Reckoning with trade-offs
Before the Cutting Board: April 7, 2022
Hey there,
As I was working on this week’s roundup, I found myself thinking back often to my favorite class in my masters program. It was a political ecology class in which we spent a lot of time exploring how environmental change strategies are shaped and motivated by both global and local power relations, historical patterns, and dominant economic structures. We were essentially learning how to identify the broader systems that influence how environmental problems manifest and how we attempt to solve them.
I think I enjoyed that class because at an econ-driven school like the one I was studying at, you find that many academics don’t like to sit with and dive into the discomfort of consequences. It often felt like we treated trade-offs as simply the effect of a given choice or action, as if rationality will always prevail and fix all. As if human lives, equality, distribution and access are not all deeply tied to those consequences. So when I was in that political ecology class, it felt like a safe space to interrogate and understand those trade-offs. Why our society has deemed some trade-offs acceptable and others not, and what questions to ask about those dynamics. I hope this week’s food, agriculture, and supply chain news cycle can prompt you to want to accept and move past that discomfort as well to get to the bottom of what actually makes a solution ‘work’.
Welcome back to Before the Cutting Board, your weekly roundup of food + supply chain hot topics to help keep you up to speed on what’s going down with your food.
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Without further ado, let’s dig in.
-This Week-
Food versus Fuel
Last month, I sent out articles discussing the impacts that Putin’s war in Ukraine is having on food access and prices across the world. Most obviously, the conflict has ratcheted up fuel, fertilizer, and wheat prices. More subtly, the crisis has created a chain of disruptions and transitions in renewable fuel production, which in turn has - you guessed it - also messed with food prices. This piece from The Counter breaks down how both demand and price for the cooking oils that we know and love has been rising intensely for biofuel production as a result of growing legislation around renewable fuel. The most influential of these mandates is the 2005 US federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which deployed subsidies and other incentives to ramp up the production of renewable diesel. Renewable diesel is a fuel that operates essentially the same as the gas we all know and don’t love, but is produced using ‘green’ alternatives - namely vegetable oils and cooking oil waste. Since there’s not enough oil waste (or streamlined collection of oil waste) to meet the incentivized drive to produce renewable oil, this gap is being filled by farmers and producers that would typically be growing corn and soybeans for cooking oils and foodstuffs.
Okay so back to food prices. Ukraine and Russia are the source of 60% of the world’s supply of sunflower oil, one of the key oils that is approved for use in renewable diesel production. Now, other edible oils are being sought as a substitute to fill the gap left behind by the new shortage of sunflower oil. Vegetable oil prices, as well as the costs of other food groups that rely on these commodities, are soaring. In the US, the Biden administration is considering increasing the amount of ethanol in gasoline to soften gas prices, but experts worry this will compound the food cost issue. This chain of events has reignited conversations surrounding the ‘food versus fuel’ debate, with some arguing that the worsening global food crisis is a sign that we should roll back renewable fuel mandates - especially considering that studies are showing that the long-term land-use change and emissions caused by renewable fuel production could be leaving us worse off. But corn and soybean farmers, who have now been benefiting from incentives for the better half of two decades and are now seeing higher pay due to the rise in demand, insist that the mandates remain.
IPCC Report Finalized
This year’s IPCC report was officially finalized earlier this week. As I’ve discussed before, the new report takes a critical look at the role our global food systems play in contributing to climate change and the unequal nature of how the resulting shocks will be felt. Food Navigator summarized some of the food chapter’s findings. The response to the report has largely been focused on drawing attention to solutions. Civil Eats rounded up several reports and studies from organizations studying effective, integrated interventions and solutions. Interestingly, while the report’s draft version recommended a shift to plant-based diets, this week’s finalized version took a more delicate stance that called for balanced diets with sustainably produced food.
-Food Fights-
The Indoor Farming Frontier
This week, Civil Eats released “What will the Rise of Giant Indoor Farms Mean for Appalachian Kentucky?”, penned by Twilight Greenway. The feature dove into the growth of indoor farm company AppHarvest which is hydroponically growing tomatoes inside greenhouses in Kentucky’s rural Appalachian region. Greenway does an amazing job of getting insight on why indoor farming as a solution tends to rally excitement and dollars, while also critically interrogating what it will mean for both traditional farmers and the surrounding communities for a factory-esque operation like greenhouses to scale aggressively.
The story reminded me of a similar chain of trade-offs that happens in Almeria, Spain every day. Almeria is the only desert climate on the European continent, and yet manages to produce 4.5 million fruits and vegetables annually to make up around half of Western Europe’s supply. It’s been substantially praised and hailed as a “miracle economy” and the “Garden of Europe” - exciting proof that indoor farming can be an answer. But it also comes at a huge cost. The greenhouses largely rely on migrant laborers, often those who have traveled from African countries and are allowed to stay in the country on the condition that they work in these greenhouses. Most Almeria workers are paid around 32-40 euros/day in a country where the minimum wage is 50-55 euros/day. Without access to citizenship procedures or fair pay, migrants are forced to live in housing systems along the “sea of plastic” greenhouses, which lack running water, are rampant with waste, and rely on dangerous sources of power that make fires a common occurrence.
The article about AppHarvest includes interviews with multiple employees who are happy and excited about their work and the way they are treated. Also, AppHarvest’s operations are nowhere near the size of what happens in Almeria. But when we talk about agritech and greenhouse farming at a large scale, I think we need to reckon with what has become the prevailing pattern of throwing tech at the problem: getting excited about a green fix without taking into consideration all of the social, political, and historical dynamics that are at play.
Of course, it’s not like conventional farming has a strong, consistent track record of treating farmworkers well. That’s exactly the issue at hand though. The larger something scales, the easier it is to ignore the human cost of production - as we’re seeing with the emerging demands for improved food worker treatment. Trying to solve for only one part of the problem, and ignoring the integrated nature of these challenges, fixes little.
I wonder if that’s why, as the article points out, that AppHarvest is trying to figure out how to have robotics be a key segment of their workforce as they strategize their scale plans. Is that the right way to address this particular externality? I’m not sure. But it does make me uncomfortable that we don’t sit with these questions properly. Questions like the ones Greenway poses at the end of the piece:
“Should we focus on producing food by any means necessary, as efficiently as possible—like cars, shampoo, or razor blades? Or is it just one more effort in an endless drive to extract capital for investors? And perhaps most importantly—should the future of farming be unrecognizable to the people who know its past?”
That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed reading this, please forward to a friend. Even if you didn’t enjoy reading it, still tell your friends - misery loves company :)
Amazing insights!!! Thank you Linds. Wonderful writing.