Eat Local Food. Um, Except When You Shouldn't.
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07.29.06
We do go on about the benefits of eating local food. So does Peter Singer in The Way We Eat, , but he points out certain exceptions, where the social good of importing outweighs the benefit of buying local. Rice is a great example- growing it employs thousands of Bangladeshis. It is dense and longlasting so it is cheap to transport by ship. California rice, on the other hand, is "a monsoon crop in a desert state" according to San Francisco author Marc Riesner. Here it is water, chemical and equipment intensive, rather than labour intensive as in Asia.
Jeffery MacDonald writes in the Christian Science Monitor, quoting John Clark of the World Bank: Biases in favor of local production techniques can lead not only to wasteful energy systems such as growing bananas in domestic hothouses, but also to a mistaken idea that techniques most familiar to consumers are also ecofriendly. If local farmers "are using tractors, as they most certainly will be, then probably right from the start that means the food is less energy efficient in terms of oil use than hand-plow or ox-plow production in a developing country," Clark says. "And so it can be very deceptive to say that because it's local, it's avoiding all of these problems." ::Christian Science Monitor via ::Common Ground
Bountiful gardens sells rice seed that you don't have to flood, so local California farmers could sell rice. http://www.bountifulgardens.org/products.asp?dept=4&pagenumber=2&sort_on=&sort_by=
Bangladesh is tragically famous for arsenic contaminated well water, courtesy of some international aid program that punched wells for the farmers. As a result, many serious toxic exposures have been documented (google bangladesh and arsenic) from the drinking of well water with high arsenic levels. Recently, food crops irrigated with those same wells have been tested for arsenic....
*part* of the answer, along with the above mentioned issues, is to eat less rice if it isn't local for you.
I buy Mahatma rice, it's grown in Louisiana...
I agree. Eating organic products that come from abroad is often a great way to support poor countries, which I find as important as protecting the environment. A lot of small countries depend greatly of their exports.
Acai is a great example. It's a very healthy fruit and harvesting it allows Brazilians to make money from the Amazons, not from its destruction.
The Boston Globe published a story last week on eating local foods. It is great to see mainstream publications start to consider this idea.
something clark is missing in his last quote here is that food grown in developing countries has to be transported all the way to the US which will use a lot of oil as well and the product will be less fresh than local. sometimes id rather buy a local conventional product over an organic product that comes from very far away. so many decisions and variables to weigh when choosing food, but i think its very important that we think deeply about the food we eat. and im glad that some stores are doing a better job of labeling where the food comes from.
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Excellent points made between locally grown rice versus rice harvested abroad in a third world country.
The social good of importing rice is a fine point to make on this issue. Most people are not aware of such realities.
Great point in what the article author, Clark, mentions about tractors being used for rice production and being seen as "efficient" when in reality it's really not so.