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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Is the problem of not having enough cash to buy the food mainly encountered in the developing world?
Well, you'll see it in poor neighborhoods in America, but, yeah, just about in every case, whether it's in the developing world or in New York, hunger is caused by too little money, not by too little food. And even in cases where there have been huge famines in Africa and Asia, it's not because there wasn't any food, it's because they didn't have any money to buy food with. There would be relief efforts, but sometimes in the next country, the next province or the next village, you would have plenty of food. The people who were hungry were hungry because they were broke.
If we were to grow less and to get away from subsidies, would that help put cash in the pockets of people who can't afford to buy enough food?
It's the only thing that we might do. I can't guarantee that this would be successful in Africa, but I do know that what we're doing hurts, and what the European Union is doing as well. They have a slightly different way of subsidizing their farmers, but the effect is the same. We sell or give rice, cotton and corn on the world market for less than it really costs to produce it -- and certainly for less than farmers in Africa or Asia can afford to produce it -- so they go out of business or become simple subsistence farmers.
They move to the cities. There aren't enough jobs for them, so you get huge slums and disease, AIDS, prostitution, child slavery, ripe planting grounds for distrust and terrorism, because they're not able to make the agricultural base of their economies work.
Now, if tomorrow we did what I think is the right thing, phase out the subsidies and support our own farmers by paying them to care for land instead of maxing out production and consequently stop flooding foreign markets, they wouldn't all automatically turn into successful farmers in Africa. They've got lots of problems with bad government, corruption and war that make it difficult.
You mention in your prologue that many advocates for small farms are dismissed for "fuzzy-headed nostalgia." You're pretty careful to distance yourself from that kind of sentimental reasoning. How do you make your case without indulging in it?
It is difficult. I do think that the real advocates, especially those who are also farmers, they understand that it's a market they're in. They understand that they have to have a product that people want to buy. They are hoping that the government will not get in their way, that academia will not put all of its efforts into inventing things that are good on a huge scale and have little application on a small scale, like GPS systems for leveling fields. I think they think that they can do pretty well in a truly open market, as opposed to the one that's distorted by our failure to enforce environmental and antitrust laws. That would give them a chance.
So they're generally not plucking at our heartstrings deliberately, but that's certainly the way it's spun by the apologists for industrial agriculture, who say you shouldn't try to cling to a way of life that's gone the way of all things, and you shouldn't expect us to risk having less food or risk having more expensive food just to save Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. The successful organic farmers don't expect to be taken care of out of charity. They want to make a living by selling a better product.
Another way you often see this spun is that the people who are against industrial agriculture are spoiled urbanites who can afford to buy organic vegetables and grass-fed beef and like to feel self-righteous about it. How do you respond to the suggestion that this cause is a luxury of the privileged?
Well, you do run into that. I mean there's a downtown farmers' market here in Salt Lake City on Saturday mornings, and the place is lousy with Volvos and people who come down because they've got some disposable income and don't have to work that day. But these changes are more and more reaching into your average supermarket. When you consider that out of every disposable consumer dollar that's spent on food, two cents of it gets to the farmer, I don't think it would be so horrible if four cents got to the farmer. That would help them out a lot, and it wouldn't hurt us at all.
Would you say that moving toward a small-farm model is not something that just makes life a little bit sweeter for those who can afford it but is a necessary change?
Yes, in the long term. I mean it starts out, like a lot of things start out, as something to gladden the bleeding heart. You feel good about helping the farmer and about feeding your children organic food instead of Twinkies. The most successful farmers in the niche markets are those who just are lucky enough or foresighted enough to be close to a city, often close to a university town, places where there's an educated kind of folks who are taking the lead. They're the first ones to seek out organic food, locally produced food, to want to see the face of their farmer in their produce, as the Japanese say.
And they're the ones who get it started, but once somebody gets established in a farmers' market, the regular supermarkets start carrying that stuff and start promoting that they have organic food and have local food. They haven't bragged about that in the past partly because they felt that people like industrial food, that people like the idea that it comes from this stainless steel, pressure-washed factory somewhere, even when it didn't. And now people are starting to understand that they can say, 'Well, you know, this comes from this guy down the road and we're going to charge you ten more cents for it.' And people will buy it.
