Ms Wente versus Local Food

Margaret Wente emphatically states in today's Globe and Mail that eating local is plain wrong and silly.

And that’s what’s wrong with locavorism. It’s the most wasteful, inefficient way to feed the human race you can possibly imagine. It’s also bad for the environment
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/take-the-romance-out-of-farming-and-ditch-locavorism/article4396371/

She also says:

Modern food systems have done wonders for our standard of living and have liberated humankind from the chains of rural serfdom. They have increased, not decreased, food security.

So are the folks promoting local food really such  complete idiots?  According to Margaret Wente, they are.  Perhaps she has erred - been too hasty - read one book and not done other research - or just plain wrong.
I plump for just plain wrong - Margaret Wente that, is. The modern food systems which she extols,  according to the UN, did not lead to food security for everyone.  Nor are they safer for the environment.

"The increase in prices underlying the 2007-2008 food crisis and the new food price spikes in 2011 have exposed the presence of serious threats to the sustainability of the global food system and its capacity to provide adequate and affordable access to food. Meeting the challenge of expanding food production to feed the world population over the coming decades requires a major transformation in agriculture. The so-called green revolution of the 1960s and 1970s helped boost agricultural productivity worldwide, but did not conduce to a sustainable management of natural resources, nor to food security for many of the world’s poor.  "http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wess/wess_current/2011wess_chapter3.pdf

Worse, our huge farms are not as productive as small holdings.  (Yes, I was astonished when I read this too!)

Vandana Shiva, an agriculture and food activist, points to reams of studies .....showing that the most poductive form of agriculture is not our modern, tractor - seviced, big field monocultures, but multilple crop manual labor intensive smallholdings. ( page 170, Good News for A Change: How Everyday People Are Healing the Planet, David Suzuki and Holly Dressel.)

Industrial agriculture  - the kind of food growing that Ms. Wente lauds - is heavily subsidized.     And torments animals.  (Just watch Food Inc. if you doubt me on the animal cruelty. )
 This sytem also degrades our soils - and contributes to climate change.

Professor Michael Bomford, a research scientist at Kentucky State University and a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, is concerned about how our dependence on oil to feed ourselves is leading to soil depletion and degradation, as well as increasing [food]prices....
Carbon stored in soil allows the soil to hold nutrients and water, and losing soil contributes to climate change. Bomford is worried about other contributing factors to climate change borne from the use of chemical fertilizers.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/07/201173114451998370.html

And that serfdom Ms. Wente frets about?  Seemingly, people are anxious to take it up.  From her own column:

Today the countryside around our place is thronged with a brand-new generation of farmers – eager young idealists who have fled back to the land. Every weekend they show up at the little farmers’ market with their colourful bouquets of organic carrots and their tender non-commodified artisanal greens. 

Organic local food is a good thing! It tastes better than food shippled thousands of miles, is better for the environment, and puts money into the local economy.  Ms. Wente is wrong.

Problems with Agriculture

I recently posted - muttering to myself- about the lack of discussion on climate change in the media.  As I stated earlier, Al Jazeera ia an exception.  Dahr Jamal wrote an aricle on July 4, 2011 entitled The Decline of Agriculture?  You can find it at http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/07/201173114451998370.html
Ze starts with a warning from the Food and Agriculture Organisation about the delterious effects climate change will have on agriculture and hence, on human eating. The FAO warned that climate change will reduce food production, and therefore, cause millions of people to go hungry - or starve.  (The author also quotes the US National Climate Data Center as saying that April 2011's weather extremes were unprecedented.  Don't worry , the relevance of this point will be apparent later on.)
Ze then moved into a discussion of current agricultural practices.  Our industrail agribusiness methods are apparently quite disastrous.  Dahr Jamal quotes Dr. Bomford, a plant and soil scientist, as saying

Clearing land for farming releases carbon into the atmosphere and that contributes to climate change.  Then by farming it, using cultivation causes soil to be lost in wind and erosion, and that topsoil took thousands of years to from.  One extreme weather event can cause us to lose thousands of years of soil.

Please see the comment above on April's weather extremes and picture such extremes becoming the new normal as predicted by climate change models. Goodbye soil.  Goodbye cheap plentiful food.
Cultivation istn't the only problem with our agriculture. Our use of fertilizers derived from petroleum is also problematic. Dr Ryerson is quoted as follows:

The world's agricultural systems rely substantially on increasing use of fertilizers.  But now, the world's farmers are witnessing signs of a declining response curve, where the use of additional fertilizer yields little additional food product. At the same time, fertilizers and intensive cropping lower the quality of soil. These factors will more and more limit the possibilities of raising food production substantially and will, at a minimum, boost relative food prices and resulting hunger for many.

Looks like starvation is on the menu for many of us as food isn't going to be!   Weirdly, our penchant for large agribusiness - huge industrial farms - isn't a logical choice when one considers productivity. The bigger the farm , the less productive it is. Astonishing fact, isn't it?  "Vandana Shiva....points to reams of studies by universities, the UN and FAO showing that the most productive form of agriculture is not our modern, tractor-serviced, big field monocultures, but multilple crop..., manual labour intensive smallholdings."  (page 170, Good News For A Change, Suzuki and Dressel.) In  fact, the UN came out with another report called Agroecology and the Right to Food which urged that we shift towards agro-ecology in order to deal with the problems of hunger, climate change, and poverty.
As defined by the UN, agroecology "applies ecological science to the design of agricultureal systems taht can help put an end to food crises and address climate change and poverty challenges.  It enhances soils productivity and protects crops agaisnt pests by relying on the natural environment such as benefical trees, palnts, animals, and insects."   Sounds like organic gardening to me.  But whatever agroecology sounds like, it is a multiple crop system that relies on manual labour - and it is incredibly productive. 
Even more weirdly, governments have ignored the facts and chosen to subsidize agribiz instead of small family farms. Even worse, in Canada the federal government has had a settled and considered policy of squeezing small holders out of existence.  "During the late 1960s, the federal government instigated a major study into the future of Canadian agriculture. The study concluded that there were too many farmers in Canada (emphasis mine) and recommended that approximately two-thirds of them be eventually eliminated (page 94, Writing Off The Rural West, editors Roger Epp and Dave Epson..)

So the Canadian government chose to encourage large farms that require massive inputs of chemical fertilizers and pesticides; that destroy the soil; increase greenhouse gas emissions; and are actually less productive than small holdings.   These existing  problems with agribusines are now exacerbated by the effects of climate change.

Food and Cheap Oil

Hey - Jeff Rubin has a blog about, of all things, how weaning our economy off oil means some fundamental changes in the way we live, and other things.  (He is the former chief economist at CIBC.)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/jeff-rubins-smaller-world/

From a post entitled "How much longger will our Chinese food be delivered?"

Behind the green facade of the farm gate lies one of the most energy-intensive industries in the world. From fertilizer to farm machinery, most modern agriculture is really about making hydrocarbons edible. No matter what the crop, the most important input is always energy — and it’s getting to be more so every day. Driven by ever greater fertilizer use and farm mechanization, energy represents half the cost of growing wheat (up from 30 per cent only a decade ago), and over 40 per cent of the cost of growing corn or sorghum.

Mr Rubin recommends getting used to local produce as the days of cheap energy are almost over.  I predict that not only will we be eating local food,  industrial agri business will not survive peak oil.   As small farms are more productive, we will probably be tending small farms by hand - without fertilizers made from and with light sweet crude.  We may even be keeping chickens in our back yard as Vancouverites are premitted to do!