Globaleyes

Globalization and Food Localism

By Carol Thiessen

This is the fourth in a series of articles on economic globalization sponsored by the Peace Ministries Program of MCC Canada. The writers are young adult Canadians who are studying and thinking about globalization and seeking to make a difference.

 

Not long ago, I was visiting my parents and received the usual 'feed her up before she goes home' routine. "Would you like some grapes?" Mom offers. A few minutes later, her head pops around the corner: "How about honeydew melon? Do you like honeydew?" I meander past the kitchen and notice two hefty mangos ripening on the counter.

Where is she getting all this fruit from? It's May in Manitoba. Not exactly fruit season.

Well, I had the grapes. And then decided to calculate how far they traveled to reach my lips. Last time I checked, grapes in my supermarket started life in Chile. A quick perusal of the atlas tells me that's roughly 10,000 km away. Those must be some good grapes.

We didn't used to eat this way. Growing up we ate juicy melons in the heat of the summer, grapes got served up on special occasions, and I never saw a mango.

But in Manitoba, the average food ingredient now travels 2000 km from farm to fork. In the US, the average distance food travels is 20 percent further than just 20 years ago.

Food from far away

So what does this have to do with globalization? Simply speaking, food is right at the heart of globalization. According to the Worldwatch Institute, an American research organization devoted to environmental and social justice issues, international food trade has tripled since 1961. In 2000, countries shipped $417 billion US worth of food and agricultural goods around the world.

Food, of course, has been traded for thousands of years. And not the entire recent spike in long distance food is directly linked to globalization. Many developing nations turned to exportable crops in the 1970s, as part of so called structural adjustment programs foisted on them by international funding agencies.

But international free trade agreements in the 1990s, a hallmark of economic globalization, opened up even more markets for the trade in food. Economists have seen these open markets as one long highway to prosperity, by stimulating investment in poor countries and providing greater access to world markets.

That means those grapes I'm munching on from Chile are helping small farmers feed their families, right? Well, not exactly, it seems.

Who benefits?

A few years ago, MCC took the globalization question on the road, with a series of globalization consultations around the world. In Latin America, participants told of their struggles to compete with cheap imported food. As Honduras, for instance, opened up its markets and lifted price controls, subsidized corn from the US flooded the market, making it difficult for Honduran farmers to sell their own corn at a profit. Many left their farms. And the gap between the rich and poor in the country grew ever wider.

Lori Ann Thrupp, author of Bittersweet Harvest, an examination of fruit and vegetable export industries in Latin America, found that the main beneficiaries of export-oriented agriculture are large companies involved in the processing, packaging and marketing of those crops.

Or as Linford Martin, of MCC El Salvador, told the globalization consultation: while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) increased trade and economic growth, life has become more difficult for many ordinary citizens. It's the investors, managers and professionals who have become increasingly wealthy. He pointed out that Cargill, a US company, controls 60 percent of the world's trade in cereal grains.

The typical supermarket apparently contains some 30,000 items for sale. About half of those items are produced by 10 multinational companies. And less than 150 people control those companies.

So much for choice.

What are the costs?

It's not like all North American farmers are flourishing under this export-oriented regime. Marg Rempel, a Manitoba farmer, lamented at the North American globalization consultation about the struggle to sustain healthy rural communities in North America. Indeed, according to Statistics Canada, between 1996 and 2001, the number of farms in Canada plunged by 11 percent. That's a lot of farms lost in five years.

Rempel also expressed concern about the environmental implications of long distance food, and the loss of control over the food we eat. "The mindset [of global food competition] completely misplaces the challenges of food accessible for all, produced responsibly, with good stewardship of ourselves, our communities and our environment," she said.

As Rempel suggested, the implications of our long distance food habit aren't solely economic. They also come with severe environmental costs. Swedish research has found that a basic imported diet can gobble up four times the energy and produce four times the greenhouse gas emissions than a local diet. In an era of climate change, that's worrying. The most egregious examples are perishable foods, such as lettuce, which are increasingly shipped by refrigerated planes, at huge costs to the environment.

Then there's also the issue of taste. How good can my 10,000 km-grapes really taste, compared to plucking them ripe off the vine and popping them in my mouth. Safety can also be an issue. Long distance food provides much more opportunity for contamination than buying another fruit locally.

What can we do?

These are complex issues, without simple answers. Can the world be fed on a more local food diet that emphasizes smaller scale farms? Would a sudden change in the way we eat cause vast economic hardship? How does one restructure global food markets? I don't have these answers.

But I'm pretty sure that the status quo can't continue. It is harming the majority of the world's poorest people. And the environment can't sustain it. Changing the way we eat involves reexamining how we fit into the cycle of life in God's great creation. It's about how we go about being stewards of the earth. And how we care for the weak, the marginalized and the poor. I don't think it's an all or nothing proposition, but I do believe eating can be a moral act.

Here are a few things that we can do.

• Eat more local food. That could mean visiting farmers' markets, joining vegetable box schemes, or simply checking the supermarket labels a whole lot more closely. The new MCC cookbook, Simply in Season, serves as a great guide to eating locally-grown seasonal food. You might even want to grow some of your own food, radical thought that that is.
• Support projects that help developing countries improve their food self-sufficiency. In Laos, for instance, MCC works with an agricultural college to promote fruit trees and vegetable crops and research with upland rice.
• Join or start a local food policy council. In Vancouver, for example, Farm Folk/City Folk coordinates food delivery schemes and farmers' markets, starts rooftop gardens, has opened a healthy cafe in an inner city area, and starts urban agriculture projects.

Frankly, these are small - albeit important - actions in the massive world food market. We can also push for bigger, more substantial changes.

• Encourage international policies to eliminate rich countries dumping their subsidized crops on poor countries, and push for fair trade policies to benefit all producers.
• Encourage government financial support for locally-consumed, diversified agriculture.
• Lobby our federal government to adopt a carbon tax, which charges companies for dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (to discourage long distance food).

Globalized food is awfully tempting for those of us who like our exotic flavours. But when I start looking at the big picture, somehow the taste in my mouth isn't so pleasant anymore.

 

Carol Thiessen is a freelance writer living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She recently completed a M.Sc. in Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

 

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