King Marketing

Observers call Wal-Mart’s moves a mixed blessing - it’ll certainly get a lot of Wal-Mart suppliers moving to organic farming practices, and the pricing will bring organic food within the reach of many more households. But will Wal-Mart’s traditional aggressive treatment of its suppliers mean that shortcuts will be taken, or that produce will be sourced from overseas, where standards aren’t as strictly monitored as here?

Beyond that, some fear that the economic pressures of supplying Wal-Mart will rule out small organic farms, and only larger firms will be able to bid; they’ll meet the baseline requirements of “organic” while still using the same practices as industrial agriculture, discarding organic soil remediation, pest control methods, the avoidance of soil-compacting heavy machinery, and crop rotation.

I’m all for more organic produce at lower prices - it shouldn’t be a luxury, it should be the norm. It’s obvious, though, that major food companies have latched onto a marketable keyword without really understanding what it entails. Wal-Mart spokespeople in the NYT article linked above seem to view organic produce as an interchangeable SKU; focusing unduly on the end-product, and forgetting that the process is equally important. And when it comes down to it, overpackaged convenience foods are still wasteful, organic or not.

My friend Andrew Potter and I differ on one major point, which is the importance of local sourcing.

Currently, the average meal travels 1000 miles before it gets to your plate; some items travel literally halfway around the world. The idea of eating “within your local biome” has been replaced by supply lines that wrap around the globe. Norman Church, writing about the British situation, found that

UK imports of food products and animal feed involved transportation by sea, air and road amounting to over 83 billion tonne-kilometres. This required 1.6 billion litres of fuel and, based on a conservative figure of 50 grams of carbon dioxide per tonne-kilometre resulted in 4.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Within the UK, the amount of food transported increased by 16% and the distances travelled by 50% between 1978 and 1999. […] It has been estimated that the CO2 emissions attributable to producing, processing, packaging and distributing the food consumed by a family of four is about 8 tonnes a year […] It is not that this transportation is critical or necessary. In many cases countries import and export similar quantities of the same food productsFor example, in 1997, 126 million litres of liquid milk was imported into the UK and, at the same time, 270 million litres of milk was exported from the UK. 23,000 tonnes of milk powder was imported into the UK and 153,000 tonnes exported. UK milk imports have doubled over the last 20 years, but there has been a four-fold increase in UK milk exports over the last 30 years.

Britain imports 61,400 tonnes of poultry meat a year from the Netherlands and exports 33,100 tonnes to the Netherlands. We import 240,000 tonnes of pork and 125,000 tonnes of lamb while exporting 195,000 tonnes of pork and 102,000 tonnes of lamb.

Of course this is all done in the name of economics and securing the lowest price, but of course the true cost of these global supply lines is massive energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Ultimately we’re all paying these costs through altered climate; ironically, it is this altered climate that threatens farmers worldwide.

And they aren’t taking it lying down. Here in Canada, the National Farmers’ Union produced a position paper on the Kyoto treaty - they accept that climate change is real and damaging to their livelihoods - and an extensive portion of their response brief says that Canada needs to restore its formerly extensive rail network to allow farmers to ship to market much more efficiently and with a drastic reduction in greenhouse emissions, compared to previous policies which have currently shifted transportation to trucks almost exclusively.

I suppose Wal-Mart’s plan is as good a first step as we could expect from them - circumstance and public opinion may well adapt them into the local farmers’ markets of the future. In the meantime, the Hundred Mile Diet is looking a lot more appealing.