The Trouble With Local and Organic

I think a lot of us have had the suspicion that the idea that everyone should eat only local, organic food is unrealistic not just in a “not going to happen” sense but in a very strong “wouldn’t actually be possible” sense. Paul Roberts in a great Mother Jones article about what sustainable agriculture would really entail gets the numbers:

In fact, most of the familiar candidates for alternative food would have trouble operating on the kind of scale necessary for a world of 6.7 billion people. Consider what it would take to make our farm system entirely organic. The only reason industrial organic agriculture can get away with replenishing its soils with manure or by planting nitrogen-fixing cover crops is that the industry is so tiny—making up less than 3 percent of the US food supply (and just 5.3 percent even in gung-ho green cultures like Austria’s). If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we’d need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba. Such an expansion, Smil notes, “would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming—making this clearly only a theoretical notion.”

Now a couple of things on the plus side. There’s pretty ample reason to believe that it would be desirable for dietary habits to not “remain constant.” Americans, and other big-time meat consumers, seem to eat substantially more meat than is healthy for us. A switch to a dynamic in which less meat is eaten, but meat-dollars are held constant so that you get less of a higher-quality product, would be tastier and healthier and move in the direction of sustainability. At the same time, most people aren’t Americans. If the billions of extremely poor people on the planet become less poor (which we should certainly hope for) they’ll want to eat somewhat more meat. So you’re still left with the same basic dilemma.

Roberts has some ideas for more realistic paths to sustainability. But it’s worth highlighting just one insight, namely that one problem with the current organic paradigm is that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. No-till farming, which Roberts explores, has some substantial environmental benefits over conventional methods including a substantial reduction in the use of artificial herbicides. But because it doesn’t reduce herbicide use to zero it doesn’t qualify as “organic.” Consequently, the current market set-up doesn’t provide any real reward from switching from a less-sustainable to a more-sustainable model.

That kind of focus on all-or-nothing issues reflects organic farming’s origins in quasi-mystical movements and it suits the business model of the “Big Organic” enterprises that have sprung up in recent years. But sound public policy is usually all about impacts at the margin. Doubling the proportion of the U.S. food supply that comes from organic sources would still leave us with 94 percent coming from conventional farms. You would accomplish much more by policies that produce a mild reduction in the ecological footprint of the entire conventional center.