Local food systems are often touted as sustainable, but will they alone be enough?
Over the past half century or so, agriculture increasingly has become a consolidated entity. Farming now is predominately industrial, mostly done by machines and focused on increasing production. It has been transformed into a business, focused on profit and yields, ignoring potential externalities such as the destruction of soil biota, soil erosion, or the pollution of rivers, lakes and the ocean.
Just as the environment suffers from that system, people suffer as well. The rise of agribusiness has brought about an increase of environmental injustice, food insecurity and oligarchical decision-making structures.
With the transformation of agriculture into agribusiness came the globalization of the food system. Globalization helped facilitate that transformation, so naturally, it's an opponent to an industrial capitalist food system. It champions the local food movement as the antidote and the solution to the problem of agriculture. According to many proponents of that movement, regional food systems and food sovereignty are the end goal, which will result in sustainable agriculture. Conversely, a globalized food system is poison for the earth.
That perception is exemplary of the local trap, a tendency to assume an inherent quality about the local scale. In this case, the assumption is that a local food system inherently is sustainable, while a globalized food system inherently is capitalist and mechanized, and therefore unsustainable. Neither is the case. Scale does not have any inherent qualities. A globalized food system may not necessarily be capitalist or employ unsustainable practices, while agribusiness potentially may operate on a local scale.
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That’s not to say that local food will harm the environment or any communities, because most of its supporters advocate for sustainability. It's only that the local scale per se is not any better or worse than the global scale, or the national or state scale for that matter. The evaluation of the sustainability of a food system should not solely focus on how local it is or automatically assume that a system operating on a global scale is unsustainable.
To zealously support local food systems themselves may be unsustainable. That defensive localism, often characterized as elitist or bourgeois, stresses the importance of a sort of purist local food system in opposition to the global, capitalist system. In Athens, for instance, the 30 Mile Meal promotes local food as a sustainable response to the influence of corporate interests over the food system. But the local food system in Athens could not be characterized as sustainable because it is not necessarily equitable.
A truly sustainable food system may require consideration of multiple scales because they are all connected. The local scale is nested within the national scale, which is in turn nested within the global scale. The world, globalized as it is, will require an food system that can operate on all of those scales. The local food system surely is important, but the road to sustainability will require that we move beyond localism and regionalism and figure out how we can use the various scales as means to create a sustainable food system.
Austin Miles is a senior studying biology. Have you eaten a 30 Mile Meal in Athens? Email him at am343011@ohio.edu.
