So, I just recently subscribed to a Community Supported Agricultural Network [1]. What is a CSA? It is one way in which non-food-producers can buy food directly from producers, skipping the middle-men. Because you buy from small(er), local (or at least close), and often organic farms, the food tends to be higher quality, and more nutritious and delicious. I also don’t have to ‘manage’ the vegetables in my refrigerator – my CSA will deliver their groceries to me on a regular basis – and I will eat them. That simple. It means I eat more healthfully, more cheaply (though the savings are not enormous for most people), and most important, more locally.
Why is buying your food locally important? It is important because of the way in which non-local food is transported to your local grocery store: planes, ships, and trucks. All of which use a lot of fossil fuels and increase costs to the consumer, without raising the price the farmer receives.
Sure, if we stuck completely to a CSA model, our dining would be radically different. We certainly wouldn’t be eating many ‘fresh’ tomatoes in the winter. Our meals become more seasonal, and certain things we’ve learned to love are no longer available to us whenever we want them. I’m inclined to simply say, ‘Tough,’ but I think that a better response might be, “this is a good thing.” After all, constant gratification is not a useful thing for human beings. (Or so says the ghost of Calvin, I suppose).
This is all deeply relevant to the expanding food crisis. Even advisors to President Bush are starting to recognize that buying locally is crucial. When Bush pushed for $770 million dollars for international food aid. That probably won’t be enough, and when compared to the 70 Billion dollar package it is a very minor part of (and the bulk of which is military and security spending), it seems positively like an afterthought.
But there is an aspect to the new push which makes me feel a bit more positive. Bush is pushing to change the ways in which food aid is actually delivered. While the vast bulk of US foreign aid is ‘tied aid’ (meaning the aid must be spent on U.S. goods, services, or salaries for American ‘experts’), Bush has suggested – and he is right in this case – that food aid should be purchased in the countries or regions where it is to be provided.
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Norman Borlaug wrote in the Wall Street Journal (along with a past director of USAID) on precisely this issue, and why buying food locally is so key:
Purchasing food locally simplifies the process, cuts down the time delay in delivery, reduces the logistical risks, and saves transport costs. These savings can be used to buy more food. At the same time, higher prices will probably reduce the purchasing power of USAID’s food-aid programs by at least $200 million this year. While President George W. Bush has released food aid from a reserve fund, it is not sufficient.
Direct food purchases in local countries could also help improve their agriculture. In Africa, for example, two-thirds of the 200 million people who suffer hunger are small-scale farmers, primarily engaged in subsistence production because they find too few buyers for any larger harvest.
In Ethiopia in 2003, for example, widespread drought occurred in the low-lying areas of the country and the very dry northern highlands. Some 12 million to 15 million people were at risk of hunger and starvation. But in the central and southern highlands of Ethiopia, farmers were producing a bumper crop of corn and other cereals. Yet with no market for the locally produced grains, prices collapsed.
While Cambodia is announcing that it wants to export more and more of its rice, and Thailand is organizing a rice cartel to get better prices for its exported rice, more and more attention should be paid to the people in these countries who desperately need the food. After all, even though Cambodia intends to lead the world’s rice exports by 2015, thousands of school-aged children are going hungry in the country right now, since the World Food Program was forced to cut their free breakfast program in the face of rising food prices.
*Oh yeah. Though I normally appreciate the Christian Science Journal, their recent article on Cambodia’s rice ’success’ misses all the important points, one after another, and seems to have been written in the heat of the earliest years of the Green Revolution, which hasn’t received so much praise and flattery in decades. Read the Wikipedia article to see how views on the Green Revolution differs from the presentation in the article. Totally irresponsible journalism, IMHO. [I should note, however, that Borlaug himself largely ignores the criticisms of the Green Revolution, and might be perfectly happy with the presentation it receives in the CSJ]
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