26 minute read
Green Economy Journal Issue 44
WHY CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION PATTERNS MATTER
It is ironic that the shortage of humble face masks and personal protective equipment has highlighted critical fault lines in the supply chain and revealed that the core problem is that, in general, nations do not produce their own goods locally for local populations.
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BY LLEWELLYN VAN WYK, B.ARCH; MSC. (APPLIED), URBAN ANALYST
The Common City Manifesto by James McKay, 2020
— Viwanou Gnassounou, assistant secretary-general for sustainable economic development and trade, Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific State
The Times quotes one medical equipment executive stating that 80% of the world’s supply of medical face masks are manufactured in China. Many countries do continue to manufacture everything from toilet paper to automobiles. The problem is that in most countries, especially geographically large countries, with variable climates, growing seasons, and resources, not all products are manufactured close to where people need to use them. Consequently, cities and regions import goods, from coast to coast. It is this misalignment in consumption and production patterns that creates all the costs – economic and environmental – of producing, growing, and transporting, across thousands of kilometres, everything from vegetables to medical equipment.
Money paid for the products and producers exits the local community in the millions – sometimes billions – of dollars. And the carbon footprint alone of a single truck carrying 2 000 pounds of cargo 1 000 miles [1 610km] is a whopping 3.24 metric tons of CO2. 1 The socio-economic and environmental costs of transporting everything we need, even domestically, very quickly adds up.
A convincing argument can be made that, aside from the socio-economic and environmental costs, the global complexity that has been built up in pursuit of economic efficiency (lowest cost) has created a fragile global structure of just-in-time commerce. A case in point is the impact that the 2009 crisis in Fukushima, Japan had on Ford where the production of trucks had to stop because the pigment used in the paint was only made in Fukushima.
As far as the Covid-19 pandemic is concerned, we are in the early stages of assessing which components generally made overseas are about to stop arriving. It is known that 70% of drug APIs globally are made in China, so drug shortages are already commencing and are likely to get worse. This begs the bigger question, which is what sort of unknown critical components are needed but will be unavailable if the lockdown continues?
If decentralisation were taken seriously and designed the way that nature does, systems would be created based on planned redundancy and diversity.
It may well be that the pandemic may hasten, rather than cause, a flattening, or even reversal, in the growth of international trade, a trend which is already underway in the United States and the United Kingdom because of tensions over tariffs (United States), and BREXIT (United Kingdom). If virus-induced shutdowns or border closings create shortages of drugs, medical equipment, or other essential items, many nations and companies may well want to reduce their vulnerability to highly globalised supply networks. Of course, if supply chains shrink, and if countries are going to produce more of their goods, it will structurally alter the demand for oil and reduce the carbon footprint of global transportation.
If our supply chains were in geographically tight hubs across the globe, during any disaster, natural or pandemic, the communities least impacted could continue to function, providing the time and resources to pick up the pieces of the community that has temporarily collapsed. If decentralisation were taken seriously and designed the way that nature does, systems would be created based on planned redundancy and diversity. Paired together, redundancy and diversity are nature’s survival strategies. Yet our supply chains keep tending toward monocultures and monoliths.
One explanation for this backwards approach to systems design is that, in the so-called name of efficiency and price point, our sovereignty has been outsourced to a handful of entities that require centralisation as a means to control how and where profits are directed while leaving the majority of humanity one pay packet away from experiencing intolerable and unnecessary levels of vulnerability and risk.
As Rachel Moriarty, director of operations at The Schumacher Centre puts it, “I think what we’re seeing, especially now, is the need to adapt and look at our existing resources.” The Schumacher Centre is a “think-and-do” tank that advocates for locally-based, just and sustainable economies, and creates models that can be implemented elsewhere. “We are so dependent on outside forces, and we are exporting [our] money to them,” says Moriarty. “‘What if we produced locally, kept money locally, so retail could keep local? … [Then] everybody starts to understand it’s not us versus them, it’s helping our neighbours adapt to needs.” 2
The concept of import replacement is a city-specific version of the larger economic notion of import substitution. Import replacement was originally posited by activist Jane Jacobs in her 1985 work Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Susan Witt, executive director of the Schumacher Centre for a New Economics, explains in an essay titled The Grace of Import Replacement, “Jacobs believed that the best way to achieve such sustainable economies is to examine what is now imported into a region and develop the conditions to produce those goods from local resources with local labour.” 3 Re-localisation keeps dollars in the community, with local businesses that are small and accountable and responsible to their employees as well as the neighbourhoods they serve.
Paired together, redundancy and diversity are nature’s survival strategies.
Against this backdrop, the import replacement movement is thinking seriously about re-localisation: how to bring back the goods and services communities need, while building up and keeping wealth within those communities. It critically argues that import replacement is the solution to scarcity, job loss and economic downturn, not only during a global crisis such as Covid-19, but in general and, at a time of catastrophic unemployment, and that re-localising the means of production may create the products and jobs needed to generate local economic growth.
What Covid-19 has laid bare is that globalised economic growth has reached its limits. Economies cannot continue to expand without creating new pandemic risks, as people displace the habitat of more wildlife or raise domestic animals in unhealthy conditions.
Local is Lekker
There is a wonderful irony in Sturminster Newton Mill, a 1 000-year-old water mill in southwest England – which in its long history witnessed among other events global pandemics such as the plague in the 17th century and the 1918 influenza pandemic – having resumed production to meet the local demand for flour. Evidence suggests the mill has been on the site since 1016 – predating the Norman invasion – and it was mentioned in the Domesday Book, a vast survey of life in Norman England ordered by William the Conqueror and published in 1086.
The current mill was built in 1556, a few years before Queen Elizabeth I took to the throne and more than 200 years before the United States Declaration of Independence. It was upgraded in 1904. 4 Like so many other heritage resources, it was last fully operational in 1970, before becoming a museum and normally producing flour just two days a month during the summer, more to simulate a working mill environment than to contribute toward national food production. However, given the food demands created by the coronavirus outbreak, it has been able to produce more than 998kg of flour in a few weeks, the same amount it would usually produce in an entire year. As the curator notes, their first reaction was to shut down before realising that many local shops had no flour in stock and people were desperate. 5
All the stories making international headlines about the impact of the pandemic on food – milk being poured down the drain, planeloads of eastern European vegetable pickers licensed to travel to the UK to harvest salad crops, the hoarding, the scarcities – paints a picture of the existing food system. And it is not a pretty picture.
Experts who study what makes societies sustainable (or unsustainable) have been warning for decades that our modern food system is packed with ticking bombs. The way we grow, process, package, and distribute food depend overwhelmingly on finite, depleting, and polluting fossil fuels. Industrial agriculture contributes to climate change and results in soil erosion and salinisation. Ammonia-based fertilisers create dead zones near river deltas while petrochemical pesticides and herbicides pollute air and water. Modern agriculture also contributes to deforestation and biodiversity loss. Monocrops – huge fields of genetically uniform corn and soybeans – are especially vulnerable to pests and diseases. And while it may be easy for those living in the West to point accusing fingers at the meat-eating practices of those in the Far East, the reality is that the West is also participating in risky animal-use practices.
While the new coronavirus, crippling as it is, might have a somewhat merciful case fatality rate, we know that this catastrophe may be just a dress rehearsal for an even more serious pandemic that could take a more gruesome toll. When that day comes, it is highly likely that such a virus will also have its origin in humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire to eat animals, whether wild or domestic. The conditions in which animals are often farmed today – crowding tens of thousands of animals wing-to-wing or snout-to-snout – serve as “amplifiers” for viral pandemics. 6
A 2007 editorial in the American Journal of Public Health was published on the topic, worrying that our mass-raising and slaughtering of animals for food could be the genesis of the next big global pandemic. Given the connection between industrial animal agriculture and pandemic risk, the American Public Health Association journal editorial observed: “It is curious, therefore, that changing the way humans treat animals – most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten – is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure.” 7
Food vulnerability is a term raised in many commentaries. Long supply chains make localities increasingly dependent on distant suppliers. Many countries have come to depend heavily on imported food and therefore on the resilience of food systems in other countries as well as their own.
Consequently, food chains have become extremely long, with consumers and producers kept far apart creating an inherent vulnerability in the system – one break in the chain and the whole thing falls apart.
The system also tends to exploit vulnerable low-wage workers. And food is often unequally distributed and even unhealthful, contributing to poor nutrition as well as diabetes and other diseases. Although the current food system seems so successful, even to the extent that we have “coped magnificently” with maintaining supplies of key staple foods to the consuming public during the Covid emergency, we need to realise that this is a dangerous delusion. In truth, this model of a highly intensive centralised production, packing and distribution system, for most of the foods that are sold in supermarkets, will continue to have devastatingly negative consequences on the planet and its people.
5 CORE TENETS FOR A BETTER FOOD SYSTEM
In her study, Who Feeds Bristol (see page 22), Joy Carey found that there were five core principles on which to start building a better and more resilient food system, and which are equally valid now to see us through a crisis such as the one we’re now living through.
Build more regional-supply networks. Towns should buy more food produced in a climate and nature-friendly way from nearby regions. This means land needs to be allocated for food production and skilled food producers are required. If more of this was in place, towns would be less reliant on other countries, especially for seasonal fruit and vegetables.
People need to increase their cooking skills. Households need to be capable of cooking a meal from scratch with simple, fresh, affordable ingredients. It is less stressful when you know how to adapt meals if there are shortages of certain ingredients. Besides, less pre-prepared food means less wasted packaging and usually, money saved too.
Improve collective food awareness. If everyone understands where their food comes from, recognises the part they play in the local food community, and realises their potential in contributing to the resilience of that community it will shift attitudes and therefore habits.
Develop more closed-loop or circular systems. This is ultimately about conserving resources, and money – designing out unnecessary pollution and waste and treating anything that remains as a resource, not waste. The impacts of this are countless: more free water for gardens from rainwater harvesting; provision of compost and fertilisers derived from food by-products to urban farmers that in turn encourages the city to collect green and food waste; healthier and more nutritious food produced in natural systems that regenerate the environment; helping money to keep circulating in the local economy rather than be lost to external shareholders.
Safeguard food retail diversity. As experience is showing now, there is an inherent risk in relying only on supermarkets. A wider range of options is needed for where nutritious food can be bought, including independent businesses, market traders, farm shops, and home deliveries direct from farmers. Numerous smaller-scale food producers need alternatives to supermarkets to get their products to local buyers and to thrive as businesses. It is known that diversity brings mutual benefits.
Examined in relation to human security and international development, Covid-19 is causing a sea-change in the landscape of food security. The concerns of policymakers and communities in rich and poor countries have switched from a primary focus on the global food system to very real and everyday worries about getting the next square meal in local contexts. What this pandemic challenges us to do is to build greater resilience into our food systems so that it can better endure a crisis in the future.
Exactly ten years ago, Joy Carey, coordinator of Bristol for Gold, began her research into Who Feeds Bristol? Its purpose was to better understand the strengths and vulnerabilities in Bristol’s food supply, to identify the priorities for future resilience, and to inform an action plan on how the city could shape its food system. She notes how, at the time, she had to be assertive about referring to the “food system” and its “vulnerability”, never imagining that within a decade both concepts would be at the fore of daily experience. She states, suddenly, the word “vulnerable” is everywhere: the most vulnerable groups are being hit hardest by Covid-19; endless discussion about how vulnerable the global food supply system is to supply chain disruptions and resulting food shortages; cities all around the world scrambling to organise emergency food supply to vulnerable groups through not-for-profit and community-organised operations that are dependent on donated surplus food and therefore also vulnerable. Businesses are vulnerable to closing. Individuals not classified as vulnerable nevertheless feel their health vulnerability each time they go out food shopping. 8
Covid-19 has highlighted just how interconnected we all are; and how, when it comes to food, we are similarly all part of and reliant on a highly complex system – dependent on the health of the soil, and all the people and processes that get the food onto our plates – for our nutrition, our health and our survival. Not surprisingly, key food system vulnerabilities are being starkly exposed in this pandemic. Not only does a country like the UK produce only 61% of all the food it consumes, more critically it imports almost 60% of the vegetables and up to 90% of the fruit it eats. 9 Aside from this, Carey notes it goes further: rely on “invisible” but highly-skilled migrant seasonal workers to plant and to harvest, or to work in the abattoirs.
The “just in time” delivery systems of the UK centralised supermarket supply chain aims to keep food storage costs to a minimum by only buying in a limited volume at any given time. This approach has led to bare shelves and slow restocking, with people faced with lockdown suddenly all buying more food than usual. Added to this, the global food system is responsible for a third of greenhouse gas emissions; a third of the global population cannot afford to buy enough food, while another third has food-related health problems. To address vulnerabilities and to make big changes for a better future it is critical to understand more about how the whole system works.
LOCAL FOOD: THE BIG 6
1. THE TASTE. Local food is invariably fresher and therefore has more flavour.
2. NUTRITIONAL VALUE. Many foods lose some of their nutritive value over time. If food is coming from thousands of kilometres away it is going to lose its freshness and taste as well as its various beneficial components, especially vitamins.
3. FOOD SAFETY. The concern of food safety not only includes the fear of various additives but also focuses on growing techniques and farm conditions. Over the past 20 years, there have been horror stories about food contamination in China, South America, Mexico and even California. As a consumer, you have no control over food produced in other regions or countries. There is little transparency. The big multinationals are mainly concerned with reducing costs so that they can beat the competition on price alone. Product source does not rate very highly. They will not hesitate to use hormones and antibiotics for animals or various pesticides and herbicides to increase production. Locally grown and made food can allay many of our food safety fears because we can go check out the farm or food plant ourselves. Also, a local supplier lives and sells in your neighbourhood and they cannot jeopardise their only market which places a much greater emphasis on quality and safety.
4. FOOD DIVERSITY. When you by local you are supporting a business in your community. The diversity of small businesses is crucial to regional economies as it ensures greater stability over time, including added resilience to recessions. Many factors influence this outcome but primary among them is that local businesses create and keep jobs in the community. They keep profits and valuable skills in that same community. They also develop long-term relationships with their clientele.
5. FOOD DISTRIBUTION. Local businesses have the potential to significantly reduce the negative impact [pollution] of too many “food miles” associated with transporting food.
6. EMOTIONAL CONNECTION. The final advantage of the buy local philosophy comes from two loosely related attributes. One is physical, the other more ethereal. The first attribute that a local food brings to the table is a “sense of place”. This is a direct result of local growing conditions which influences taste. In French, they use the word terroir to encapsulate all those elements that go into growing food – things like soil, weather, topography, wind, drainage, etc. As a result, each crop, grapes as an example, will taste slightly different in different places. This is a fascinating phenomenon and it creates pride in the foods from your own region. It dovetails nicely into the growing interest in “food provenance” in North America – people want to know where their food comes from and they are demanding traceability (an easier task for your local farmer than huge multinationals!). The second, and less empirical, value gained from purchasing locally is harder to define. Besides the pride one might feel about buying local there is an even greater emotional connection to local foods – that involves knowing a farmer, or br
ewer or pastry maker. 12 Bob Desautels
The notion of diversification in the food supply chain runs through several commentaries. While it is natural to consider food security only from a predominantly consumer perspective, many smallholder farmers, who help produce almost 80% of the food consumed in Asia and Sub- Saharan Africa for example, also feel the impacts of this crisis. They are experiencing significant disruptions of the vital food supply chains in which they are essential participants as both producers and consumers.
Local, national and global food supply chains will falter if farmers cannot access inputs or supplies necessary for efficient production, get into their fields to sow their crops, fertilise appropriately, manage pest and weed problems, harvest perishable products such as fruits and vegetables, or participate in markets because of lockdowns. The crisis underlines the vulnerability of billions of people at the bottom of the food pyramid and the need for more diversified, nutritious, and resilient food systems.
One way to increase the resilience of the global food system is to support a wider range of suppliers. Diversifying away from a centralised supply chain to a more multifaceted one can increase the food system’s ability to react and adapt to shocks. Shorter supply chains have greater resilience because they have fewer links in the chain and therefore less opportunity for the chain to break in such a crisis. As Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food (2008-14) highlighted, “It is urgent that [we put ourselves] in the service of supporting diversity, not uniformity. The shift towards re-localisation and re-territorialisation of food systems must be seen not as a threat but as an opportunity for fairer and more sustainable food systems. 10 Concerns about the food system have been growing for several years already, especially as the impact of climate change becomes more apparent. Farmers have been increasingly focused on how to adapt food systems to improve resilience and help address those challenges as instances of extreme weather events and global temperatures have risen. Agroecology is one approach that is receiving increasing attention because agroecological systems are inherently more resilient as they have a greater capacity to recover from drought, floods, or hurricanes. Furthermore, they foster stronger socio-economic resilience because by diversifying the range of crops grown and reducing dependence on external inputs, producers dilute economic risk.
Vulnerable international food chains must now be replaced by regenerative local food systems. Building a vibrant food culture could simultaneously tackle obesity and youth unemployment while ensuring future food security and restoring soil nutrition. The creation of worker cooperatives and support for local businesses have been shown to multiply local wealth and wellbeing and will be needed to create more cohesive living and working communities. Families may want to ramp up their gardening to supplement purchased food. Get to know and buy from local farmers and create a network of social capital to boot. Over the longer term, the entire food system needs to be overhauled to be less complex, more locally oriented, and attuned to the realities of soil, energy, and nature. Like everything, our future agriculture system can be informed and improved by this crisis, but we first need to navigate the crisis.” 11
The global food system is responsible for a third of greenhouse gas emissions; a third of the global population cannot afford to buy enough food, while another third has food-related health problems.
Fortunately, there are encouraging signs emerging around the globe most notably the burgeoning of local efforts that are currently underway – in both rich and poor countries – to provide food supplies to the most marginalised in society. Most countries are reporting an upsurge in public-spiritedness, with local businesses and community organisations setting up food delivery networks to get food to households in isolation or with vulnerable residents.
There has also been a rapid rise in pop-up distribution centres, with decentralisation appearing to be the most effective way to link farmers’ produce to the people who need it in local towns. The creation of a new “direct-to-home” model, where farmers become the distributors of their own produce to local households, is emerging as the new form of local delivery to ensure food security of households. These different firm and farmer initiatives indicate that rural entrepreneurship is developing and finding new ways to ensure food security in local communities.
In addition, a welcome feature emerging within communities in both rich and poor countries are the changes in how people source food, and in how they cook and eat at home. People are learning how to manage within new constraints. In public broadcasts, the message is to stretch whatever ingredients are available. In poor communities, the breakdown of global supply chains has resulted in a fall in cheaper imports and a shift to local produce. For example, women trading fish in Kisumu, Kenya, have started to sell local fish from nearby Lake Victoria as Chinese imports are no longer available, and this has increased their local income. 13
It is these stories of local, decentralised solutions to managing food security during the Covid-19 pandemic that could be the beginning of a new chapter in the field of global food security. All communities across the globe are focusing on their local food security. Now might be the best moment to extend that enquiry towards a widespread understanding of the relationship between food availability and nutritional outcomes as well. Eating the most nutritive foods to ensure better health and wellbeing is intricately linked to the ability of communities to undertake innovative local agroecological practices.
The agroecology approach aims to create sustainable food systems, and at the core of this approach is a set of practices based on “locally adapted” farming. Working with farmers and their knowledge base and linking farmers to their local consumers has two benefits. Farming methods are improved, and there is an increasing awareness among local consumers of the relationship between food production methods and improved nutrition and health. This synergy ensures that agroecology has benefits for both food security and sustainability. In this new approach, improving local links between food production and human nutrition is the first step to advancing human security in communities across the globe. Increasing the resilience of communities will ensure that agriculture – which remains the primary source of livelihood for 86% of the world’s rural population – will be recognised as a key priority in international development.
Consumers too have a role to play in this transition. The Sustainable Food Trust advocates action on three levels. First, consumers should commit to sourcing as much local and sustainable food as is consistent with their household’s needs and capacity. Second, consumers can go on the Internet and identify all the producers who are farming nearby who would like to increase their percentage of local sales, contact them, and ask how they can supply them. In a way, these are the most powerful actions we can take, because if you think of the food system as a giant organism, individual consumers are its cells, and we need action from a cellular level up. Third, farmers and growers could approach local independent food shops and ask if they would consider stocking their products; they could register their existence on local food websites; they could also collaborate with others to establish “pop-up” farmers markets where their customers order online, and boxes and bags of products are delivered to them at a pre-arranged place and time in a food-secure manner. Independent food companies and retailers, and for that matter supermarkets as well, could increase their loyalty to stocking sustainable.
Government also has a role to play. Government could establish a national umbrella website which holds all the constellations of regional and local food websites and provides an opportunity for all producers and all citizens to explore how they could identify and secure supplies of sustainable and local food. Governments could also offer immediate cash grants to producers who wish to improve their local food production, processing, packing and distribution infrastructure, including local abattoirs which are seeing greatly increased demand but are struggling to survive due to the increased costs they face. It might also include polytunnels for growers, packing sheds, buildings and processing equipment for dairy farmers and meat producers. 14
As Richard Heinberg notes, “for better or worse, this is likely to be a historic moment of change for our food system. Events may take us in one or another direction. If big existing players in the food industry are first in line for bailouts and use the crisis as an opportunity to gobble up their smaller competitors, we could soon find ourselves dependent on a food system that is even more consolidated and deregulated, and even less resilient in the face of future disruptions. On the other hand, governments, producers, and consumers could use the crisis as an opportunity to address festering food supply issues, and to refashion the system in a way that better meets everyone’s needs over the long run. We all have a stake in the outcome.” 15
The model which is needed involves regional and even local supply chains being developed on a large scale – in other words, cellular systems somewhat analogous to the re-localisation that is beginning to take place in electricity distribution.
REFERENCES
1 Vande Panne, V. 2020. “To combat widespread job loss, stay local and look to import replacement.”Downloaded: Tuesday, 21 April 2020
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Frater, J. 2020. “1,000-year old English mill resumes flour production to meet demand during coronavirus pandemic.”Downloaded: Thursday, 30 April 2020
5 Ibid.
6 Shapiro, P. 2020. “One root cause of pandemics few people think about.” Downloaded: Wednesday, 25 March 2020
7 Ibid.
8 Carey, J. 2020. “A wake up call for food production resilience.” Downloaded: Tuesday, 28 April 2020
9 Ibid.
10 Elridge, H. 2020. “Building resilience into our food systems.” Downloaded: Saturday, 11 April 2020
11
Hagens, N. 2020. “An overview of the systemic implications of the Coronavirus.” Downloaded: Saturday, 18 April 2020
12 Deasautels, B. 2020. “Think globally, act locally.” Downloaded: Thursday, 07 May 2020
13 Fennell, S. 2020. “Local food solutions during the Coronavirus crisis could have lasting benefits.” Downloaded: Friday, 24 April 2020
14 Holden, P. 2020. “The Coronavirus pandemic and future food security.” Downloaded: Thursday, 09 April 2020
15 Heinberg, R. 2020. “Fraying food system may be our next crisis.” Downloaded: Friday, 24 April 2020
