Going Local 2: Re-localising food

By Helena Norberg-Hodge

For part 1

For virtually the whole of human history most human cultures have relied on food produced within a reasonable distance. The logic is unassailable: locally grown food is fresher, and so tastier and more nutritious, than food transported over long distances. It is also likely to be healthier because the producer knows the consumer, does not view him or her merely as a faceless ‘target market’ and so is less likely to take risks and liberties with preservatives and other artificial chemicals. Increasingly, faced with a bland, globalised food culture, people are realising the advantages of local food, and are working to rejuvenate markets for it.

In the UK, for example, the first ‘farmers’ market’, set up in the city of Bath in 1997, was restricted to producers based within a 30–40 mile radius. Public interest in the Bath market was extraordinary, with over 400 callers ringing the market itself in the first few weeks, many of them asking for information on how similar initiatives might be set up in their own areas. Now there are over 500 farmers’ markets in the UK.

At the same time, more and more people are also joining a variety of community supported agriculture (CSA) schemes in which consumers in towns and cities link up directly with a nearby farmer. In some cases, consumers purchase an entire season’s produce in advance, sharing the risk with the farmer. In others, shares of the harvest are purchased in monthly or quarterly instalments. Consumers usually have a chance to visit the farm where their food is grown, and in some cases their help on the farm is welcomed too. This movement is sweeping the world, from Switzerland, where it first started 25 years ago, to Japan where many thousands of people are involved.

It is heartening to see how rapidly local food is gaining popularity with consumers in the UK. A recent report put the worth of the national local food market at 3.7 billion pounds. In 2005, a poll of British shoppers revealed that 65 per cent say they purchase local produce. Nearly one-half of these buy from farmers’ markets and farm shops.

When farmers are allowed to sell in the local marketplace, more of the profit stays in their hands. Currently, only about 5 cents in every dollar spent on food goes to the farmer. The rest goes on transport, packaging, irradiation, colouring, advertising and corporate profit margins. It is routine practice to send apples grown in the UK to South Africa, where labour is cheaper. There, they are washed, waxed and packed and shipped back to the UK to be sold. Even within the UK, the distances involved in processing food have grown enormously. Today carrots travel nearly 60 per cent further on UK roads than in the 1970s. When the distances are shortened and there are fewer links between producer and consumer, the farmer receives more money and we pay less.

Often, the joy of a direct connection between producers and consumers is that their ideals coincide. They want the same things: small-scale production and high organic quality. They both want freshness, variety and a non-exploitative price. Social life often flourishes when like-minded suppliers and consumers meet as friends.

Direct communication between producers and consumers creates a responsive economic system, one shaped by the needs of society rather than the needs of big business. Local food markets by their very nature create consumer demand for a wide range of products that are valued for their taste and nutritional content, rather than the ability to withstand the rigours of long-distance transport or conform to supermarket specifications. This therefore helps to stimulate diversification, allowing farmers to change their mode of production away from monoculture to diversified farming.

The local food movement allows a return to mixed farming systems, where farmers can keep animals and grow some grain, some vegetables, some tree crops and some herbs on the same land. That diversity allows for cycles that reinforce one another in both ecological and economic ways. When animals, grain and vegetables are combined on the same farm, they all feed each other: the grain and vegetables feed both humans and animals, while the straw provides bedding for animals and animal manure is used as a valuable fertiliser. The farmer thus finds the required inputs within reach, without having to pay for them, whereas farmers who are forced to produce monocultures are dependent on ever more expensive inputs. A strong local food economy also provides farmers with the opportunity to diversify into value-added products.

Local production is also often conducive to a gradual reduction in the use of artificial chemicals and other toxic substances. Food sold locally does not need to contain preservatives or additives as it isn’t transported vast distances. In addition, when we produce food locally, we do not need to subject the land to the conformist rigours of centralised monoculture, eradicating competing plants, birds, insects and other animals. By promoting multicultures for local production, we allow people and nature space to move and breathe: diverse people, plants and animals regain their place in local ecosystems.

The local food economy is the root and fibre of the entire rural economy, and efforts to strengthen it thus have systemic benefits that reach far beyond the local good chain itself. A complicated web of interdependence, comprising farmers, farm shops, small retailers and small wholesalers, and spreading out from farming into all of its allied trades, underpins the economy of the market towns and villages, their trades people, bankers and other professional service providers.

Simple steps towards closer links between farmers and consumers are thus helping to rebuild community, enhance human health and restore ecological balance. In joining the local food movement we take an apparently small step that is good for ourselves and our families. At the same time we also make a very real contribution towards preserving biodiversity, the environment in general and regional distinctiveness, while protecting jobs and rural livelihoods. This is true not only in the industrialised world, but particularly in ‘developing’ countries, where often as much as 80 per cent of the population lives by farming, forestry or fishing.


Localising in the developing world

Now that consumers in the West are becoming more aware of the importance of local food and are supporting it through their buying habits, we are seeing the inevitable backlash.  Supporters of the globalisation model have argued that localisation is elitist. They accuse people supporting their local economy of selfishly hording their money and not ‘sharing’ it with people in the developing world. They say we should buy green beans from Kenya and rice from Thailand so they have an income. I even read, in a popular newspaper, that as consumers in the West, we ought to buy clothes produced in sweatshops. If we don’t then these workers will have to go back to the horror of working in the fields.   

It is impossible to see the logic in this having spent so many years working in developing countries where I witnessed the all-pervasive destruction wrought by the global development model. In Ladakh, a remote region in the Indian Himalayas, I have worked with local groups for the last two decades to help them make informed decisions in the face of rapid economic and cultural change. As the local economy was systematically dismantled by outside forces, the Ladakhis lost the stability that local production had provided for centuries. The combination of economic restructuring, tourism, Western-style education and subsidised imported food, forced young people off the land and into the city to compete for scarce jobs. Where there had been prosperity and peacefulness for many centuries, suddenly there was unemployment, poverty, crime and ethnic violence. In this case, and in many other places throughout the developing world, globalisation is essentially a process of slumification.

It is ignorant to suggest that people are better off working 16-hour days in a dark, airless factory producing goods for our consumer appetites than producing food for themselves and their communities. Producing cash crops for export occupies precious, fertile land that could otherwise be used to feed the local population. The drive towards large-scale production pushes small producers off the land in many developing countries and often creates local food shortages. Ensuring that land and fisheries remain in the hands of small producers concerned with producing for the local market is a better guarantee of food security, economic health and ecological sustainability than large-scale export-oriented production.

Developing countries don’t have to take the same path we have tread. We have put ourselves on a global suicide course by following the current development model with its voracious appetite for oil. In the south, they still have the opportunity to leap-frog the fossil fuel stage and implement a more sustainable system, which would include renewable energy and strong local food economies.     

Big business would like us to believe that diversifying and localising food production leads to inefficiency, job losses and economic hardship. The reality is that the opposite is true: as more of the wealth created by the community stays in the community, jobs are created locally and the prosperity of small business is secured.


Tipping the scales towards local production

For local food systems to genuinely flourish and prosper and be replicated in large numbers around the world, changes at the policy level are clearly necessary. Current economic policies are artificially lowering the prices of industrially-produced foods by shifting the costs of production onto the community. If people do not take these hidden subsidies into account, and do not challenge the economic basis of our current monocultural, export-based food system, they risk falling into the trap of arguing that consumers should pay more for better food — when, as farmers’ markets etc. show — they can actually pay less. This approach marginalises the poor and opens campaigners to charges of elitism. Furthermore, to overlook hidden subsidies is to miss a fantastic opportunity: if these resources were diverted towards decent agriculture and retailing, we could have better food at no extra cost at all. In fact, the price of fresh local food would come down.

Recognising the global consequences of the economic system also gives agricultural and environmental groups common cause with those campaigning for social justice and the ‘Third World’. Access to fresh, healthy food is coming to be seen as a fundamental human right, and these diverse bodies are now beginning to join hands to demand a different set of economic priorities, and the redrawing of the global economic map.

The most important thing to remember is that we do have the power to change things. The destructive, global economy can only exist as long as we are prepared to accept and subsidise it. We can reject it. We can start today by joining the local food movement and reap the wealth of benefits from re-linking farmers and consumers. Fresh, local food for all may be one of the most rewarding — and certainly the most delicious — results of localisation.


Helena Norberg-Hodge is a leading analyst on the impact of the global economy on cultures and agriculture worldwide. She is the founder director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture and author of the inspirational classic, Ancient Futures. In 1986 Helena received the Right Livelihood Award, or the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ as recognition for her work.

Notes
* Food and Agriculture Organization, FAOSTAT, www.apps.fao.org. A similar pattern holds for many other commodities. In 1998, the UK imported 174,570 tons of bread, while exporting 148,710 tons; imported 21,979 tons of eggs and egg products, while exporting 30,604 tons; imported 158,294 tons of pork, while exporting 258,558 tons [Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Overseas Trade Data System, UK Trade Data in Food, Feed and Drink (London: MAFF, HMSO, July 1999)]. See also Caroline Lucas, Stopping the Great Food Swap: Relocalising Europe’s Food Supply, March 2001, The Pear Essentials and How Green are our Apples. Sustain, September 18, 2006.
http://www.sustainweb.org/page.php?id=147
Alison Smith, et.al. The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development: Final report. (UK: Defra, 2005)
Jules Pretty and Tim Lang et al. Farm costs and food miles: an assessment of the full cost of the UK weekly food basket. Food Policy, 30 (1), 2005
Angela Groves, The Local and Regional Food Opportunity. (UK: Institute of Grocery Distribution, 2005).
Carrot Fashion. Sustain, September 18, 2006. http://www.sustainweb.org/page.php?id=143

See also

See also on this site  The Green Revolution Goes to Africa, 12 Reasons to Buy Locally