Food for thought

A few weeks ago, Margaret Wente wrote a column over at the Globe and Mail - "Enviro-romanticism is hurting Africa" - that I think is well worth a read. I want to use it as a jumping-off point for a discussion. Be warned, though - it's classic Wente, throwing her broad brush around much as ever.

I've actually got a confession to make on that front. However far apart we may be on the political spectrum (though I'm less inclined to paint her as a straightforward right-winger than some are), Margaret Wente is by far my favourite national columnist. She's pretty often off-base (look at her pieces on indegenous peoples for a pretty huge miss) , and the broad brush does come out all the time, but she does have a nose for bullshit, hypocrisy, and unsubstantiated claims that I appreciate. At her best, she's not so much right-winged as hard-assed and critical-thinking, which commentary can always do with. In any case, I'd much rather be provoked into arguing with a piece than put it down in boredom - as I usually do with the party-line windbags at the National Post.

In any case, the crux of her argument here is that the organic movement is a danger because it shifts emphasis from yields - how much is getting produced - to methods. Perhaps in the West, where we already produce far more than we can consume, this is more understandable, but what do we do about Africa, the continent most passed-over even by the green revolution. The problem is obvious enough: populations in the poor world are growing, and yields are not growing fast enough to match. The old oversimplified argument - that to feed the whole earth organically would take way more land than we have - does have some resonance here. What do we do about NGOs that push organic agriculture to African farmers? What relationship does that have with the organic movement in the west?

To me, the most pressing part of the piece actually comes early, when Wente notes that the people who embrace organic agriculture most fervently are the same who are most inclined to care for development agendas - people who, generally, care. I'd consider myself one of those people. I'd consider most of my friends in that group too, and many of us have been involved in some way with reducing the impact of our food consumption - whether through supporting local farms, not eating meet, growing food, or buying organic.

I've also spent much of the last couple of weeks chatting with Senegalese and Gambian farmers, subsistence and otherwise, as well as having the chance to meet a couple local people doing environmental education and activism in West Africa - a pretty tall order. It's all provoked the need for me to lay out in print some thoughts about the interconnectedness of food.

I've long been pretty antsy with the idea of a "local food movement" or an "organic movement". Sticking "movement" onto anything always seems like a step towards the sort of dogmatism that says simply "Organic = good" or "local = good" without thinking about what criteria we're using to establish exactly what "good" means. So what are those criteria? Why do we buy local, or buy organic?

As far as organic foods go, there tend to be two justifications - either that they are better from the point of view of health, or that it's broadly better for the earth to not be pouring pesticides and other byproducts of industrial agriculture into watersheds. This argument is far more convincing than the health one - I haven't found anything really convincing to say that organic food is any healthier than non-organic.

But what do we do about the rest of the world, where the need to minimize our impact must be balanced with the need to drastically increase yield? Although population predictions tend to be overly pessimistic, there will certainly be a great many more mouths to feed in the global south over the next while. What place does organic agriculture hold here? It's hard to say. Obviously, most poor subsistence farmers are already essentially organic - they don't have the money to invest in chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and such. There certainly are plenty of NGOs out there that are encouraging people to keep to this style, either for ecological reasons, or to capitalize on the organic fad in the West. These are the people Wente is hitting at, I think somewhat unfairly. As long as you aren't too much of a locavore (and here we have a conflict a-brewing), making the link between rich consumers and poor producers makes sense - it's basically what the fair-trade movement does. The problem, though, is that this can never be more than a niche. It's hard to imagine every single Westerner demanding organic food, but even if they did, people in the poorer parts of the world still need to be fed - not all agricultural products are internationally traded, obviously.

To my mind, the problem is again the blanket labelling of chemical or biological technology as "bad". Encouraging and helping people to move to a more technically sophisticated agricultural model, to me, doesn't seem to necessitate pushing people to adopt the particularly idiotic one we use. There must be some middle ground here - limited use of chemical fertilizers, say, or genetically modified crops of a certain type (maybe bred to resist bugs, instead of to survive huge pesticide doses). Perhaps equally important to their effects on yields, though, is their social impact.

Subsistence farming sucks. It's backbreaking, heartbreaking, and tedious work overwhelmingly undertaken by women and children. I think we have to be very careful about promoting the continuation of "traditional" models that specifically keep women oppressed and children out of school. It is easy to overromanticize the peasant model, and I think I often have. When we in the west devote ourselves to our gardens, go WWOOFing or buy organic, we are making a choice. West Africans don't have any such options. Context, as always, is everything. To my mind, organic agriculture has a big place in the chemical-soaked West. In the South, not so much - at least not yet. I really feel I need to read up more on the specifics of this stuff, though, as so much of this really depends on actual, empirical data.

Indeed, thinking big, if a move towards organic production does lower yields within the industrialized countries, it might not be such a bad thing. We'd have less cheap crops to subsidize and dump onto the global market, something that depresses prices and does a lot of damage to the economies of poorer countries. This, of course, brings up another question - how does trade fit into all of this, once you start looking at things through an ecological lens?

One of the big reasons behind the local food movement - though far from the only one - is the desire to minimize our "food miles". On face value, this makes some sense. I want to minimize the amount of carbon and other pollutants that my life adds to the biosphere, and trucking/boating/flying food all over the place to get to my table certainly does add a good pile of stink.

This gets tricky fast, though. If I want to be a really good locavore, I change my diet so that I buy fewer and fewer foods that cannot be produced locally. But I also care about the poor around the world, a large number of whom are farmers. To my mind, buying a bag of tomatoes from a farmer in Guinea will almost certainly benefit that farmer much more, proportionately, than buying it from a Canadian. There is, though, the ecological impact of sending all that food across the ocean. Aaargh, tangles!

Some of these tangles solve themselves. Southern climes are generally pretty friendly to plants, so it may well be that the life-cycle carbon footprint, even including shipping, could be lower if you grow some things in Guinea. For the sake of argument, though, I'm willing to accept that this probably isn't the case for most crops. We need to realize that this is a place for some serious cost-benefit analysis - broad principles really don't get us very far here. We can't just evaluate things on the grounds of carbon emissions, or poverty reduction, we have to try our best to think out where any decision helps and where it hurts - because it all does both.

I don't know nearly enough of the details of any of this to propose any sort of solution, so I'd invite anyone reading to jump in. To my mind, the end seems at least partially evident. We have one big part of the world that dumps way too much crap on our crops, and one big part of the earth that dumps way too little. Perhaps, in the end, it will even out. On the shorter term, maybe we should think about multiple global food markets, one for fancy organics and those who can afford them, and one for those who can't. This way, maybe, we can minimize the market distortions that we dump on the heads of those who can't bear them.

As with many things in my mind, a lot of this comes back to good ol' trade policy. We subsidize our farmers to grow cheap crops, then dump them on the markets. Then we raise tariffs to make sure that processed, value-added goods from poorer countries can't make it past our doors. I can't imagine a system better designed to promote rural poverty. From an ecological standpoint, too, rather than shipping bulk produce around the world, there's one hell of a good carbon argument for encouraging the development of agricultural processing capacity at the source - we just have to get comfortable with the idea that sometimes this will put our farmers or factories out of business. Unless you can show me a convincing reason why a Canadian citizen deserves any better chance in the world than a Guinean, I'm all for it.

At the end of the day, sitting and thinking about this surrounded by young women bent double all day over rows of peanuts, I don't really feel I have any right to tell them much at all.

Thoughts?