Here’s a contradiction to get your head around: Trumpanyahoo’s war on Iran has not only curtailed the supply of oil and natural gas but also threatens global agriculture because one of the derivatives of natural gas is fertiliser, yet a third of the food produced around the world is wasted. Why is this?
Another way of asking this: why do supermarkets in rich countries end up throwing unsold food away, while in poor countries crops are left to rot in the fields? If the market is as efficient as its defenders make it out to be, how is this possible? The first answer is that it isn’t efficient – except at making a profit. In 2015, when I was filming in Greece, a volunteer working in community food distribution who had lost his shop in the country’s economic collapse, explained it like this: ‘The market, which they link to freedom, is actually rule-governed, full of contracts and concentrations. The concentration of the market leaves people out, and produce gets thrown away. We could feed every hungry person on Earth three times over with all produce that gets thrown away.’
This is not a new situation. There is a scene in the German communist film of 1932, Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe (for which Brecht had a hand in the script), in which commuters on a train discuss a newspaper report that in Brazil, they’ve burned 24m pounds of coffee because the bottom has fallen out of the world market. The same issue was highlighted by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, albeit for different reasons. There were reports of billions of dollars worth of food going to waste in the US as growers from California to Florida faced a mountain of highly perishable produce for which roughly half their market disappeared with the closure of restaurants, schools, stadiums, theme parks and cruise ships. This wasn’t due to a fall in demand, but an impediment to its satisfaction, because the supply lines which criss-cross the food processing industry became scrambled. This is not just a question of the country’s size. The US is a large country which is some 85% self-supporting in food. The UK is much smaller and imports around 46% of the food it consumes, but farmers in the UK were dumping fresh milk and plowing vegetables back into the dirt, which wasn’t normal, while food banks were handling record demand, because so many people were thrown out of work or underpaid.
The problems in food supply exposed by the pandemic were not caused by it, but lying dormant within its structure, because of the globalised nature of agribusiness, its international supply lines, and the irrational character of its market mechanisms. Take the UK. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the availability of food was confined by its perishability to domestic agrarian production, augmented after Columbus by the uptake of new crops like potatoes, tomatoes, corn and chocolate, previously unknown outside the Americas, and supplemented by the import of items that couldn’t be grown domestically – spices and condiments, sugar, tea, coffee and citrus. The pattern changed over the century, with the introduction of synthetic fertilisers, new machinery, the introduction of railways and steamships which expanded the grain trade, and finally refrigeration. Argentina’s world beating beef industry was a product of the introduction of refrigerated steamships in the late nineteenth century. It would take developments in other sectors – electricity supply, manufacture of appliances – before frozen food was sold directly to the consumer, and the post-war spread of supermarkets in the global North to create a mass market through expensive advertising campaigns urging the convenience of what were called TV-dinners as a regular part of modern living. Regulations and standards were devised to reassure consumers of their safety, which indicate, for those who cared, the mass of ingredients, natural and chemical, that go into their preparation – a process of manufacture which can hardly be called cooking any more, and is now known as UPFs, ultra-processed foods. These are a primary driver of obesity, and strongly associated with the risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.
The food industry took a further leap with the cheap air transport. One of my foibles is a penchant for seedless grapes, which have been available in supermarkets in the UK all year round since the mid 1980s. They come from countries like Chile, South Africa or India. When I visited Chile some years ago, I found that out of season, you couldn’t get grapes of any kind. This asymmetry is one of the traits of the globalised food industry. Long-distance refrigerated shipping and air freight opened the market to more perishable produce like fruit. The result was a buyers’ market – where the buyer is a corporation – and the distortion of local agricultures, as growers competed to supply the new demand and domestic supply was impoverished.
Nevertheless, about one-third of the world’s food is thrown away. Loss and waste occurs at all stages of the supply chain – production, processing, sale, and consumption – in both rich and poor countries. In poor countries, produce is lost between harvesting and processing. According to the World Food Programme, this is because of poor storage, leading to the ruination of crops by pest infestation or mould, while many farmers are forced to watch their crops rot in fields for lack of labour, technology or investment. Increasingly, crops are lost to extreme weather, from drought to flooding – this can happen anywhere – or as in Ukraine, the result of war (and that’s only one example).
In the rich countries, losses happen at retail and consumer levels, and consumers are urged to reduce the amount of food they throw away, but the massive supermarket chains pursue irrational policies which encourage overproduction. They reject a portion of the harvest merely for cosmetic reasons, and themselves discard large quantities because they’ve reached their sell-by date, even though it’s still safe to eat. Some reports suggest that more than fifty per cent of food waste is domestic, people throwing stuff away because of confusion between the sell-by, best-before, or use-by date on the packaging. In Europe, following France’s lead, one or two countries now require supermarkets to donate their surplus to charity instead of dumping it.
The current levels of hunger in rich countries are due to domestic political choices, each in its own fashion. In the UK, for example, they run from Thatcherism to the austerity-driven contraction of the welfare state. On the other hand, the hunger that is so widespread in poor countries is evidently not due to insufficient global food production – on the contrary, there’s enough, but it doesn’t reach the people who need it. It’s the result of a topsy-turvy and critically inefficient economic structure with supply lines stretched between continents, which instead of supplying local markets with fresh and wholesome produce, encourages production for export, contributes excessive carbon miles to its transportation, and often adds unhealthy ingredients to its processing to lengthen its shelf-life and make it more palatable.
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It doesn’t have to be like that. There are countries in Africa like Kenya, where supermarkets sell fresh produce supplied by local farmers in the informal sector. In the US, when the pandemic hit, growers associations began lobbying state or federal bodies to keep them afloat by buying their surplus to supply to the needy, while farmers, facilitated by mobile communications, began cutting out the middleman and started selling direct-to-consumer boxes of produce to local customers. The same technology allowed the fruit and vegetable wholesalers at New Covent Garden market in London who no longer had restaurants and hotels to supply to sell directly to the consumer. (Good news for delivery drivers, sort of.) What is important here is the elimination of the middleman as the market returns to the local community. This is established principle for the green movement, and takes shape in farmers’ markets and local shops and restaurants buying directly from the farm. As this moves online, will it strengthen community ties and consciousness?
The same principle of localisation applies to whole of agro-industry. Industrial agriculture is far too costly in all sorts of ways other than waste, through chemical pollution, the reduction of biodiversity, the energy cost, the processing industry which requires huge amounts of packaging and single-use plastic, and not least, transport. The goal of sustainable farming is not only respect for biodiversity and the soil, but also to reduce the distance between farm and market, from field to fork. Food should travel the least possible distance to reach the consumer, eliminating reliance on large-scale manufacturers, transport companies, and the cost of fuel. This has all sorts of implications for local food cultures and diets, of which the first is a return to a more natural and seasonal regime. Perhaps more supermarkets will see sense in reining in their supply lines, but this would hardly be enough for real amelioration. What’s needed is a new model of national self-sufficiency, the idea that every country needs to be able as far as possible to feed itself. But this is not a simple concept.
Take the example of the supply of strawberries in the UK, which can be grown domestically, but sourcing them in Spain is cheaper, even after Brexit. Not doing so would raise the price to the consumer, which is politically undesirable, not to mention problematic when the seasonal workforce needed to pick them is unavailable (largely because of Brexit) and the country is in the grip of inflation. This doesn’t mean the UK is reliant on Spain for strawberries, just, let’s say, economically prudent. Self-sufficiency is thus a notional concept which comes down to whether a country could feed itself, not whether it actually does. By that measure, which is the one used by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, very few countries qualify. Most are large and several, not all, are rich: the USA, Canada, Australia, Russia, India, Argentina, Burma, Thailand. Practically the only such country in Europe is France. However none of these countries is truly self-sufficient in all food items. Take the case of Australia, which has a diverse range of climates and soils, allowing for a wide variety of crops and livestock, and produces enough food to meet the needs of its own population, with some surplus for export. What it typically imports are tropical fruits that don’t grow in Australia’s climate, certain types of fish and shellfish not caught in large quantities in Australian waters, specialty cheeses and gourmet foods from Europe. These are the consumption habits of rich countries.
Social justice says that everybody ought to be able to enjoy the same pleasures, but as things stand, that’s a utopian idea in the pejorative sense, a pipe-dream. Is it equally fanciful to say that meanwhile, these pleasures constitute a damaging form of overconsumption which is part of the wider overconsumption of the rich countries that lies historically at the root of the planetary climate crisis?
I shan’t be posting next week. It’s the day of my brother’s funeral.
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