Interesting food articles from around the web 0

Evidently, journalists who write about food haven’t gotten the memo that this is supposed to be a slow week. My browser is blowing up with interesting articles.

Here are a few:

• At the Boston Globe, op-ed columnist Derek Z. Jackson wonders if “a sustainable food strategy [is] on Obama’s menu?” This has been a pretty standard line of inquiry lately—New York Times food reporter Kim Severson covered similar ground less than a week ago. (The consensus answer appears to be, no). But Jackson brings some new (for me) info to the table. For example, I knew that Obama demonstrated during the campaign that he had read Michael Pollan’s famous “Farmer in Chief” essay. But I didn’t know—as someone who doesn’t obsessively follow day-to-day campaign news—that Obama “purchased peaches, pears, apples and nectarines from farmers markets on the campaign trail,” or that “grass-roots organizing in farmers markets helped him turn Indiana from a red state to a blue state and cruise to victory in Wisconsin.” So maybe, Vilsack pick notwithstanding, there’s some hope after all. Politics works in mysterious ways.

• Over in Britain, organic livestock farmers are struggling as sales of their goods plummet under the strain of the recession. As a result, the nation’s main organic-farming groups are asking the government for a “holiday” around organic feed standards, the Times of London reports.

The farmers are asking permission to weather the recession by having the option to switch to conventional feed, which costs half as much as organic.

The request is generating some outrage. “Since when did anyone ask for a vacation from ethics?” asks the Ethicurean blog. But you can’t blame folks for trying to maintain their liveliehoods under dismal economic conditions.

It seems to me that Britain’s livestock farmers are running into a market failure. Conventional livestock production is an environmental distaster—one propped up by governments in the form of lax regulatory oversight. It’s in society’s interest that producers move to more sustainable methods—and that producers using more sustainable methods thrive. Moreover, people want organic meat, dairy, and eggs, study after study shows. It’s just that under current economic conditions, fewer folks can afford them.

For me, the situation calls for strategic government intervention. Rather than a “holiday” on organic standards to weather the storm, why not temoporary payments to organic farmers to cover losses while the slump continues? And in the long term, the government could bring down organic feed costs by creating incentives for organic grain production—and disincentives for environmentally destructive conventional grain farming.

• For months now, there has been a steady stream of reports about how the recession is tamping down demand for organic food (recent examples here and here). In the midst of the gloom, Associated Press reporter Michelle Locke comes out with a feature about how the eat-local movement is doing just fine. Locke trots out familiar statistics documenting the robust growth of farmers markets and CSAs in the last 20 years, and she strays out of standard territory by revealing that musician Elvin Bishop, famous for the ‘70s soft-rock standard “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” grows his own food in Marin County, California. She paints an arresting picture of locavorism, but doesn’t nail down how it’s faring under severe economic strain. How are small-scale farmers who grow for their nearby communities holding up as job losses mount and property wealth evaporates? Are people cutting back on expenditures at the farmers market? Locke’s article isn’t bad, but it could have been written a year ago, or two years ago.

• Speaking of struggling farmers,  The Wall Street Journal published a doozy Tuesday on the plight of conventional U.S. grain farmers. The folks have seen prices for corn and soy gyrate wildly over the past three years, while prices for inputs—fertilizer, seeds, equipment—marched steadily upwards.

The article focuses on one highy successful, well-capitalized Iowa farmer who runs 10,000 acres (large even by corn-belt standards) of corn and soy. He brought in six-figure profits in ‘07, after the ethanol boom drove up corn prices to multi-year highs. In ‘08, corn prices touched all-time highs as speculative cash flooded the commodities market. But that hot money has since fled, and like crude oil, corn is in the dumps. Suddenly, the farmer is faced with selling his goods for less than the cost of production. Get this:

Mr. Riensche figures it will cost him close to $5 to grow a bushel of
corn next year and about $11 to grow a bushel of soybeans—not good
with prices where they are at the moment. Taking their cues from the
Chicago Board of Trade, local buyers are offering about $4 a bushel for
corn that farmers promise to deliver next year, while soybean
processors are offering about $9.

Interestingly, the farmer doesn’t expect a gusher of subsidies to cover his losses. Current corn prices are low compared to last summer’s peak, but are still high by historic standards. Prices would have to drop still more to trigger a windfall of government payments.

So why doesn’t he pare his losses by idling some land? That’s how things work in most businesses, but not farming. “To lower his costs, he could idle land, but figures raising a crop at least gives him a chance to benefit if prices move back up, as some predict,” the article states. The trouble is, every other farmer makes the same bet, and so prices stay low.

Meanwhile, he’ll be dousing his land in agrichemicals to ensure the highest yield possible, desperate to wring every penny he can from each acre.

• Meanwhile, back in Britain, scholar Tim Lang, who sits on the U.K. government’s newly formed Food Council, has called for a “fundamental rethink” of the global agri-food system in which the above-mentioned Iowa farmer operates, BBC reports.

In Lang’s analysis, the agri-food system was designed after World War II to ensure a bountiful supply of calories. Policymakers were responding to the U.S. Dust Bowl problem, as well as very real postwar famine fears in Europe and Asia.

While the system succeeded in churning out calories, it resulted in “structural failures,” including “astronomic” environmental costs and declining public health.

Meanwhile, productivity gains brought on by synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, petroleum-powered machinery, and genetically modified seeds appear to be tapering off. According to Lang:

The level of growth in food production per capita is dropping off, even dropping, and we have got huge problems ahead with an explosion in human population.

Rather than an intensification of agrichemicals and GMOs, Lang calls for a focus on increased biodiversity.

• Speaking of GMOs, BBC recently aired a pretty robust debate over whether GMOs represent the answer to the riddle of feeding the world going forward.

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