Thinking About Organic, Fairtrade, and Local Food

The Dec. 9 issue of The Economist has both a brief opinion piece, "Good Food?", and a longer article, "Voting with your trolley" (both articles online require subscription), that ask some important questions -- and make some good points -- about the increasingly fashionable food trends of shopping for and buying organic, fairtrade, and local foods. If you make a point of doing so, or think that doing so is the ethically best approach to food shopping, these articles raise some facts that should give you pause. As the opinion piece summarizes:

There are good reasons to doubt the claims made about three of the most popular varieties of "ethical" food: organic food, Fairtrade food and local food. People who want to make the world a better place cannot do so by shifting their shopping habits...

Both the opinion piece and the article make the following enlightening points, that can be summed up as follows:

• Buy organic, destroy the rainforest. "Following the 'green revolution' of the 1960s greater use of chemical fertiliser has tripled grain yields with very little increase in the area of land under cultivation. Organic methods, which rely on crop rotation, manure and compost in place of fertiliser, are far less intensive. So producing the world's current agricultural output organically would require several times as much as land as currently cultivated. There wouldn't be much room left for the rainforest."
• Buy 'Fairtrade foods', hurt those you intend to help. "Fairtrade food is designed to raise poor farmers' incomes. It is sold at a higher price than ordinary food, with a subsidy passed back to the farmer. But prices of agricultural commodities are low because of overproduction. By propping up the price, the Fairtrade system encourages farmers to produce more of these commodities rather than diversifying into other crops and so depresses prices -- thus achieving, for most farmers, exactly the opposite fo what the initiative is intended to do. And since only a small fraction of the mark-up on Fairtrade foods actually goes to the farmer -- most goes to the retailer -- the system gives rich consumers an inflated impression of their largesse and makes alleviating poverty seem to easy."
• Buy local food, hurt the environment. "A study of Britain's food system found that nearly half of food-vehicle miles (i.e., miles travelled by vehicles carrying food) were driven by cars going to and from the shops. Most people live closer to a supermarket than a farmer's market, so more local food could mean more food-vehicle miles. Moving food around in big, carefully packed lorries, as supermarkets do, may in fact be the most efficient way to transport the stuff. What's more, once the energy used in production as well as transport is taken into account, local food may turn out to be even less green. Producing lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to Britain uses less energy than producing British lamb, because farming in New Zealand is less energy-intensive."

And that is just taking each of these three separately. Consider what happens when you try to both buy Fairtrade and buy local:

And the local-food movement's aims, of course, contradict those of the Fairtrade movement, by discouraging rich-country consumers from buying poor-country produce. But since the local-food movement looks suspiciously like old-fashioned protectionism masquerading as concern for the environment, helping poor countries is presumably not the point.

Each of these issues is of course more detailed and complicated than summarized here. See the opinion piece and the longer article for more info.