Food and Agriculture
A New System For Feeding The World? Slow Food Nation Says Yes
Tuesday, September 02, 2008 / KW
Mary-Jo and I just got back from an extraordinary weekend in San Francisco attending the first Slow Food Nation conference. (The picture at the left shows the "Victory Garden" created on the grounds of the city's civic center as part of the conference.)
After spending four days joining an estimated 50,000 participants in sampling many of the activities offered — including food tastings and sales, panel discussions, film screenings, educational exhibits, and (of course) some amazing dinners — I came away feeling as though I'd witnessed one stage in the emergence of a new social, political, and economic movement.
As you may know, Slow Food is an international organization founded by the Italian cultural critic Carlo Petrini. Its original intention was, as the name implies, to combat the spread of American-style fast food and to defend more traditional forms of agriculture and food preparation. It has spread to the United States (as well as around the world) and has now become — as I witnessed this past weekend — a popular movement that strives to address and link an array of economic, cultural, and political issues related to the production, sale, and use of food.
Thus, the people and organizations loosely affiliated with Slow Food come from many varied backgrounds and bring a wide range of interests and values to the table. Some are food lovers for whom the pleasure of fresh, local, well-prepared farm products is the chief motivating factor. Others are economists focused on issues like global hunger and the exploitation of farm workers. And still others are scientists and activists concerned with nutrition, food safety, pollution, and global climate change. In a vague way, most of the people I met and heard from this weekend could probably be described as "leftist" or "progressive," but it's not at all obvious that their disparate interests add up to a single coherent "food agenda."
Nonetheless, it seems clear that something big is happening here, represented not just by the thousands of people who attended Slow Food Nation in San Francisco but also by millions of other people around the country who are engaged in activities like shopping at organic food stores, at local farmers' markets, or through community-supported agriculture programs (CSAs); asking their kids' schools to get junk food out of the cafeterias; planting community gardens; writing their representatives to call for changes in farm subsidies, better regulation of meat production, and clearer food labeling standards; and ordering fair trade coffee when they get their morning caffeine fix.
The overall tone of the weekend was best captured, I think, by the standing-room-only panel I attended on Saturday at the Herbst Theater. The avid audience listened enthralled — and frequently broke in with applause — as a who's who of food celebrities discussed the meaning and significance of the conference.
Essayist, poet, short-story writer, and farmer Wendell Berry, who has been writing about the need to reform the U.S. agricultural system since the 1970s, spoke about how industrial farming damages communities, destroys ecosystems, and squanders resources.
Restaurateur Alice Waters (who launched the Slow Food movement in the U.S.) shared her dream that the next U.S. president will plant a garden and harvest vegetables to be served at state dinners at the White House.
The movement's Italian founder Carlo Petrini explained (through a translator) that Slow Food is not merely about the pleasures of good eating — though these are important — but also about community, family, and the creation of a truly humane and sustainable way of life.
Activist Vandana Shiva gave a fiery talk about how corporations like Monsanto and ADM are driving a new enclosure movement that is driving millions of farmers in developing nations off the land and impoverishing entire societies.
And journalists Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) talked about the political prospects for reforming the U.S. food production system so as to better protect workers' rights while producing abundant, nutritious, safe, and healthful food for all.
Where is the Slow Food movement heading? Is its dream of a reformed food supply system attainable? That remains to be seen. It's obvious that food-related issues — hunger, childhood obesity, rising food prices, water shortages, soil depletion, and many others — are on the radar screens of plenty of individuals and organizations. But nothing that adds up to a global "food issue" is on the agenda at a national political level — for example, in the platform of the Obama or McCain campaign.
Still, events like the Slow Food Nation conference may play an important catalytic role by bringing together thousands of people and getting them to draw lines connecting seemingly unrelated economic, political, and social issues. Someday, food activists may look back on Labor Day weekend of 2008 as the coming-out party for their movement — one that may end up having a vast impact on the national and world economy.
Where Has Your Breakfast Been? Practically Anywhere
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 / KW
Check out this excellent article from the New York Times about the environmental costs of shipping foodstuffs around the globe. It's filled with remarkable facts like these:
Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe's peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.
In the United States, FreshDirect proclaims kiwi season has expanded to "All year!" now that Italy has become the world's leading supplier of New Zealand's national fruit, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere's winter.
But perhaps the most revealing paragraph of the article is this one, which helps to explain why it (counter-intuitively) makes economic sense for food processing firms to move stuff from one continent to another:
Under a little-known international treaty called the Convention on International Civil Aviation, signed in Chicago in 1944 to help the fledgling airline industry, fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.
Get that? Shipping foods around the world is not some market-tested, economically efficient business strategy developed in response to consumer demand. It's actually the perverse result of an indirect subsidy originally created for an entirely different purpose more than half a century ago.
Free-market fundamentalists often criticize environmentalists (and other non-fundamentalists) for wanting to interfere with the natural, unfettered workings of the economy, which are supposed to embody some quasi-mystical perfection. Their argument would carry more weight if those supposedly simon-pure markets hadn't already been endlessly tinkered with in order to tilt the playing field in favor of one business interest or another.
Reality Check: How Cures From Nature Can Endanger Nature
Monday, February 11, 2008 / KW
It's a fascinating dilemma, and a bit of a Catch-22. Those of us who worry about human despoliation of the natural environment like to invoke, among other arguments, the long-term value of species survival for our own quality of life. "Who knows," we like to ask rhetorically, "What untold cures may someday be discovered among the obscure species of plants flourishing in the Amazon rainforest?"
It's a valid argument, but one that carries a sting in its tail. Because when those "untold cures" are actually discovered, it doesn't exactly guarantee the protection of the source species. In fact, it may be just the opposite, as this article from a German broadcaster's website suggests:
Drugs made from medicinal plants have become ever more popular among doctors and patients in Germany in recent years. Around 75 percent of customers in German pharmacies reach for a natural product when they buy non-prescription medications. In 2006, so-called phytopharmaceuticals accounted for around 2 billions euros ($2.9 billion) worth of revenue, or about a third of the total revenue in non-prescription medications. That translates into a high demand for the raw materials for these products — medicinal plants and their leaves, flowers, roots, and seeds. . . .
. . . for this reason Germany has a special responsibility when it comes to protecting medicinal plants. Excessive harvest and unregulated trade pose a threat to the existence of 4000 medicinal plants worldwide. In Europe, around 150 types of plants are in danger of extinction.
The article goes on to explain that, for technical reasons, industrial production of most of these plants isn't feasible. For now, at least, the only hope is the establishment of strict protocols governing how the plants can be harvested in their natural settings, and in what quantities. The inevitable result is limitations on the size of the market and lack of availability of the natural cures for some people who could benefit from them.
Sometimes we in the sustainable business community speak as if sustainability requires no tradeoffs — as if, with sufficient ingenuity, we can devise solutions that offer wins all around, with no downside for anyone. And maybe, in the very long run (measured in generations), that will be true. But in the real world, in the short term — where we all live — tradeoffs are unavoidable. And one big reason is the sheer fragility of our environment.
Medicinal plants offer just one example. There are many others. We want America's national parks to remain as symbols and reposititories of natural grandeur, which means we have to limit the number of visitors. We want to take advantage of wind and water power wherever these are available, which means we have to tolerate the intrusion of windmills and generating stations into some of our most scenic landscapes. We want the peoples of the developing world to enjoy a standard of living comparable to the one we enjoy in the West without accelerating the production of greenhouse gases, which means we all have to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels — perhaps drastically.
In each case, a balancing act is demanded, weighing goods that are mutually exclusive against one another and requiring difficult choices.
One of the painful lessons of growing up is that it's just not possible to do everything — that hard choices and, often, sacrifices must be made. (I have recently come to accept the harsh truth that I will never be a starting pitcher for the New York Mets.) As an industrial civilization, we'll be facing a series of such choices over the coming decades. We in the sustainability movement have a responsibility to help the world focus thoughtfully on the kinds of tradeoffs that are necessary, so that wise decisions for the long term can be made.
Activists of Many Stripes Gang Up on Agribusiness in Farm Bill Battle
Wednesday, July 04, 2007 / KW
Perhaps the most important business story in today's New York Times appears not in the business section but in the "Dining In/Dining Out" section, normally devoted to restaurant reviews and recipes. In an article titled "The Debate Over Subsidizing Snacks," food writer Marian Burros analyzes the battle surrounding various versions of the farm bill now making their way through Congress. The key grafs:
Increasingly, people are blaming the farm bill, and the longstanding agriculture policy it embodies, for some of the problems afflicting the country: the growth in obesity, the increase in food poisonings, and the disappearance of the family farm. Payments for farmers were started in the 1930s during the Depression to help save family farms; now the program costs billions and benefits about one-third of the nation’s farmers.
Changes in the farm bill are being supported by the Bush administration and an unusual alliance that includes the American Heart Association, Environmental Defense, Taxpayers for Common Sense and GMA/FPA, a food industry association. They agree that some subsidies should be cut and money spent instead to help fruit and vegetable growers, protect farmland, support small farmers and promote healthier eating.
For the first time, lobbyists for farm subsidies are facing off in the halls of Congress against hundreds of activists.
We see here a theme we've written about a lot: the growing public interconnectedness of all the links in an industry's value chain. In this case, the connections are being pushed by ever-more-informed, ever-more-sophisticated activists who are joining forces to create multiple pressure points at which to push for change in a system they view as having multiple flaws.
A decade or two ago, the chances for altering America's farm subsidies program (which was widely recognized as unbalanced and wasteful even then) were slim, mainly because the lobby that supported the program (the farmers themselves) was concentrated, united, and well organized, while the opposition was scattered, disunited, and disorganized. Today this is changing. And a big reason is that consumers have come to recognize the connections between the checks the government writes to support producers of a few favored commodities — soybeans, corn, rice, wheat, and cotton — and the nutrition habits developed by kids in their school cafeterias.
Armed with this new sophistication, they are creating alliances among disparate interest groups that, in combination, have far more clout than any single organization could muster — enough, perhaps, to overcome the powerful opposition of U.S. agribusiness.
If you're a business manager, you can no longer afford to take an atomized view of your industry or behave as if you're responsible just for the handful of activities you conduct on your own. You need to start taking a wide-angle view that includes everyone in your value chain and the human, economic, environmental, and social effects they all produce. Because sooner or later — and probably sooner — the outsiders who scrutinize business will start judging you through just such a wide-angle lens, and you'd better be prepared for what they will see.
China, Food Safety, and the Upside of Globalization
Thursday, June 07, 2007 / KW
Advocates of environmental and labor protections worry — with good reason — that globalization may drive a "race to the bottom" in which government regulations get watered down in the competition for world markets. But as this article in the New York Times suggests, the process can sometimes operate in reverse. The story deals with the fallout from the recent stories of tainted foodstuffs and toothpaste being exported from China and the resulting loss of confidence on the part of foreign consumers. Key grafs:
While Beijing has strongly defended the quality and safety of its food and drug exports, and even denied that the toothpaste it exported was unsafe, government regulators at the same time have stepped up safety inspections and shut down companies accused of producing unsafe food or counterfeit drugs.
But with pressure growing from regulators in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world, and international food companies expressing concern about the risks of importing Chinese-made food and feed ingredients, Beijing is pushing for a more forceful response to the crisis.
In its announcement on Tuesday, which was posted on a government Web site, China said that the State Council had approved a new food and drug safety guarantee system on April 17 and that an outline of the program was being distributed to government agencies nationwide.
The government said in its announcement that it planned by 2010 to place new controls on food and drug imports and exports and to step up random testing on medicines. It also said that it would have information on inspections of 90 percent of all food products, although it was unclear how that would work.
There seems to be little doubt that Chinese food and drug safety standards have always been lax. But as long as only Chinese consumers were affected, the government had little incentive to act. (That's the sort of attitude that having dictatorial powers tends to encourage.) Nosy, noisy, demanding Westerners are another matter. Economic pressure from disgruntled Americans and Europeans may be having an impact on Chinese practices that domestic dissatisfaction never could.
This doesn't mean that globalization automatically leads to good results. That happens only when people care, are informed, and have mechanisms through which to act. Companies in the United States and elsewhere that are partnering with firms in China or using Chinese suppliers need to encourage these conditions. The sooner firms in China (and the rest of the developing world) can be prodded or pushed into applying world-class standards of product safety and quality, the better it'll be for the future of global trade.
