Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (7 page)

This is apparently the first phase of a plan to acquire 1.2 million acres (500,000 hectares) of land in Ethiopia over the next few years to grow rice, wheat, vegetables, and flowers for Saudi consumers. Commercial farms are popping up in Ethiopia because the government is willing to lease 7.5 million acres (three million hectares) of its most fertile land at a reported price of one dollar per 2.5 acres (1 hectare) per year. Ethiopia is also a country synonymous with famine and food aid. There are still thirteen million citizens who are in need of more food than they currently are getting.

Ethiopia is a particularly jarring example, but it's not the only one. Over 125 million acres (50,500 hectares) worldwide are being “outsource farmed” by rich countries. Japan and South Korea import 70 percent of their grains, and Africa is the site of a neocolonial land grab. It has fertile farmland, water resources, and desperate or corrupt governments ready to sell farming rights to the highest bidders. (Because Africa was spared the industrialized farming revolution that transformed the great farm belts of India, China, Mexico, and the United States, many countries in Africa are now seen as the last frontier of viable, nutrient-rich farmland. And it's going for cheap. Land in Africa is leasing for one-tenth the price of land in Asia. It is no surprise that wealthy countries are on a major shopping spree for agricultural land leases in places like the Sudan, Nigeria, Tanzania, Mali, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi, to name a few.

In keeping with the arrival of the large commercial foreign farms, subsistence farmers and small family farms are having their land and livelihood sold out from under them. Those who do get paid are getting the equivalent of ten years of crop yields. This may sound like a healthy sum for poor farmers, but really it's just the equivalent of a half-generation's income. And this is being sold to African nations as “tools for development,” to potential investors as the new strategic financial asset, and to the rest of the world who cares to pay attention as the only way to feed the projected nine-billion-person global population by 2045
through high-yield genetically engineered organisms, monocrops, and commercial farming. It's enough to make you believe in mass delusion.

It's not just food security that is driving this land grab. One international nongovernmental organization (NGO), called GRAIN, reports that the world financial and food crisis of the past few years has caused “all kinds of actors from the financial and the agribusiness sectors—pensions, hedge funds, etc.” to abandon the derivative markets, “and the food and financial crises combined have turned agricultural land into the new strategic asset.”
¹⁸
Pension funds are even investing in farmland.

These extraterritorial agricultural annexes are not just in Africa; they are happening wherever anyone can place a “for sale” sign on some cheap farmland, like in the American Midwest and on the Canadian Prairies. The ongoing farm crisis at home is no longer front-page news, but it should be. American and Canadian farmers continue to post record losses, surpassing those of the Great Depression. And in the wake of foreclosures and crippling debt, strategic asset companies specializing in accumulating farmland are nipping at their heels. These companies are snapping up family farms at fire-sale rates to increase the profits and ownership of international speculators. The sentimentally named Walton International Group owns 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) of farmland in the wheat belt of Canada and the United States.
¹⁹
The investment capital comes from Germany, Japan, and the Middle East. So, what may look like medium-sized or family farms bucking the trend and hanging onto their livelihoods by their fingernails may already be tenant farmers. How can it be otherwise when the average American chicken farmer will have to invest over $500,000 in poultry farming start-up costs yet will make only $18,000 per year?
²⁰
Or when wheat routinely sells at a dollar less per bushel than the cost of production? If what we are after is cheaper and cheaper food, this means that we are purposefully driving our family farmer to the poorhouse and eventually out of existence.

P
EAK
O
IL

“Peak oil” does not refer to the time at which the very last drop of black gold is scrounged from the last oil well on the planet. Rather, it's the point at which the resource extraction reaches its maximum capability. It's the top of the bell curve of global production, not a cliff that rises and then plummets vertically straight down from its peak. After cresting at record high levels of supply and record low levels of cost, each barrel thereafter gets exponentially harder to tap, and oil production enters into a state of terminal decline. Eventually decline becomes depletion, and oil becomes really expensive as those last dribbles are extracted.

Peak oil is not a universally accepted idea. Some believe that where there is a demand for oil, someone will always find a supply. This certainly was the case when companies started to dig up vast strips of northern Alberta to extract oil suspended in tarry sands, a proposition only viable when the cost of a barrel of oil stays above sixty-five dollars.

But most economists, geologists, and governments do believe in peak oil, and there is no disputing that the industrialized world runs on fossil fuel. Everything from heating our homes to growing, processing, transporting, and selling the food we eat is dependent on it. But oil is a finite, and now dwindling, resource; we're already casting about to find new efficiencies or even a new source of energy to replace our oil diet. Some peak oil pundits are convinced we've already crested; others predict it will happen by 2020 unless there are significant discoveries of new oil fields.

There's no end to the speculation about the end of oil and the mayhem that will result when there really is no more oil left in the ground. University of Guelph professors Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas describe a rather grim scenario in their
Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations:
“Should the derricks stop pumping crude, the loss of fertilizer would drop crop yields by half. Three billion people would lose their daily sustenance.”
²¹

It should be said that many brilliant minds are cautious about doomsday end-of-oil scenarios. Other forms of energy, they feel, will step up and take oil's place, whether it's wind energy, solar energy, or other geological resources.

Vaclav Smil is a distinguished professor in the Faculty of the Environment at the University of Manitoba and an international critical thinker with interdisciplinary expertise in energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical, and public policy studies. In
Energy Myths and Realities
, Smil lays out the case that the process of switching from fossil fuels to another source of energy will not take place over a few years but rather will come at a significant cost and will occur over a much longer timeline than most people are aware of. Smil argues that comprehensive energy transitions take several generations.
²²
For an overwhelmingly oil-dependent food system, as we have now, a several-generation transition is a dire prediction indeed. And our early attempts to find a suitable replacement—such as biofuels—have not gone so well.

P
EAK
W
ATER

Growing food demands a tremendous amount of fresh water. The figures are almost unbelievable. The daily food needs for one person can require up to 1,320 US gallons, or 5,000 liters.
²³
Of all the fresh water used in the world right now, 70 percent is used by agriculture.
²⁴
And the United Nations has identified that water, specifically the scarcity of fresh water, will be the defining resource of the next century. We currently go to war over oil reserves; it's not unlikely that we'll go to war over fresh water access in a few generations.

The United States depends on fresh water flowing to it from Canada, just as Egypt is dependent on water flowing in from its neighbors. Shutting off the tap from the water-rich countries to the water-poor countries would result in catastrophe. And moving this water
around to where it is needed for agriculture requires energy. One-fifth of the energy used in California is simply to get water from one place to another. Water resources, therefore, are also tied to energy resources.

China prefers to use its abundant river water in the north for more profitable industrial purposes than for growing food. The trade-off is that it must rely on wheat imports and the fluctuations of the global wheat market.

Middle Eastern countries are outsourcing the farming of water-intensive staple crops like wheat to Africa. The Saudi government has a stated goal of reducing its domestic grain and cereal production by 12 percent simply as a means of conserving fresh water.
²⁵
Countries that are exporting food are not only exporting wheat, beef, apples, and heads of lettuce; they are exporting their water resources. When water becomes scarce, it will only add to the cost of food, and water-rich countries will be holding the cards.

P
EAK
F
ARMING
K
NOWLEDGE

One issue that gets very little attention in this whole discussion around industrial agriculture is that the world is losing farming knowledge faster than it is losing natural resources. There are currently about 2.8 billion farmers left on our planet of 6.7 billion inhabitants.
²⁶
Now one industrial farmer feeds over 140 people on average.
²⁷
Farmers account for a mere 2 percent of the US population.

Most of the planet's farmers are peasant farmers and subsistence farmers. Many are quite poor. Many live in places where land registries are nonexistent. The security of knowing they will be able to continue to farm their land is tenuous at best. When they are displaced, the knowledge of the specific food-growing skills in their regions will be lost within a generation. It will be a loss of traditional knowledge that has taken tens of thousands of years to accumulate.

T
HE
P
ERFECT
S
TORM

With all these elements in play, it's actually a wonder that the global food crisis caught most of us off-guard. Already by 2006, investment banks were turning to commodity markets—especially crops—rather than derivatives and other speculative financial market options. Wheat and other grains were very much in demand as biofuels. The word
agflation
became the term the international financial markets used to explain the link between the rise in general inflation as the cost of commodity crops went up, which until this point were seen as external factors in general inflation. Asia and Africa felt the brunt of these increases. When the price of wheat doubled and other staples soared with inflation, the landlocked West African country of Burkina Faso erupted in riots in three of its major cities in February 2008. Soon there were more food riots in Africa and the Middle East, notably in Egypt and Yemen.

Then food riots began bubbling up in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The rise in price of wheat sparked “pasta riots” in Italy. And the inflation in the corn markets caused “tortilla riots.” Argentina had a “tomato boycott” to protest the soaring costs of its favorite vegetable. Brazil's government also announced that it would stop exporting rice for the time being. When the price of rice doubled in two weeks in March 2008, food riots broke out in Asia as well. In 2009, the cost of potatoes in India went up 136 percent, and other foods like chickpeas, lentils, and beans went up over 40 percent.
²⁸

The next time the price of food rose so sharply, in 2011, the violence increased and governments were brought to their knees. Egyptians took to the streets over the increase of the price of wheat, and therefore bread, a daily staple. It's still underreported in the media that food shortages and rising costs of staple foods like bread were the spark for so much of the political unrest that is unseating governments in the Middle East.
²⁹

In 2011, the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization released another devastating Food Price Index indicating that food
prices globally rose above the record peak of 2008. A second wave of widespread food riots began in cities in Tunisia, and the long-time ruler of Tunisia was chased out of office. (It's no surprise that the food riots took place in the cities. Urbanites are always more vulnerable when there are food shortages or price hikes than are their rural counterparts.) Then the unrest spread to Bahrain, Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Albania, Syria, Lebanon, and then Egypt. Soon it moved on to Libya, the Sudan, and the Ivory Coast. Hunger is a surefire igniter of change in even the most despotically ruled places.

So it seems that we are back to where we began at the start of the twentieth century, convinced that the earth has reached its carrying capacity and looking for the next agricultural leap that will feed the billions more mouths predicted to be born in the next half century. Big Ag is telling us that we need to rely even more on their patented “life sciences” technology—expensive, proprietary genetically engineered seeds and livestock, chemical pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics, and fertilizers—even though this new technology is homogenizing entire rural landscapes in the service of producing a very narrow range of foods. But there is another solution to the world food crisis already germinating. It looks nothing like an endless genetically modified soybean field that stretches to the horizon where a rainforest stood only years ago. In fact, it's everything that Big Ag is not. It's decentralized, open-source, small-scale, incredibly diverse, scattered, and even a little chaotic. It's able to produce without heavy equipment or expensive infrastructure. And it's within arms’ reach. It's food being grown, distributed, shared, and eaten right in the city.

T
HE
F
IRST
W
AVE

I
n November 1992, a lanky, soft-spoken academic type appeared on Britain's Channel 4 television magazine called
Food File.
Tim Lang had just a few minutes to sound off in a segment called “Mouthpiece” on a topic of his choosing. As the chair of the Sustainable Agriculture, Food, and Environment (SAFE) Alliance, he chose to bring attention to the realities of the globalized food system, something that very few people were even aware of at the time. A lot of their food, not just the obvious exotic fruit they bought at a supermarket, came from other countries, not to mention other continents.
¹

Lang knew about the intricacies of the food system and had serious concerns about where the increasingly globalized food chain was heading. He had been a small-scale livestock farmer in the 1970s before moving into the academic realm in the early 1980s. From 1984 to 1990, Lang was director of the London Food Commission, one of the early municipally created and funded food-policy councils.
²

In the 1990s, Lang campaigned relentlessly to highlight the absurdity of the global food trade, hoping to bring about awareness and change. He first urged policy makers, especially those steering the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the forerunner of the World Trade Organization (WTO), to consider the hidden and unforeseen ecological, social, and economic consequences of trade liberalization. The quest for lower and lower food prices was resulting in complex routes and absurdly long distances that common grocery store items traveled between production and the store purchase. No one, it seemed, was weighing the potential environmental, health, and cultural costs. Instead, policy makers were marching forward with the idea that open markets equaled progress.

Lang wondered if he could influence the discussion by targeting consumers, making them aware of what was being left off the labeling. Lang and colleagues at the SAFE Alliance were already talking about “food miles” as shorthand for the distances that foods were traveling between the point of production and the end consumer. Perhaps it was just the term to “help consumers engage with an important aspect of the struggle over the future of food—where their food comes from and how.”
³

Lang felt strongly that consumers needed to become aware that there had been an out-of-sight revolution in how (and where) food is grown, processed, distributed, and sold, and that they were putting this revolution into their mouths every single day. This short television segment was his opportunity to take what had to this point been an insider's knowledge of the global food system and plant the seed that people should consider their grocery choices not only by price or appearance but also by their food miles. Handily, the term was perfectly suited to a consumer-friendly sound bite on television.

In the televised segment, Lang and cameras visited Covent Garden Market, an enormous food hall for fruit, vegetables, and flowers in central London. Food vendors at their stalls were interviewed, as was the head of a major national grocery chain. The finale featured Lang, filmed
from fifty feet (fifteen meters) above, pushing a shopping cart around a huge map of the world, choosing items from around the globe, and accumulating food miles with each purchase. Lang then proceeded to do a similar shopping trip of mostly British and European foods, tallying up a much lower food-mile total in contrast.

“I was able to suggest to people watching that they might like to judge their food, not just by price or what it looked like, but also by its food miles, how far it had travelled,” Lang wrote a decade later in the May 2006 issue of
Slow Food
, the journal of the international Slow Food movement. “It looked surreal and was intended to be amusing. The programme ended with me suggesting a tax on food miles to curb absurd and damaging energy use.”
⁴

Lang soon realized that his Benny Hill—esque moment on national television hit a nerve with British shoppers. By 1993, the term “food miles” had entered the mainstream lexicon and was used in major newspapers in the United Kingdom.
⁵

In 1994, the SAFE Alliance fanned the flames of food-miles fever in the United Kingdom with fleshed-out and concretized research headed up by Angela Paxton in
The Food Miles Report.
⁶
And the Sustain Alliance, which was born from the merger of the SAFE and National Food Alliances in 1999, followed up with another groundbreaking report,
Eating Oil
, in 2001.

Meanwhile in Italy, another reaction to globalization was taking shape. In 1986, McDonald's opened an outlet beside the Spanish Steps, one of Rome's major landmarks and public gathering places. This was the last straw for many locals who saw their great food culture being invaded by the Big Mac
^®
, of all things, creeping in from America. As Carl Honoré deftly puts it in his 2004 book,
In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed
, this was “one restaurant too far: the barbarians were inside the gates and something had to be done.”
⁷

Carlo Petrini, a visionary food journalist, saw the future, where the flavors and customs of Italian life would be overtaken by the cheap, the
fast, and the predictable. Petrini and fellow fast-food opposers chose the name Slow Food for obvious reasons as their visceral reaction to this affront of globalization and homogenization of food culture. By 1989, he'd gathered equally outraged gastronomes from fifteen countries to the founding Slow Food meeting in Paris, where they rallied around, endorsed, and adopted the Slow Food manifesto written by Italian poet Folco Portinari. It began:

Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.

We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.

A firm defence of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.

But concern about food miles, awareness of disappearing traditions around food, and lyrical opposition stances were one thing. What were people actually
doing
about the situation?

T
HE
S
ECOND
W
AVE

This first wave awakened pockets of enlightened eaters. As we moved into the 2000s, consumers began to vocalize their concerns over industrial and long-distance food chains. Shoppers in the United Kingdom started demanding that major grocery chains carry more local and regional foods. Food-mile fever in the United Kingdom trickled up from consumer to the heads of the big grocery chains, in a reversal of the top-down decision making about people's food choices that had been
dominating until then. It was an example of how a broad-based consumer movement could effect real change that the grocery industry had to respond to.

Slow Food's philosophies and adaptable organizational structure traveled surprisingly well outside of Italy. Eating locally, ironically enough, became a global movement, and Slow Food ideals and
convivia
, as its chapters are called, took root early on in places like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and New York.

Farmers’ markets, which had nearly gone extinct from the 1970s to 1990s in the United States and Canada, came roaring back with surprising vigor. By 1998, there were 2,756 farmers’ markets operating in the United States.
⁸
By 2009, the number was up to 5,274, clearly a weekend routine for many urbanites by now.
⁹

Furthermore, Michael Pollan wrote the right book at the right time.
The Omnivore's Dilemma
, which appeared in hardcover in 2006, exposed the realities of the industrial food landscape and how so much of supermarket stock is arguably not so much food as it is food science, and it laid bare the effects the industrial food culture we live in has on our bodies, our families, and our society. All of the sudden, I had friends, who never before cared about what went in their mouths, heading out to farmers’ markets and asking me where they could get local, organic chicken, beef, and pork.

By purchasing food directly from farmers, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs—where households pay money up front to a local (usually small-scale) farming operation in return for a share of the produce from early spring to late fall—were beginning to emerge alongside farmers’ markets as another alternative that was “beyond the barcode.” The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that there were 400 CSAs operating nationally in 2001; by the end of the decade, there were more than 1,400.
¹⁰

The Slow Food agenda progressed from education to activism, as its influence reached around the globe. It turned its efforts toward biodiversity
preservation, promoting fair wages for agricultural endeavors, supporting family farmers, and preserving traditional food knowledge. Rather than shrinking from the root causes of the problem, the new Slow Food philosophy squarely opposed “the standardization of taste and culture, and the unrestrained power of food industry multinationals and industrial agriculture.”
¹¹
Now, with members in several dozen nations, it streamlined its message to the more politically charged “good, clean, and fair food for all.”
¹²

By the end of the 2000s, Carlo Petrini famously urged Slow Food members around the world to cast off their passive title of “consumer.” In its place, he deputized them “co-producers,” effectively empowering them to exercise their political and economic role in the changes they wanted to see without sacrificing Slow Food's pleasure-focused rationale. “What's good for you is good for the world!” Slow Food promises on its website.
¹³
Eat better, spend money on food, open yourselves up to pleasure, and save the world at the same time.

General consumer awareness had definitely come a long way in a few short years. There was no denying that discussions about where our food was coming from had gone mainstream. At the end of 2007, the
New Oxford American Dictionary
proclaimed
locavore
its word of the year.
¹⁴
Locavores are those who buy their food from farmers’ markets rather than from supermarkets for both environmental and food-quality reasons. Local eating, at least in name, had entered the mainstream.

T
HE
T
HIRD
W
AVE

Every generation, I suppose, feels that it is living in changing times. But statistically, on a planetary scale, we
are
living in a world that has shifted in the most fundamental of ways.

In 2008, the United Nations Population Fund reported that humanity had passed “an invisible but momentous milestone.”
¹⁵
For the
first time ever, more people on the planet were now living in cities than in the countryside. By 2030, over two-thirds of our planet's population will live in cities. Already 80 percent of the populations in industrialized countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom were living in urban settings.
¹⁶
We are now an urban species, living in an urban habitat, and the way in which we choose to organize our basic necessities of food and shelter will be affected accordingly.

While we may have broken ties with rural living, we haven't broken our ties with our need to eat. If the second wave, as personified by Michael Pollan's journey through the various food chains in
The Omnivore's Dilemma
, asked “What are we going to have for dinner?” then the third wave is asking, “Where will this dinner come from?”

For the longest time, we've planned our cities around transportation needs, housing needs, recreational needs, and sanitation needs, all the while hoping that the rural lands around us would continue to produce food and that the cheap fuels would continue to flow to transport it from farther and farther away. Outsourcing our agriculture to other continents is looking like the last gasps of fuel-intensive industrial agriculture. Energy conservation will drive us to shorten that global food chain. It all leads us back to the city. We are just starting to rethink our cities
deliberately
with our food needs in mind. (For an excellent take on the intrinsic relationship between food and cities, read Carolyn Steel's
Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives.
¹⁷
)
Cities have resources like land, water, labor, and a ready-made market for food production. It actually makes a lot of sense to shorten our food chain by growing food right in the cities where we “co-producers” live.
¹⁸
And we are just waking up to the possibilities of what might happen if we consciously plan our cities with food in mind.