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Nations will often go to extreme measures to move food into the global marketplace. Since 1992, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been developing plals to expand the network of locks and dams along the Mississippi River. The Mississippi is the primary con- duit for shipping American soybeans to the rest of the world- about 35,000 metric tonnes a day.l The Corps'plan would mean

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hauling in up to 1.2 million tonnes of concrete to lengthen l0 of the locks from 180 meters to 360 meters each, as well as to bolster several major wing dams, which narrow the river to keep the soy-

bean barges moving. This construction would supplement the existing dredges, which are already sucking 85 million cubic meters of sand and mud from the rivert bank and bottom eachyear.2

Several different levels of"upgrade" forthe riverhave been con-

sidered,but the most ambitious of them would purportedlyieduce

the cost of shipping soybeans by 4 to 8 cents per bushel.3 Some independent analysts think this is a pipe dream.a

Around the same time the Mississippi plan was announced, the five governments of South America's La Plata Basin-Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, fugentina, and Uruguay-announced plans to dredge 13 million cubic meters of sand, mud, and rock from 233 sites along the Paraguay-Parand River.s That would be enough to

fill a convoy of dump trucks 16,000 kilometers long. Here, the plan is to straighten natural river meanders in at least seven places, build dozens of locks, and construct a major port in the heart of the Pan- tanal, the world's largest wetland.6 The Paraguay-Parand flows throughthe center of Brazil's burgeoning soybean heartland-sec- ond only to the United States in production and exports. Accord- ing to statements from the Brazilian State of Mato Grasso, this "Hidrovla" (water highway) will give a further boost to the region's soybean export capacity.T

Lobbyists for both these projects argue that expanding the barge

capacity of these rivers is necessary in order to improve comPet- itiveness, grab world market share, and rescue farmers (either U.S.

or Brazilian, depending on whom the lobbyists are addressing) from

their worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Chris Bres-

cia, president of the Midwest River Coalition 2000, an alliance of commodity shippers that forms the primary lobblng force for the Mississippi plan, says, "The sooner we provide the waterway infra- structure, the sooner our family farmers will benefit."8 Some of his fellow lobbyists have even argued that these projects are essen-

tial to feeding the world (since the barges can then more easily speed

the soybeans to the world's hungry masses) and to saving the envi- ronrnent (since the hungry masses will not have to clear rainfor- est to scratch out their own subsistence).e

Probablyvery fewpeople have had an opportunity to hearboth pitches and compare them, But anyone who has may find some- thing amiss with the argument that U.S. farmers will become more competitive with their Brazilian counterparts, at the same time that Brazilian farmers will, for the same reasons, become more corn- petitive with their U.S. counterparts. A more likely outcome is that farmers of theie two nations will be pitted against each other in a costly race to maximize production, resulting in short-cut prac- tices that essentially stripmine their soil and throw long-term investments,in the land to the wind. Farmers in Iowa will have stronger incentives to plow up land along stream banks, trigger- ing faster erosion of topsoil. Their brethren in Brazil will find

' themselves needing to cut deeper into thc savanna, also acceler- ating erosion.

That will increase the flow of soybeans, all right-both north and south. But it will also further depress prices, so lhat even as the farmers ship more, they will gct lcss incorne per ton. And in any case, increasing volume can't help the farmers survive in the long run, because sooner or later they will be swallowed by larger, corporate, farms that can make up for the smaller per-ton mar- gins by producing even larger volumes.

So how can the supporters of these river projects, who pro- fess to be acting in the farmer's best interests, not notice the illogic of this form ofcompetition? One explanation is that from the advo- cates' (as opposed to the farmers') standpoint, this competition isn't illogical at all-because the lobbyists aren't really representing farmers. They're working for the commodity processing, ship- ping, and trading firms who want the price of soybeans to fall, because these are the firms that buy the crops from the farmers. In fact, it is the same three agribusiness conglomerates-Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, and Bunge-that are the top soybean processors and traders along both rivers.l0

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Welcome to the global economy. The more brutally the U.S.

and Brazilian farmers can batter each other's prices (and standards

of living) down, the greater is the margin of profit for these three giants. Meanwhile, another handful of companies controls the markets for genetically modified seeds, fertilizers, and herbicides

used by the farmers-charging oligopolistically high prices both north and south of the equator. In assessing what this proposed digging-up and reconfiguring of two of the world's great river basins really means, keep in mind that these projects will not be the activities of private businesses operating inside their own pri- vate property. These are proposed public works, to be undertaken'

athuge public expense.The motive is neither the plight of the fam-

ily farmer nor any moral obligation to feed the world, but the oppor-

tunity to exploit poorly informed public sentiments about "farmers'

plights" or "hungry masses" as a means of usurping public poli- cies to benefit private interests. What gets thoroughly Big Mud- died, in this usurping process' is that in addition to subjecting farmers to a gladiator-like attrition, these projects will likely trig- ger a cascade of damaging economic, social, and ecological impacts

within the very river basins being so expensively remodeled. What's likely to happen if the lock and dam system along the

Mississippi is expanded as proposed? The most obvious effectwill be increased barge traffic, which will accelerate a less obvious cas- cade of events that has been under way for some time, accord- ing to Mike Davis of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Much of the Mississippi River ecosystem involves aquatic rooted plants,like bullrush, arrowhead, and wild celery. Increased barge traffic will kick up more sediment, blocking sunlight and reducing the depth to which plants can survive. Already, since the 1970s, the number of aquatic plant species found in some stretches of the river has been cut from 23 to about half that, with just a handful thriving under the cloudier conditions. "Areas of the river have reached an ecological turning point," warns Davis.'This decline in plant diversity has triggered a drop in the invertebrate communities that live on these plants, as well as a

drop in the fish, mollusk, and bird communities that depend on the diversity of insects and plants." A2OO2 report from the Fish and Wildlife Service said that the Corps of Engineersprojectwould threaten the 300 species of migratorybirds and 127 species of fish in the Mississippi river, and could ultimately push some into extinction.l I "The least tern, the pallid sturgeon, and other species that evolved with the ebbs and flows, sandbars and depths, of the river are progressively eliminated or forced away as the diversity of the river's natural habitats is removed to maximize the barge habitatJ' says Davis. 12

The outlook for the Hidrovla project is similar. Mark Rob- bins, an ornithologist at the Natural History Museum at the Uni- versity of Kansas, calls it "a key step in creating a Florida Everglades-like scenario of destruction in the Pantanal, and an American Great Plains-like scenario in the Cerrado in southern Brazil." The Paraguay-Parand feeds the Pantanal wetlands, one of the most diverse habitats on the planet, with its populations of woodstorks, snailkites, limpkins, jabirus, and more than 650 other species of birds, as well as rnore than 400 species of fish and hundreds of other less-studied plants, mussels, and marsh- land organisms. As the river is dredged and the banks are built up to funnel the surrounding wetlands water into the naviga- tion path, bird nesting habitat and fish Spawning grounds will be eliminated, depriving the indigenous societies that depend on these resources. Increased barge traffic will suppress river species here just as it will on the Mississippi. Meanwhile, her- bicide-intensive soybean monocultures-on farms so enor- mous that they dwarf even the biggest operations in the U.S. Midwest-are rapidly replacing diverse grasslands in the frag- ile Cerrado. The heavy plowing and periodic absence of ground cover associated with such farming erodes 100 million tonnes of soil per year. Robbins notes that "compared to the Mississippi, this southern river system and surrounding grassland is several orders of magnitude more diverse and has suffered considerably less, so there is much more at stake." t3

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2928 Eat Here

From Embalmed Foods to Indestructibte Sandwiches Despite fierce resistance from environmentalists, hunters, kayak-

ers, taxpayers, and farmers who live and work along the Missis- sippi-and a multibillion-dollar pricetag-several midwestern U.S. senators are pushing the project towards approvalla Sup- porters of massiveprojects like the reshapingof the Mississippi and

Paraguay-Parand Rivers argue that they are justified because it is the most "efficient" way to do business. The perceived efficiency

depends partly on ignoring certain long-term impacts-deterio- rations of tnt o massive rivers, the dislocation of rural cultures, the

loss of the genetic diversity that underpins agriculture. In this sense, the perceived efficiency might be compared to the perceived

efficiency of an energy system based on coal; it looks very efficient

if you ignore deteriorating air quality and climate stability. This "efficient" way of doing business is also a wholly new phe-

nomenon. For the better part of human history, and even as recently as several decades ago, most people obtained their food from local sources. Of course, even in ancient times, nations shipped food for exotic flavors and to supplement what could be produced nearby, In the volume on ancient Ronre in his I l-part Story of Civilization,the historian Will Durant writes that "delica- cies were imported from every part of the Empire and beyond: pea- cocks from Samos, grouse from Phrygia, cranes from lonia, tunnyfish from Chalcedon, muraenas from Gades, oysters from Tiu-

entum, sturgeons from Rhodes," in addition to "extorted wheat from Spain, Sicily, and Africa," spices from India and China, and "deli-

cacies of half the planel."ts As the empire grew in wealth and power, "the old simple diet gave way to long and heavy meals of meat, game, delicacies, and condiments." 16 As in most civilizations until modern times, the wealthy shared most of this bounty. "Exotic foods were indispensable to social position or pretense," 17 Durant writes. "Food produced in ltalywas considered a bit vulgar, fit only for plebians."ls (Durant did not miss the opportunityto note that this growing dependence on trade, combined with wars that rav- aged the countrpide and conscripted legions of farmers, "produced

The Transcontinentat Lettuce

a debt-ridden tenant class in the countryside, and in the capital a propertyless; rootless proletariat whose sullen discontent would destroy the Republic that peasant toil had made.")te

In the modern era, of course,locallyraised foods playan even smaller role in our collective diet and exotic foods have become available to a larger and larger segment of the public. Statistics on how far food travels are not available for most nations. Nonethe- less, a survey of trends from a nuniber of countries and regions clearlyindicates a growing distance between the fields and pastures

where most food is grown and the mouths it feeds. Food trade has grown nearly threefold since 1961. Countries

shipped $442 billion worth of food and agricultural goods around the globe in 2002.20 As the value of agricultural trade has increased, so has the volume. Today, some 898 million tonnes of food are shipped around the planet each year-up fourfold from 200 mil- lion tonnesin l95l.2l (See Figures l-l and l-2,p.9.1

Surveys of food moving within nations tell the same story. (See Figures 2-l and2-2,pp.30 and 31.) Statistics fronr several whole- sale markets in the United States show that fruits and vegetables are travelingbetween 2,500 and 4,000 kilometers from farm to mar- ket, an increase of roughly 20 percent in the last two decades.22 Food eaten in the United Kingdom travels 50 percent farther on aver- age than two decades ago. Over the same period, imports of fruits and vegetables arriving there by plane more than tripled, to nearly 120,000 tonnes ayear. TLucks moving food now account for nearly 40 percent of all road freight in the United Kingdom.23 In Nor- way, the amount of food being shuttled around the nation nearly doubled betrreen 1993 and 2Oo2.24

Part of the reason we are moving more food around the planet is demographic: there are more people living in cities and fewer living near the centers of food production-which havb themselves become fewer and more concentrated. Perhaps more importantlp advances in food technology that allow longer stor- age and more distant (as well as cheaper) shipping helpetr the food system to sprawl.

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Figure 2-1. Local Versus Imported Ingredlents: Iowa Figure 2-2. Local Vercus Imported Ingredlcnts: Engtrnd

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The hods going into an "Att-Iowa" Beat traveted an average of 74 kilometer to reach their destinaHon, compared wlh 2,571 kitometers ifthey had been shipped from the usual dlstant sources naHonwide. Researchers estimated that local and regionally sourced meals entaited 4 to 17 times less petroleum consumption and 5 to 17 times less carbon dioxide emissions than a meal bought from the conven- tional food chain.

Source: See Endnote 22 ftr Chapter 2.

Mikal Saltveit, a professor in the Plant Science Department at the University of California at Davis, directs a lab concerned with "how to keep lettuce and carrots from browning, among other things." He says that storing food has been an on-going preoccu- pation for humans.2s Early agricultural societies struggled to keep enough food to last from one harvest to the next. Before the advent of salting, pickling, drying, and fermenting, summer was a notorious period for starvation. "If you could store food longer, you could get rid of famine," he says. The major impetus for

A "traditionat" Sunday meal in England-beef, potatoes, canots, broccoll, beans, btueberries, and stnwberries-made from lmpoded ingrcdlents generat$ nearty 650 tlmes tfte tnnspoil-related carbon emissions as the sime meal made from tocalt! gmwn ingrcdlents (atmost !8 htognms of carbon dloxide compand idth Just 5C grams). Alt the ingredients are avallable ln England for much of the year erccpt the ftuits, which can either be storcd or preserued to ortend thdir avallabiflty. Soune.' See Endnote 23lor fioptu 2.

improving food storage came at the dawn of the industrial rev- olution, Salweit says, when people flooded into massive cities and governments maintained large standing armies.26 In 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte offered 12,000 francs (equivalent to about 460,000 francs today) for a method to keep military rations from spoiling.In response, French chef Nicolas Appert developed the first technique for canning foods. Appert packed food into glass jars, sealed the cork tops with pitch, and boiled the jars-a tech- nique not too different from modern home canning. Napoleon knew that armies marched on their stomachs, and (untilAppert's

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invention) lived off the land, which limited the size and stamina of military campaigns. Across the English channel, the British quickly refined-some say stole-the technique by using tin- coated steel with a hand-soldered cover.27 A good worker could produce four cans in one day. (A canned food factory today man- ufactures about 400 per minute.)28 ByWaterloo ( 1815), the troops that faced offon both sides ate from cans.2e

By the 1860s, the time and cost of canning food had fallen dra- maticallyand canned foodswere soon commonplace, just in time for the next groundbreaking innovation in food storage. "The invention of mechanical refrigeration in 1875 was crucial to the

' modern storage of perishable food," Salweit says.3o In the late 1870s, Chicago meatpacker Gustavus F. Swift introduced an improved refrigerated railroad car that revolufionized food ship- ping.3l Even though ice-refrigerated railroad cars-with blocks of ice, buckets of brine, and fans to circulate the cold air-allowed

S perishable food products to be shipped as early as the 1860s, it was major advances in freezing technology during World War II- spurredbythe shortage of metals for food canning-that gave birth to the frozen food industry.32 In the mid- 1920s, the Birdseye com- pany started "fast-freezing" produce, which helped retain the nutri- tive value, flavor, and mouthfeel.33 Suddenly it became possible to store everything from trout to tomatoes almost indefinitely.

Food scientists further extended the storage life of perish- ables by tinkering with plant biology, using rudimentary approaches early on and crop breeding and genetic engineering in recent decades. In the 1920s, British scientists developed "controlled atmosphere storage" for apples, which slowed ripening by lower- ing orygen and raising carbon dioxide levels in the air.3a Todap virtuallydl apples are stored and shipped in this environment,some- times as long as oneyear after theywere severed from the tree. Plas- tic bags containingpre-cut salads house tinycontrolled atmosphere environments with nitrogen gas added to reduce browning. After the discovery of ethylene in 1924, fruit producers first began to ship tomatoes, bananas, and other fruits unripe, and ripen them upon

The Transcontinentat Lettuce

arrival using ethylene gas.3s Most bananas grown around the world have been bred to not fipen on their own, but instead to obedi- ently wait for their arrival at regional gassing facilities near their final point of sale.36

Of course, there are certain things that farmers can do in the field to make food last longer. Prevent an apple from getting bruised and it will last longer before it gets mealy. Put a head of lettuce into a cooler immediately after harvest and it wilt be less likely to wilt. But the leading edge of food preservation technol- ogy is making foods themselves more storable without heating or packaging, or anything else, once they're harvested. "Both tradi- tional plant breeding and biotechnological genetic engineering are being usedj'salweit says. He argues that concerns about the lat- ter shouldn't taint all of its uses: "Reducing softening of tomatoes byanti-sensing [reversing through genetic engineering] a specific gene should not be viewed with the.sanre concern as introducing human genes into pigs."rz

As for those fragile foods that need additional protection, Salweit notes that food technologists are toyingwith"certain for- mulations of edible packaging." This technology worla best for whole, unsliced foods-an unpeeled, uncut grapefruit, for instance. (The exposed surface of a sliced peach, in contrast,"prevents many edible coatings from firmly adhering to the piece bf commodity," Salweit says.)38 Using such coatings, the U.S. Army recently cre- ated an "indestructible sandwich' designed to stay "fresh" as long as three years.3e

(The overlap between the military and the modern food indus- try is no coincidence. The military enjoys a captive audience, con- siderable freedom to experiment, and low palatability standards. Dehydrated eggs, freeze-dried coffee, and processed cheese are just some of the innovations originally developed by the military that eventually found a wider market the armies-so to speak- of McDonald's and Nestld and Wal-Mart.)no

People have always tieen wary of new techniques of processing and storing food, Saltveit says. In the late lgth century, Brits

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called the first canned foods "embalmed." A range of groups, from mothers to doctors to priests, opposed the widespread pas- teurization of milk beginning in the early part of the 20th cen- tury, and the burgeoning frozen food industry tried to calm resistance by renaming their products "frosted." But Salweit feels that the trajectory has generally been beneficial and necessary, despite some concerns about a loss of variety or flavor. People may

reminisce about the perfect, juicy tomatoes of yesteryear, Saltveit says, quickly forgetting that these were only available for three months out of the year. Americans can now buy ripe tomatoes year-round, partly because 80 percent of fresh tomatoes on the market are ripened with ethylene and partly because American stores import tomatoes from as far awayas Mexico and Holland. "Of course, they may not be as good as a tomato.you pick dead ripe off the vinej' he admits. "But good enough fior a BLI or salad." Saltveit grows cherry tomatoes in a backyard garden, and says that his children will not eat the storebought varieties after being exposed to the homegrown pleasures. "If you really look at it in a historical fashion, on average, quality of food is increasing as is the healthfulness of the diet."al

Not everyone calls the situation rosy. Robert Sommers, another University of California professor, was once driving on the high- way behind an l8-wheel truck carrying recently harvested toma- toes piled a few meters deep on top of each other. He told me that "when the truck went around a corner at 60 miles an hour, some tomatoes rolled off the top of the truck, and when they hit the highway they bounced!"42 So much for subtle flavor. Sommers, who headed the Center for Consumer Research at the University of California at Davis, says that these hard tomatoes were a sort of turning point in farm research. "The universities were support- ing research !o make things look pretty at the neglect of things that were important to consumersi' Sommers notes. "But consumer resistance to the tough, square, tasteless tomato was so great that the universities couldn't just support the mechanical, industrial type of agriculture." 4s In Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times,f im High-

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tower tells the story of industrial farming through the example of tomatoes bred to withstand mechanical harvesting, artificial ripening, and even being dropped from a third-story window (by curious plant breeders).44 The sturdy fruit allowed the first mechanical harvesters, which were faster than human pickers, but also put a lot of California farm laborers out of work and were affordable only by the larger growers. "Both small farmers and con-

sumers were being hurt," Sommers says. After that, the Univer- sity of California created a number of alternative agriculture programs, including a center for small farms and Sommert own center for consumer research.4s

Jet-Lagged Fruits

Advances in food transportation-steamships in the mid-1800s, railroads later in the t 9th century the refrigerated truck in the mid- 1900s---combined with falling oil prices to dramatically reduce the cost of shipping food.t Foodthat is shipped around the globe today often takes advantage ofall three ofthese routes: chilled beefbeing sent from British farms to restaurants in fapan commonly moves via large refrigerated container ship to the U.S. east coast, then onto "doublestack" refrigerated container trains across the country to the west coast, aboard ship again for transit to fapan, and then by truck for the journey's final leg, all the while depending on pre- cise coordination among an array of enterprises in order to main- tain adequate temperature and avoid spoilage.aT (This land-bridge route is preferred to an all-sea route, since the very large ships that can.reduce the cost of shipping a given unit cannot fit through the Suez or Panama canals.) Containerization-the practice of put- ting food in standard-sized containers that can lre easily moved and loaded-also revolutionized food transportation by further increasing speed, ease, and uniformity, while cutting down on cost. At some of the world's most innovative vegetable farms, con- tainers sit on flatbed trucks at the field's edge ready to be shuttled to market after the harvest has been packed inside.as

It now costs 70 percent less to ship cargo (all items, not iust

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food) by sea, and 50 percent less to ship by air, than it did 20 years ago.ae Such declines have been under way for some time. For instance, the cost of shipping a bushel of wheat from Chicago to London has dropped from 60 cents in 1865 to 10 cents by 1900 to substantially less than I cent today,s0"Larger, faster, steam-driven ships replaced smalle$ slower, sail-driven ships," according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report, "and successive generations of larger and faster trains were introduced.'sl [n the United States, annual expenditures for shipping food have grown from just over $4 billion in 1967 to nearly $24 billion in 1997,but have actually declined fuom 7 percent to 5 percent as a share of the total food marketing bill during the period.sz

These innovations in food processing and shipping often worked together. For instance, before scientists figured out how to make frozen orange juice concentrate, orange growers could only

B ship their fruit fresh, and most people in temperate regions enjoyed oranges and orange juice only as seasonal delicacies. DuringWorld War II, partly in response to requests from the U.S. government for an orange juice product that could be shipped to troops over- seas,American scientists developed a process for concentrating the orange juice (reducing its bulk and allowing it to be shipped at lower cost), adding a small amount of unconcentrated juice to the mix- ture (which greatly improved the flavor), vacuum sealing it in cans, and then passing the cans through afreezingtunnel before shipping in refrigerated ocean liners, boxcars, and trucks. This process, still in use today, revolutionized the orange growing indus- try freed it from seasonal and geographic constraints, and thereby transformed orange juice into a daily ration for manyAmericans and Europeans-and turned frozen orange juice into a multibil- lion-dollar international business.s3

AII this food traffic requires staggering amounts of fuel (and probably wouldn't be feasible without abundant and cheap oil). Among the biggest culprits are those pricey, delicate items which are mostly water and provide relatively few calories, such as cut flowers, fruits, vcg,elablcs, and lrozen ftrotls. (Nutritionist loalr

The Transcontinental Lettuce

Gussow of Columbia University describes the process as "burn- ing lots of petroleum to ship cold water around.")s4 The transcon- tinental head of lettuce, grown in the Salinas Valley of California and shipped nearly 5,000 kilometers to Washington, D.C., requires about 35 times as much fossil fuel energy in transport as it pro- vides in food energywhen it arrives.ss By the time this lettuce gets to London (and California lettuce does get shipped to the United Kingdom), the ratio of energy consumed to calories provided jumps to.127.56 "Perishablss"-xs thsse goods are known in indus- try jargon-constitute the fastest growing segment (over 4 per- cent per year) of the food cargo business and are increasingly shipped by refrigerated plane.sT

Most international food trade isbyboat, and most foodtrade within nations is by rail or truck, all relatively energy efficient forms of transportation compared with climate-controlled airplane. And products like grains and beans-which pack a great deal of nutrition into a given unit of weight-as well as coffee, tea, choco- late, and spices, can all be shipped dry, without climate control. Nonetheless, Anika Carlsson-Kanyama of Stockholm University has shown that a basic diet-some meat, grain, fruits, and vegeta- bles-composed of imported ingredients can easily entail four times the energy and four times the greenhouse gas emissions of an equivalent diet with ingredients from domestic sources.s8 In Britain, food transportation is now among the biggest and fastest growing sources of British greenhouse gas emissions-a pattern emerging in much of the world.se

The climate-changing implications of a long-distance food system are particularh ironic, since farming may be the human endeavor most dependent on a stable climate. From theAmerican breadbasket to the North China Plain to the fields of southern Africa, farmers and climate scientists are finding that generations- old patterns of rainfall and temperature are shifting. Plant scien: tists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines alreadynote regular heat damage in Cambodia,India, and theirown test farms in Manila, where the average temperature is now 2.5

36

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degrees Centrigrade higher than it was 50 years ago. "In rice, wheat, and maize, grain yields are likely to decline by l0 percent for every I degree C increase over 30 degreesi says researcher Iohn Sheehy. "We are abeady at or close to this threshold." 60 Sheehy estimates that grain yields in the tropics might fall as much as 30 per cent over the next 50 years, due to damage from increasing tempera- tures, during a period when the regiont already malnourished pop- ulation will increase by 44 percent.6l

As these changes disrupt the vast intercontinental web of food production and rearrange the world's major breadbaskets, depend- ing on food from afar will be more expensive and more precari- ous. All the petroleum now used to move food around the planet is just one small part of modern agriculture's heavy dependence on fossil fuels-to run tractors, make fertilizen and pump water.62 So abrupt changes in the prices or availability of fuel-and many geologists argue that oil production will likely peak within the next decade-could be as big a shock to farming as abrupt changes in weather. The interest in local food could be the first step in break- ing this addiction. Farmers who learn now how to raise crops with less oil will be better offwhen these fuels become scare. So will com- munities that have cultivated local food sources.

Not only is long-distance food contributing to climate change, adding insult to injury is the fact that much of it seems entirely illogical. Regions and nations often import food they already have. A recent survey of trade data from the United Kingdom exposed the astonishing reality that the nation imports large amounts of milk, pork,lamb, and other major commodities even as it exports comparable quantities of the same foods, shuttling hundreds of millions of tonnes of identical food in opposite directions.6sAna- lysts explain this "food swap" as an artifact of subsidized transporta- tion, centralized buyingby supermarkets and food manufacturers, and trade agreements that set food import quotas even for self- suf6cient nations. In the case of milk, British supermarkets and food rnanufacturers prefer to buy a standardized, predictable commodity in large quantities from a few sources on the world

market, forcing British dairy farmers to sell their rnilk itt ittlcr rur tional markets. These same economic forces also explain wlry thc label on a bottle of Thopicana brand apple juice says it "colttailts concentrate from Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Argentina, Chile, Turkey, Brazil, China, and the United States."Apart from the questionable cost and pollution, a company buyingwhatever pro- duce is cheapest on the world market can have no allegiance to place,

and the drinker can never really be sure what he or she is drink- ing. (The above list of countries has a wide range of pesticide standards.) And as ecological economist Herman Daly once remarked about this sort of trade, "Americans import Danish sugar cookies,and Danes importAmerican sugar cookies. Exchang- ing recipes would surely be more efficientj'6a

Meanwhile, as food ends up farther from the soil in which it was grown, waste loops are broken. |erry Goldstein, the editor of Biocycle, a journal that tracks trends in handling organic waste around the world, notes that the long-distance nature of food sys- tems'treates tremendous food waste disposal pressures at one end, while at the other end eliminating an ideal source of plant nutri- ents and soil-building organic matter for agricultural soils, in favor of polluting chemical fertilizers."65 (Programs to collect food waste, compost it, and return it to parks, farms, and forests have been successfully piloted in supermarkets, restaurants, and residential neighborhoods around the world.) The growth in tht: distance food travels has also corresponded with an incrcasc in food packaging, as food products are designed for longer jour- neys and shelf-lives.66 Food scraps and food packaging now nrirkc up a significant share of the waste stream in many citics world- wide. In North American cities, they account for as much as a third of total landfilled waste.67

Edible packaging should help on this front, cvcn if the culi- nary advantages are debatable. But landlills bulging with decay- ing food scraps that could best be uscd on farrns is just one of the symptoms of a food chain that has been stretched so long that its weak points have started to show. Long-distance food has helped

4140 Eat Here

feed certain parts of the globe and brought exotic foods to many, but the pendulum has swung too far. Attempts to ship lettuce around the world without it browning or to find an international market for surplus beef might have once been valiant and neces- sary. Now, with greed as a motivation and technology as the accomplici, the same logic has resulted in all sorts of wasteful ship- ping that can only exist as long as people deny the problems it brings. The transcontinental lettuce wowed supermarket shop- pers with its unexpected appearance and novelty. But it also elim- inated local lettuce growers, rendered salads bland and uninteresting, and sucked up more fossil fuels than the planet can afford. A few short decades after its big splash, it's time for the transcontinental lettuce to retire.

The Transcontinenta[ lettuce

BRrnsre Gnouro: ftlaui, Hawaii

Peopte concerned about the wastefut use of fossil fuels woutd be appa[ed by how Hawaiian farmers raise beef. "I catt it meats on keets," jokes David Cote, a former America Ontine executive turned organic farmer.68 Each year, Hawaii loads about 42,000 cows on boats, sends them to be fattened in California, 3,500 kilotneters away, then ships the packaged meat back to Hawaii,6e "Ifs a very odd situation,'Cole said. "Ifs not ethical from an energy manage- ment perspective. It's not moral in terms of managing your environ- ment. Itt unwise from a security perspective." A dock strike or weather disruption in the western United Stat6s can empty the shetves in Hawaiian grocery stores for days. "What if this went on for weeks or months?" Cote asks. "We'd start eating each other."7o

So when an old friend offered Cole the opportunity in 2003 to return to his native Hawaii to manage the Maui Pineapple and land Corporation, one of the targest landholders and the largest emptoyer on the istand of Maui, he jumped at the opportunity. Cole had previ- ously hetped transform a depressed rural enctave ln Virglnla lnto a mecca of organic farming, hand-crafted comestibles, and cutinary awareness. The setting had changed. So had the climate. 8ut the vision remained the same: create businesses that reconnect tocats with their landscape white making profits..

Ifs hard to overstate the potentiat. At the 2003 Hawaii Agriculture Conference, agricuttural economist Ken Meter estimated that the chain of istands cunently imports more than 90 percent of its food, even as 200,000 hectares of lush farmtand [ie fattow. (The state est:i- mates that 85 percent of its farmtand is cunentty unused.) The most dramatic chart in Mete/s presentation showed the annual income of Hawaii's farms fatting from S500 mittion to $200 miltion (in 2000 do[[ars) between 1969 and 2000, as the amount of food purchased by tourists rose from $500 mittion to $2.2 bi[ion.7l

When I spoke to Cote in a Washington, D.C., restaurant that serves his Virginia-raised beef, he furiously scribbted numbers and obscure shapes on the back of a napkin. In an intricate dance he calts "pro- tein condominium," cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens each use the same grazing land in rotation. "You get a pretty high conversion of sotar energy into protein," Cole exptained. The economic argument is

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even more powerfut. Hog, [amb, cattte, and chicken companies can share the cost of fencing, in exchange for using parts of the fietds ('tondominium") for a certain time. No imported feed, no ghipping costs. "You end up with lots of equity and you have improved the soit," Cote said.72

But Cole's vision-guided by the Hawaiian concepts of ahupua'a' (self-sufficient communities) and malama'aina (care for the tand)- goes way beyond meat.73 He's working with growers to raise six dif- ferent oitseed crops to turn into biodiesel fuet. They are gradualty taking [and out of export crops like pineapples to raise organic meat, fruit, and vegetabtes for Hawaii's top resorts, where tourists co[tec- tivety spend as much on food each year as locals. For Cote, atl of the imported veggies or the cows that are fattened off-island represent bittions of dotlars that coutd enrich Hawaii's farmers and aspiring food businesses.T4

"They've brought excitement back into agriculture here on the istand of Maui," said Atex Franco, a rancher and managing director of Maui Cattte Company, a coatition of seven ranching famiLies. 0f the 5,000 head of cattle the company manages each year, nearty half are raised on Maui Land and Pineappte Company pasture and pineappte sitage. In the year since the coltaboration began, Franco's company has jumped from setting one animal a week to 30 animals a week and from three customers to over 60, and has moved into a new, larger processing plant. "There's been a tremendous amount of support for a [oca[ product," said Franco, adding that the beef is higher quality than that coming from cattte fattened on the maintand and that more ranching famities can afford to hotd onto their [and. "We're moving in the right direction."75

'As istanders, we have a much greater consciousness of the [ocal foodshed than if we had the freedom to drive across a politicat boundary for our food," Cote said. In a recent speech to the Maui chamber of commerce, Cote said that Maui could be an exampte for the other islands, and that Hawaii could serve as an exampte for other states. The analogy can be extended atmost indefinitety. "Utti- matety we're atl on the biggest istand of at[," he said. "The orbiting blue batt."76