Financial finagling in food and sustainability

Week three of the Comparative Farming and Sustainable Food Systems class proceeded on in fascinating detail. We've been talking about sustainability and the design of food and farm systems. Sustainability can be thought of as the interactions of cultural, economic, social, institutional, and energy components in a system that have positive effects on the present, without compromising the future. The design of such a system has an end of healthy ecosystems and healthy communities, creating wellbeing for people and their environment in both the short and long term. Cultural are distinguished from social components in that the former have to do with identity (traditions, value systems, language), while the latter have to do institutions and systems of organization (political structure, systems of control and distribution).

One of the topics that came up during the course of discussion was the food price spikes we're seeing lately and the resultant riots around the world. The professor handed out an article on this from the January 15 New Zealand Herald:

The food riots began in Algeria more than a week ago, and they are going to spread. During the last global food shortage, in 2008, there was serious rioting in Mexico, Indonesia and Egypt. We may expect to see that again, only more widespread.

The article talks about poverty, climate change, world population, global consumption patterns, floods, drought, imports, local crop failures. Interestingly, it does not talk about commodity speculation in grains and other foodstuffs. I recalled a story written for Harper's Magazine by Frederick Kaufman about the food riots of 2008 and what led up to them: he specifically focused on the role of companies like Goldman Sachs and the issue of commodities futures in wheat and corn in the food crisis. The title says it succinctly: "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it." (PDF)

Investors were delighted to see the value of their venture increase, but the rising price of breakfast, lunch, and dinner did not align with the interests of those of us who eat.

I did a little searching on the web and found the letter from Steve Strongin on behalf of Goldman Sachs in response to the article, Kaufman's reply to that, and an interview with Kaufman by Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now!

The economics of sustainability has to do with full costing: what's known as the triple bottom line or the related integrated bottom line. We talked about economy of scale (Mike Emers of Rosie Creek Farm is helping to teach the class, and he spoke about this): maximizing your inputs (money, equipment, time, labor, etc.) for the most efficient and best levels of use for what you have—a balancing of costs and benefits. Each size of operation has an economy of scale that best suits it. Craig Gerlach brought up "neighboring," a term I hadn't heard before. This is a practice where neighbor farmers will work in common to help each other. For example, community harvesting: farmers in a particular local showing up at one farm to help harvest that farmer's fields, then moving on to the next farm in a given area, and so on, until all of their fields are harvested. Bringing in the harvest is an old tradition, as is barn-raising. Farmers may also share equipment.

in a food system, how do the local, regional, and global food systems link and interact? How do the scales of agriculture affect diversity in ecology, society, culture? We talked about the size of a farm affecting its ecological diversity: monoculture tends to be the rule on the extremely large farm. Gerlach hastened to point out that the modern industrial standard of monoculture and resource exploitation could be replaced with a restorative system, using organic and rotational methods, on the very large as well as the small farm, and that diversification of crops can be done over time as well as land area.

"Nature is the model."

This led us to talking about the plains vs. the prairie, and the idea of place-based development of breeds and farming methods. Gerlach mentioned the work of Wes Jackson, who became concerned about erosion of topsoil in the US (famously in the Dust Bowl of the thirties, but still continuing), and ended up founding an organization called The Land Institute. Most grains we use are annuals; we till the land, sow the seed, harvest the crop, and then plow under the stubble. The institute describes the situation and their mission this way:

No method for perpetuating agricultural productivity exists. Our goal is to improve the security of our food and fiber source by reducing soil erosion, decreasing dependency upon petroleum and natural gas, and relieving the agriculture-related chemical contamination of our land and water. Our specific research is an innovation for agriculture, using "nature as the measure" to develop mixed perennial grain crops as food for humans where farmers use nature as a standard or measure in making their agronomic decisions. Over 75 percent of human calories worldwide come from grains such as wheat and corn, but the production of these grains erodes ecological capital. Our research is directed toward the goal of having conservation as a consequence of agricultural production.

The classic documentary, The Plow that Broke the Plains, brought the problem of tilling and erosion to public attention in 1936. The sound is pretty bad on this, but it's an interesting piece.



"A healthy, well-integrated community needs to be integrated with its food," said Gerlach, and I agree. That means the consequences of agricultural economics has to be connected to the consequences of agriculture. Food, economics, human happiness: you can't rip off one sector without hurting the others.

Previous posts in this series:

Food systems, policy, and foodsheds
Food systems and shizen
Sustainable food systems class

Cross posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Food systems, policy, and foodsheds

The second week of my Comparative Food Systems class has readings in Anna Lappé's book, Diet for a Hot Planet, going over Hamm's seven principles for a healthy food system, reading an article by Jack Kloppenburg and others on the foodshed, an article on rural Alaska food systems by my professor, Craig Gerlach, and researching definitions of "food system." In the meantime, I've been working on the Alaska Food Policy Council's introductory paper on food policy and the Alaska food system, so these two projects dovetail quite nicely. It adds up to a lot of reading—interesting, definitely, but a lot of pages.

So, to start: Lappé makes the argument that not only is small-scale, diversified organic farming that caters to a local market sustainable and good for communities, this type of agriculture is climate-friendly because it: produces fewer comparative greenhouse gas emissions than industrial farming; requires less energy inputs from fossil fuels; improves the soil; and actually sequesters carbon in the soil rather than releasing it. Her description of the energy-intensiveness of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations is horrific—and never mind the inherent cruelty of them, she hasn't even gotten into that so far. She does talk about the unhealthiness of the modern diet in terms of the amount of processing food undergoes: highly processed foods, like Pringles or Pop-Tarts, use a huge amount of energy and resources—and they're just not that good for you.

Lappé describes seven principles of a climate-friendly diet:

1. Reach for real food (food that has fewer ingredients and isn't processed or transmogrified a lot is likelier to be less climate-destructive)
2. Put plants on your plate (eat less meat—most modern meat is grain-fed, which is energy-intensive; if you eat meat, eat meat that is raised humanely and sustainably, because these practices, like grass-fed beef, produce less greenhouse gas emissions—grain-fed cattle produce more methane than grass-fed cattle!)
3. Don't panic, go organic (industrial chemicals require large energy inputs; nitrogen fertilizer produced through the Haber-Bosch process, for example—and then there's all those petrochemicals used for pesticides)
4. Lean toward local (less shipping, for one)
5. Finish your peas…the ice caps are melting (food waste is a waste of energy resources; institutional composting makes use of food waste and reduces land-fill emissions)
6. Send packaging packing (the throwaway society wastes humongous amounts of resources; I think we should institute a law like that in Germany, where the producer or seller of packing must take it back from whoever they sell it to. For example, the customer buys a box of chocolate, but returns the box to the store—the store has to take the box, no charge. Then the store can return their collected boxes to the supplier of the chocolate—and the supplier can't charge them. The cost to the retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers has reduced extra packaging dramatically in Germany. Lappé has not mentioned this law so far in my reading.)
7. DIY food (grow and cook your own food: better for you and lots less processing—and therefore lots less energy intensive)

Hamm's article, assigned last week, was also interesting but a bit less easy reading than Lappé's book. (My editorial eye kept twitching—he'd have had red ink all over his paper had I gotten to it before publication.) His operating principles for a healthy food system are that it would:

1. insure community food security for all residents
2. be community based
3. be locally integrated
4. be reasonably seasonal in nature
5. present primarily opportunities rather than problems
6. connect health across the layers of the system
7. be diverse

This is, of course, not at all what our current food system looks like. Our current food system is highly energy-intensive, unseasonal, deters connectivity between the different layers of the food system, is almost completely disassociated with local communities, is rarely distributed or minimally distributed within a community, and is rife with pseudo-diversity and ultra-processed crud disguised as foodoid items.

You can tell where I'm coming from, can't you?

A concise definition of "food system" comes from the San Francisco Food Alliance's 2005 San Francisco Collaborative Food System Assessment (PDF), which says

A food system describes the cycle of growing, distributing, eating and recycling our food, and all the factors that affect it.

Short and sweet! It's "all the factors" that are the hairy part, however: natural resources and environmental systems, social and cultural systems, political systems, economic systems, technology, research, education, etc. That encompasses a lot of things: disease, hunger, political will, costs, food safety, commodities trading, water rights, the Green Revolution, agribusiness, organic certification, heirloom seeds, and so on. This in turn brings up ideas like food democracy and equity, food sovereignty, fair trade, self-reliance, guerilla gardening, etc.

Kloppenberg's article, "Coming in to the Foodshed," takes the metaphor of the watershed and applies it to food. How does food move through the landscape, the community? One quote from it struck me:

Provided with an apparent cornucopia of continuously available foods, few consumers have much knowledge of the biological, social, or technical parameters and implications of food production in the global village.

Of course, much of the power of agribusiness ultimately depends on farmers and consumers not knowing. If we do not know, we do not act. And even if we do know, the physical and social distancing characteristics of the global food system may constrain our willingness to act when the locus of the needed action is distant or when we have no real sense of connection to the land or those on whose behalf we ought to act. Ultimately, distancing disempowers. Control passes to those who can act and are accustomed to act at a distance: the Philip Morrises, Monsantos, and ConAgras of the world.

(My emphasis added.) In short, it pays the big guys for the public to be uniformed or misinformed.

The thing that I am discovering about an examination of food systems and sustainable farming: food is political, and food politics are radical—because the nexus of the issue is about self-determination, freedom.

Kloppenberg, Hendrickson, and Stevenson go on (and bear in mind that this article was published 15 years ago) to talk about "foodshed work." They describe it so (again, my emphasis):

• A foodshed will be embedded in a moral economy that envelopes [sic] and conditions market forces. The global food system now operates according to allegedly "natural" rules of efficiency, utility maximization, competitiveness, and calculated self-interest. The historical extension of market relations has deeply eroded the obligations of mutuality, reciprocity, and equity that ought to characterize all elements of human interaction. Food production today is organized largely with the objective of producing a profit rather than with the purpose of feeding people. But human society has been and should remain more than a marketplace.
• Community Supported Agriculture also serves as an illustration of our expectation that the moral economy of a foodshed will be shaped and expressed principally through communities.…We imagine foodsheds as commensal communities that encompass sustainable relationships both between people (those who eat together) and between people and the land (obtaining food without damage). …[B]uilding the commensal community means establishment or recovery of social linkages beyond atomistic market relationships through the production, exchange, processing, and consumption of food. …Finally, the standards of a commensal community require respect and affection for the land and for other species. It is through food that humanity's most intimate and essential connections to the earth and to other creatures are expressed and consummated.
• The dominant dynamics of the global food system actively erode both moral economy and community. We agree with those who believe that this destructiveness is an inherent property of the system, and that what is needed is fundamental transformation rather than simple reform.

All this makes having a garden at home look like a revolutionary act. And maybe it is.

More later on Gerlach's article, "Rural Alaskan Food Systems: Problems, Prospects, and Policy Considerations," written for the Alaska Food Policy Council in August 2010.

See my previous posts on this course:

• Food systems and shizen
• Sustainable food systems class

Cross posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Raising a rumpus: Wells Fargo's preferred provider

Neil Davis writes the Dose of Reality column for The Ester Republic, and seems to have raked up a bit of muck this month. Wells Fargo is the state's new health care/insurance administrator, and recently sent out an announcement indicating that it had entered into a preferred provider agreement with Alaska Regional Hospital in replacement of the one the state formerly had with Providence Hospital, because it would be cheaper.

Well, this caught Neil's eye because he'd done some cost-comparison research on these hospitals for his book, Mired in the Health Care Morass. The crucial piece of information here is that Alaska Regional is a for-profit hospital, whereas Providence is, like Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, a nonprofit hospital—and markups at for-profit institutions can be significantly higher than nonprofit institutions. So he looked into it, and sure enough, it appears that's still the case for Alaska Regional. Generally speaking, procedures at this hospital tend to be more expensive or about the same as those at Providence.

So why would Wells Fargo claim that it's the other way around?

One possibility is that it IS cheaper—for Wells Fargo. The companies could have a steep discount for their payments. This does not mean, however, that it is any cheaper for the patients who are getting their care there, or for the state of Alaska.

Neil rightly raises these questions, and suggests that they be looked into. I agree.

Blogging from Anchorage

Okay, not a very inventive title. Hung out in the airport for a while, until Dimitra found me and took me to the Voyager Hotel, a nice hotel in downtown Anchortown. I figure that since I'm down here for a blogging panel, I might as well blog, hey what?

So: the commonality among the bloggers on this panel that I see is most are very political in their choice of topics. Me, too, I suppose, although this particular blog wanders all over the place in terms of subject. You'll rarely find recipes, but you will find personal tidbits, and lately, it being the season, a bit of springy gardening notes and agriculture-related stuff.

As in: I recently planted tomatoes (Mr. Stripey, red currant, Siletz, and something else, I forget what), OS Cross cabbages, sweet red peppers, and three varieties of artichoke (hah! good luck with that, Deirdre). Mostly I avoid hybrids and go for organic seeds from heirloom varieties. This year we plan to do a decent-sized garden, and I went through all the seeds and pulled out everything that was ten years old or more. I'd saved seeds from last year and the year before from my squash, and have some unidentified nightshade family seeds (eggplant? pepper? probably not tomato, since they aren't fuzzy). Some of the seeds I'm planting this year are around 15 years old.

My reading material for this trip dovetails nicely with all the recent reading and work I've been doing on CSAs. It's a book by Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce, which so far is spending a lot of time talking about how dire a situation we're in (this is in 1993) and how only a complete refiguring of business will save life on earth, that business, or the corporate institution, is the most successful and dominant institution on the planet, and that it's gotten us into a huge mess because it assumes (where have I heard this before?) no limits to growth, and the real costs of what it does aren't figured in. And it is backed by popular support for the economic model/thought paradigm it works in (democratic free-market capitalism). I haven't yet gotten to the chapters on solutions to this mess.

Of course, since this was published, there's been a grassroots shift developing in the economic workings of the world. It's pretty clear in the food end of things: the locally grown, organic or biodynamic, community-supported agriculture model has been developing for twenty years but has taken off in the last ten. We finally have presidential family planting a vegetable garden on the White House lawn again (and it's seen as so significant that it is international news! how's that for telling?). Aha. Politics!

Food security gets even more political. The oft-cited figure that better than 95% of Alaska's food comes from out of state originates from University of Alaska research, I think, but I can't find when or where this figure comes from. Sometimes I see it as 90%, other times 98%. It's also expressed as "three days' worth of food on supermarket shelves" (or two days). But, as Phil Loring pointed out recently in his column Outpost Agriculture, Alaskans do a lot of subsistence hunting and gathering. Folks in the cities drive out to pick berries, go moose hunting, etc. Still, I'd bet the great majority of our food comes from Outside. Most of us are very very dependent on good transportation and artificially cheap prices for food. And that means, lessee, subsidies, federal grants and earmarks, lots of consumption of, er, oil...which gets VEDDY political.

And then there's food security in the sense of seed diversity, the control of gardeners and farmers over their own food and the biodiversity created by generations upon generations saving their seed. That's one of the really nasty side effects of multinational corporate agribusiness: monocropping. The use of just a few, often or even usually proprietary varieties is a killer to our food security. Never mind the genetic manipulation of, say, corn and soybeans--it's that lack of variation that's the real problem.

It all comes down to sustainability (o gack, the dreaded buzzword -- except it's not a cliche, it's a damn survival necessity). Which all gets back to my garden, and food miles. If the food I grow or harvest is within walking distance of my house (berry patches, mushroom spots, garden beds), and I save my seeds and compost our kitchen waste, then I have saved a ton of real cost. Storing that food for the winter adds a cost, however, as we heat our house and use electricity to keep our food frozen. Drying it or canning or creating a root cellar would cut some of the energy use, and doing all this stuff at home definitely cuts down on the stupid packaging that we end up throwing out (jars, shopping bags, annoying little labels on the fruit and vegetables, shrink wrap, boxes made of foam, etc.), which saves on those big plastic garbage bags, and saves on trips to the dumpster, etc.

There's an interesting side effect to this whole topic for me--it makes me very aware of the power of individuals to effect profound change. Simply growing a pot of basil rather than buying it in the store makes a big difference, because it ripples out down the source chain. Alaskans are vulnerable because we are so dependent on nonrenewable fuels, on goods shipped up from Outside. (Although I hear we are the highest per capita for year-round bicyclists and pedestrians, which is good for our health and fuel economy.) Getting involved in local projects also makes me aware of this strength of personal action, but somehow it's the food thing that seems more active. Buying local food or goods, or going to a local store rather than a chain, is significant to me too, but there's nothing like getting my hands dirty in the garden or eating tomatoes I grew myself to make me feel like I'm doing something positive for the world. It's an immediate sense of accomplishment.

CSA Roundtable

My personal life and my UAF office job seem to be converging in some ways. I've been working on arranging a CSA Roundtable that will be happening this Thursday on campus, where members of the School of Natural Resources & Agricultural Sciences (SNRAS for short) will be meeting with CSA operators to discuss what the U can do to help farmers better succeed. You know, research, better curriculum, demonstration/training/instructional CSA garden on campus, that sort of thing.

It's interesting to have this crossover in the interests I hold. I'm finding myself more and more interested in local agriculture, small-scale economies, community supported anything. As Grace Lee Boggs says on Yes! magazine:

Every day it becomes clearer that we are approaching the end of the short-lived (less than 300 years) industrial/capitalist epoch.

So people in communities, rather than the workplace, have begun to create another America.

One obvious sign is the mushrooming urban agricultural and local foods movement.

Yet, speaking with a person working here at the school, he said to me this morning, "I'm a fan of the industrial model of agriculture." CSA agriculture doesn't allow for the kind of market expansion, he says, that the industrial version does. But then I think of the kind of non-local expansion/invasion of local markets here in Alaska that Full Circle Farm is guilty of, and I wonder. Any model can be abused.

But Boggs is right, in a limited way. It's not just the US that's changing, it's the world's attitudes. Today I walked in to the office and found a copy of the 2008 Slow Food Almanac on my chair. It's a book that I will read. The Slow Food movement started in, I think, Italy. It has spread throughout the world. The Slow Food Movement, like many other aspects of the green/turning/community movement, is about humane living, not just living by quantity.

More on pollock, trawling, salmon, and money

John Enge recently posted a column on Alaska Report, "Science vs. Barons of the Fish Business:"

It is apparent that the two trawl fisheries mentioned above [Neah Bay, Washington, and the Bering Sea] are not conducive to family fishermen, subsistence and sport users, the many other species of fish in the ocean, or the coastal communities. The problem is that these giant factory trawlers, and many independent trawlers fishing for shore plants with 'legal rights to process a certain % of the total catch,' don't mind snuffing out all other species of sea life. The big fishery in the Bering Sea is the pollock fishery, prosecuted by mid-water trawlers. That would seem to be a safe way to fish. Just scoop up the schools of pollock, leaving plenty behind for replenishment of the stocks. (Except that half the pollock fishery is right before propogation and the pollock never get to sow the seeds of the next generation.)

…Many times, the electronics are indicating the wrong kind of fish; fish that they are not permitted by law to keep. So down goes the nets and up comes millions of pounds of squid, king salmon, chum salmon, halibut, herring and anything else that lives in proximity to the pollock. It's not like they all live in separate apartments. You clean out one apartment and you get a mixed bag of occupants. Remember, the trawl nets are like pulling a football field-sized sieve sideways through the water, with everything in that amount of space for miles squeezed into a 'sock' on the end of the net. (I won't even go into bottom trawling where Oregon State University researchers found that it extinguishes 30% of the species complex where they have been.)

According to the Marine Stewardship Council, the Alaska pollock fishery is seeking recertification as a sustainable fishery. There is a lot of money in pollock, especially in sustainably fished pollock, and some serious drivers in the purchasing end of the business. For example, McDonald's:

McDonald's purchases more than 18,000 metric tons, or 43.2 million pounds, of fish a year for its popular Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. Filet-O-Fish is made with pollock, a whitefish that lives in the cold waters off the coasts of Alaska and eastern Russia. The Marine Stewardship Council has certified U.S. Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands and the Gulf of Alaska pollock fisheries as models for sustainable fisheries management, but many retailers and foodservice operators still use whitefish from other fisheries that are less sustainable and traceable.

McDonald's is very interested in obtaining fish from sustainable sources, providing an economic incentive for fisheries to obtain certification of sustainability. But is that level of sustainability certified by the MSC sufficiently sustainable? or is it just better than no certification at all? or, as Thomas Royer asks, is it really only a myth?

Fisheries are generally classified as a sustainable resource on the assumption that they can be maintained for future generations. However, studies have demonstrated man's ability to deplete major fisheries since the Middle Ages.

A recent book, "The Unnatural History of the Sea" by Callum Roberts, traces the destruction of fish populations from the estuaries of England after 1000 AD to the most recent demise of orange roughy off New Zealand. It has been estimated that 90 percent of large fish have now been depleted.

Will the Bering Sea pollock fishery continue to decline? Is it already too late?

An Anchorage Daily News article last summer points to the decline in the pollock fishery, which certainly doesn't sound like it's very sustainable. One interesting thing that Callum brings up, and that is discussed at the Progressive Policy Institute, is that of subsidies "to help keep catch levels up." These subsidies to build boats were in vogue until around 2004. There is a whole blog on the subject, in fact. Among the interesting recent posts are:

• WTO beaten by the Marine Stewardship Council
• US: fisheries subsidies and advice to President Obama on fisheries policy
• US: $170 million subsidies for commercial fishers of salmon in the West Coast
• USA: fisheries subsidies and WTO Trade Policy Review
• The pain of high fuel prices: US Senators introduce a bill proposing fuel subsidies for fishermen

Sustainability codes, of course, are only as good as their policy—and compliance.

Nonsustainable industry practice: stupid wanton waste

This extremely pertinent question was posted on Fiery Blazing Handbasket, and picked up by Kodiak Konfidential, but it's just too barbed a point not to repeat once again:

Does anyone else find it odd that the Bering Sea pollock trawlers can catch and discard as bycatch over 100,000 king salmon per year while the small, community-based fishing effort has to shut down? That we haven't even managed to let enough kings by on the Yukon to meet our treaty obligation to the Canadians?

All so Americans can eat cheap fish sticks?

It's real stupidity, and corruption in action, that's what it is. Bycatch waste has got to be the stupidest shortsighted cut-off-your-nose practice in the fishing industry. It costs fisherfolk a lot of effort, time, money, and bad press--but it's the bottom trawlers and big industrial-size factory fishing boats and nets that do the real damage. "Bycatch" is dead dolphins in the tuna harvest (finally got some protections there, after a long, long fight), king salmon in the pollack harvest, dead sea turtles, dead sharks, dead birds, and so on and so on....and it's a HUGE problem. According to Global Chefs magazine, something like 25% of all fisheries catch is wasted.

Bycatch.org has a database of bycatch reduction methods, and NOAA has a whole Fisheries Feature devoted to the issue.

But, as Global Chefs and others point out, consumer action can have quite an effect. And it's the big fleets and megacorps, not the little Yukon River villages, that do the most damage.

Here's an interesting article from March 1999 from the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations on the management issues regarding sustainability, with a good bit of background on the present problems.

The mainstream media finally notices

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The Green Party has been jumping up and down about this for some time, but at long last, the New York Times has noticed that, far from being the "land of the free," we are the land of the imprisoned:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Adam Liptak is doing an invaluable public service by exposing our system's workings to the public. Let's hope he goes on to examine the for-profit prison.

The CON con

The "con" is in trying to get rid of it. Neil Davis and I have been blogging about this issue over at the Health Care Morass blog. Neil's also written about it in the Republic and the Alaska Health Policy Review.

The free marketeers are at it again, claiming that the answer to rising health care costs, physician shortages, etc., will be solved if we only go to an open, competitive market in facilities services, medical specialties, etc. It's hogwash. The insert taken out in the News-Miner on Sunday by the group, "Alliance for Healthcare in Alaska", was a sneaky, deceptive advertorial that was full of falsehoods and twisted facts. Very, very low ball.

There's obviously a ton of money at stake.

And, of course, the first public hearing on rescinding the Certificate of Need law is in Fairbanks tomorrow at 9 in the morning. On a weekend with 40-below temperatures. They really don't want to hear from much of the public, do they? But, if you're willing and able to get there, here's where you can go testify to the legislature about it:

Saturday, February 9, 9 am
Legislative Affairs Office in the Alaska USA building
1292 Sadler Way, Suite 308, Fairbanks