Letters to the Editor

• Local Foods

  [Read the article: The practical ethicist]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Peter Singers arguements for not eating locally is flawed. Singer brings up the issue of Rice and the different systems that are used by two farmers a California Farmer and a Bangladeshi farmer and contrasts the system that they use in order to produce the rice. What fails in this argument is the source of the local food movement. Know your farmer, and understand the system they use. Singer tries to pin the local food movement to the fact that you will buy food solely from the label of origin on the product. When people buy locally they have a good idea about the source of their food and know the farmers. I live in Wisconsin and we are surrounded by industrial Corn agriculture, I don't consider it a local purchase when i stop by my local corn farmer who is farming over 10,000 acres of land with harmful pesticides and monoculture and pick up a bushel of corn to make tamales with. Obviously the eating locally movement strives for more then just mileage in its ethics. I know the farmers i buy my food from, I see there farms and know how the raise their products, i trust them. So in the end the usage of a sustainable locally grown product is many times more efficient then a product that is shipped from 10,000 miles away.

  Secondly as agriculture becomes a global product that is shipped from different countries the most powerful element of the the agro business will have its way. The people who sell the seed, the pesticides/herbicides and the equipment. Where the real money is made. These people will move into the markets like Bangladesh and start to control the system like they have in the US. They will destroy the sustainable systems that have been set up by thousands of years of work and implement modern systems that leave the farmers in debt and destroy the land. Monoculture and fossil fuel based systems will become the norm and we will be buying our chemically raised foods from bangladesh instead of California. Already you see this happening with the control of seed markets and the work that agro-business has done in convincing other governments to modernize their agriculture systems. The only reason that California even competes on the level of food prices is because of subsidized water and immigrant labor. If we start buying our food globally it will only in the end make the the price of labor go down for those who need it most. Singers argument about buying globally will only create a system that further destroys itself. The tenant of local food is too create systems that help everyone and it helps no one to globalize the food market.

  Another flaw in Singer's argument is that he uses a grain as an example instead of a more perishable product like strawberries or even Asparagus. Grains are incredibly efficient to ship and move long distances. They have long storage lives are harvested mechanically and is harvested at one particular time. This system does allow for utilization of the most efficient means of shipping, such as trains and ship freight. But when you have a product that is perishable you have to use much less efficient systems to ship them out and get them into the consumers hands. They are harvested in much less efficient methods (mostly using marginalized labor and unethical practices). Because of this the methods used are many times Truck Freight and air freight which uses incredible amounts of fossil fuels. The agriculture systems have destroyed land many times over because of harmful farming practices that have no accountability to the consumer or government regulations. The only systems of accountability that has been set up are the organic standards which are weak at best. Then many times the product such as tomato is shipped to a processing plant that uses ethanol to turn them red which again is an inefficient usage of natural resources. When we eat asparagus or blueberries grown in argentina that is flown up and then trucked out to different grocery stores versus the local asparagus we are eating thousands of times more efficiently. I do think that grains have a much greater likely hood of being globalized and ethical using systems such as a stronger fair trade standards but for produce our choice is local.

  Singer points out that we can help the kenyan farmer by buying from him even though he only recieves pennies back on his labor. I think that this is the greatest flaw in the globalized food system. We are not helping him and his utilitarian structure here is compromised. Because there is no way that a Kenyan farmer should be using the best land to grow food for americans. Land and farmers should grow food for their own people. The two cents he receives back is nothing in comparison to the amount of food he could be growing for his own country even continent in this situation. In countries like Indonesia where the majority of the production is shipped out to other countries and little is left for the poorest of those countries we are really hurting those countries by buying our food from them. The situation is such that we buy the food from these countries (many times destroying the land) then we give aid back to these countries in the form of US subsidized corn. What logic does that have. The american farmer is priced out of the market buy a cheaper globalized product then the US government provides subsidies that go back to the Kenyan poor instead of each market taking care of their own.

  We can't expect that these issues will be taken care of through our consumer dollars alone but rather we must look for political answers that hold these agro-businesses accountable for their actions instead of just trying to create consumer labels.

  Permalink Monday, May 8, 2006 08:02 AM