It’s a free market when it suits.
As the local food movement builds across
the developed world, there are, of course, correspondingly increased shouts of
‘no, they’re deluding themselves!’ from those who still believe large
corporatised agribusiness is the only way things can work…even in the face of mounting
evidence to the contrary.
However, I have a feeling that the promoters of free and unfettered global markets have had to discard ‘objective thinking’ and support arguments with their personal beliefs because those that study systems now demonstrate the serious flaws in the theories that previously justified globalisation dogma and ideology. Ironic really, when you consider it is exactly what they accused those who opposed globalization over the last 30 years, of. This being one example of this phenomenon.
Their arguments are starting to contain sarcastic
comments about ‘localvores’ starving during an unusually cold northern hemisphere
winter and are being supported with dubious claims of the health benefits or
corporatized food, the lack of capacity for local food production and of
course, the assumption, probably for the benefit of their argument that to
genuinely be true to your support of local, you have to be as fanatical as an Al-Qaida
terrorist when it comes to what goes onto your plate – anything else and you’re
a hypocrite.
It is highly amusing that those that argue against a more local orientated food system are also likely to hold beliefs about the value of free markets and how the consumer wins because resources in the free market system are always distributed in the most efficient manner because consumers, after all, have the ability to make ‘rational’ decisions.
Yet it is this very consumer’s
‘rationality’ (that supposedly proves the logic of their economic theory) that
is forcing change in our food markets and is posing a threat (albeit a very
small and embryonic one) to their corporatised food system.
Consumers want locally produced food. They increasingly also want it produced with minimal fossil fuel inputs, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They want it to taste good too. If the globalised food corporations can’t provide this, then surely the advocates of the free market should celebrate localvores and their fondness for fresh local produce as consumers doing what consumers do?
Surely they aren’t advocating we manipulate
the market to ensure that globalised food systems are assisted to combat the
competitive threat of the local food movement?
I’m not a localvore fundamentalist. I do grow the things that grow well in my region; at the moment these include watermelon, cucumber, zucchini, pumpkin, tomato, eggplant, rockmelon, grapes, oranges, figs and sweet corn.
I even sell some of it to my local grocer
who wants it because people come into his store asking for locally grown
produce.
I also get plenty of other food from local
sources too; milk, cheese, honey, lamb, beef and pork.
However, I still source my tea and chocolate from places far from Toodyay instead of going without. Trading outside your community is important!
But why shouldn’t our food systems be less
dependant on food imports? If it can be grown locally, employ locally and keep
money in the local economy, then why not? It makes better sense from both a
community level and a local economic level to have a local person employed
growing melons and selling them to the local grocer than have them grown
thousands of miles away and sold by a supermarket owned by someone who has
never set foot in your town. Why shouldn’t we build resilience into our food
systems by making sure that there are plenty of opportunities for small food
producing businesses to thrive in our local communities?
More to the point, why such strident opposition to such developments? Why do many advocates of free markets lambast those who are building local food networks, or even energy and financial networks for that matter? Perhaps this is the answer?
The idea of a community relinquishing its
capacity to be more self reliant in exchange for total reliance on a company or
a system outside of its influence seems to be counter to the intentions of any
society based on free enterprise, where an entrepreneurial work ethic is seen
as a good thing.
What many who write disparagingly against the trend to a more local food economy seem to want is a top heavy, highly vulnerable and disempowering, limiting, anti-free enterprise system. Because from what I am increasingly reading in the blogosphere, this is what the advocates of the food system status quo are supporting.
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