Debating the Local Food Movement

by Emily Badger, The Atlantic (excerpt)

Pierre Desrochers gleefully introduces himself as the bête noir of Canadian local-food activists. An economic geographer at the University of Toronto Mississauga, he has written a book (co-authored with his wife, Hiroko Shimizu), that attempts to eviscerate the movement’s main arguments, from its economic rationale to its environmental one. Even the book's title is an upper cut aimed at local food’s leading "agri-intellectual," the prolific Michael Pollan. The Locavore’s Dilemma, Desrochers has styled his counterargument, with this baiting subtitle: In Praise of the 10,000-mile diet….

"You cannot have economic growth without urbanization. And you cannot have urbanization without long-distance trade," Desrochers tells us. We also cannot, he says, increase food production and urban density at the same time. "You cannot square a circle."

He is essentially arguing that local food is fundamentally incompatible with urbanism. Urbanization isn’t possible without imported food. And urbanization is what makes it possible to raise standards of living everywhere. Historically, we have pushed the production of food out of cities as subsistence farmers have moved in. Now, instead of each tending our own plot of rural land for a living, cities have enabled us to specialize as lawyers and bakers and engineers, while we’ve turned farming itself into a specialty.

In the process, Desrochers points out, we’ve learned to produce more food on less land, the price of it has fallen, the range of it available at your local store has increased, and the malnourished percentage of the world population has declined. The problem with locavores, as he sees it, is that they want to undo all of this progress, with terrible consequences.

The most environmentally friendly food policy, Desrochers argues, is the one where agriculture consumes the least amount of land globally, and only agri-business can deliver this efficiency. Producing food also requires more energy than transporting it, he adds. He dismisses the concept of "food miles," which he says fails to take into account the mode of transit on which our bananas travel. The 2,000 miles your produce travels from Latin America to Los Angeles by freight, he suggests, may be associated (per banana) with fewer carbon dioxide emissions than the 10 miles it travels home in your car from the supermarket.

He also argues that it’s less energy-intensive to produce food where regions best specialize in it, than it is to try to coax those same products out of ill-suited soil elsewhere, even if that means shipping apples from New Zealand to the U.K.

Desrochers’ environmental arguments are the most interesting. But he has equal faith that these same economies of scale deliver us safer food, food that’s engineered to be more nutritious, and a more secure global supply of it – all benefits that locavores threaten. He sums all of this up with a dramatic slide warning that locavorism will lead inevitably to higher costs and greater poverty, no environmental and social benefits, less food security and nutrition, and significant penalties for developing economies.

read … Locavore’s Dilemma