finally, monoculture is based on the principles of trade and comparative 
advantage. It's supposed to work like this: Enormous areas specialize in 
growing, say, corn and soy; they then sell those crops and use the cash they 
get in return to buy a wide variety of foods.

This works in the United States, but it doesn't work well in the rest of the 
world, where trade barriers are often high, and selling crops for money and 
then exchanging that money for food is a complex and fraught process. Farmers 
growing cash crops in remote areas are often taken advantage of by middlemen, 
who take a cut of the profit and pay the growers much less than the market 
rate.

Matters are even more complicated when borders are closed altogether. During 
the commodity boom of 2008, for example, food prices rose sharply, and 
several countries, including big producers such as Vietnam and Argentina, 
either banned agricultural exports or taxed them at punitive rates.

What's more, crops are bulky, heavy things that are prone to spoilage, 
especially in hot and humid countries that lack luxuries like interstate 
highways and refrigerated trucks. While locavores in Seattle count their food 
miles because they're worried about their meal's carbon footprint, in poorer 
parts of the world food miles are much more immediately relevant: The farther 
away your food is grown, the less likely it is to reach you, and the more 
likely you are to go hungry.

It's also worth bearing in mind that there's already more than enough food 
being grown to feed every person on the planet. Right now, when we grow more 
food, the main consequence is more obesity and waste in rich countries. In 
fact, we have reached such a level of excess food that powerful agricultural 
lobbies -- supported by big businesses like ADM -- have been pushing for food 
crops to be turned into biofuels, especially in the United States and Brazil. 
It simply isn't the case that we are at risk of shortages without these 
monoculture crops.

The hunger that persists is a question of distribution; calories don't just 
magically trickle down to the people who really need it. Locavorism gets 
right to the root of this problem. By growing multiple crops close to home, 
less is likely to spoil and more will reach the table.

To be sure, the life of a subsistence farmer is not an easy one. Subsistence 
farmers make up a large proportion of the world's poor. But local farmers 
growing local food can create a much more sustainable life for themselves and 
those around them than Western agribusinesses can. At the very least, 
locavores should be an important part of the mix.

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