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Global food systems are becoming unsustainable in terms of environmental impact, health, and social quality. Up to 25 percent of the ecological impact of an 'advanced' city can be attributed to its food systems.
But what to do?
For Doors of Perception 9, we went to India in a search for inspiring new models and tools. [Participants this time - invited to Doors 9 after a Call- were active in live food-related projects in: Miami, New York, Portland, Toronto, Vancouver, Santiago. Havana, Florence, Dyestad, Newcastle, Middlesborough, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Frankfurt, Naples, Dubai, Istanbul, Gaza, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Beijing, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkota].
The text below is a personal reflection by John Thackara on what we learned. (Please note that this is Part One: Part Two follows soon).
Food issues have featured since then at Doors East (2000), then at Doors East 2 (2003), and at Doors 8 on "Infra" also in Delhi, in 2005.
[Participants this time - invited to Doors 9 after a Call- were active in live food-related projects in: Miami, New York, Portland, Toronto, Vancouver, Santiago. Havana, Florence, Dyestad, Newcastle, Middlesborough, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Frankfurt, Naples, Dubai, Istanbul, Gaza, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Beijing, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkota].
[As well as telling each other about our projects back home, including elsewhere in India, we went with Indian experts on expeditions to learn about the Yamuna River, Water Mapping, Langar, Urban Agriculture, Snack City Radio, Street Food and Markets, and Street Food by Bike. Feedback on these excursions will be posted shortly].
Up to 25 percent of the ecological impact of an 'advanced' city can be attributed to its food systems. But only one that I have heard of - Toronto - is doing anything about it. Toronto committed itself to be a "Food Secure City" back in 2000.
Chris Harwick, who is contributing to the section on food policy in the next edition of Toronto's Official Plan, showed us remarkable designs for apartment blocks in which every unit would incorporate between 20 and 40 square metres of growable space.
(Toronto's 2000 plan mentions an historic exception to the modern disconnect between urbanism and food systems: A 1929 book by W.P. Hedden, Chief of the Bureau of Commerce of the Port of New York Authority, How Great Cities are Fed. Hedden discusses urban planning context of the transportation, distribution, marketing, processing, health and waste management issues involved in getting food into cities. Hedden also pioneered the use of the term ‘foodshed’ to denote the distance food travels).
If the foreigners at Doors 9 brought anything of value to Delhi, it was fresh eyes. We perceived things to be of value that are perceived to be a negative in the local business-political ecology.
We have also learned the hard way what the costs are when food is forced into the formal economy and industrialised. The financial costs alone of obesity amount to 10 percent of total health costs in US - and are rising fast. India is already affected: 29 percent of school-age children in Delhi are classified as obese; the sugar content of their diet has risen 40 percent during the last 50 years, and its fat content by 20 percent. Poor diet, and physical inactivity, account for 35 percent (and rising) of avoidable causes of deaths in the US, and there's no reason to doubt that a similar fate awaits India if it carries on this course.
The industralisation of food also damages the biosphere. The impact of energy-inefficient food systems is crippling. The U.S. food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy.
This disparity is made possible by non-renewable fossil fuel stocks. At Cornell University, David Pimentel estimates that if the world's known oil reserves were used only for agriculture, and the whole world produced food in the high-energy ways practised in the United States, those reserves would be gone in about seven years.
(California's 3,000 food and beverage processors are the third largest industrial users of energy, behind petroleum refining and manufacturing of computer and electronic products).
Food retailers also spend insanely on energy - seven times more than is used in an ordinary office. In larger food stores up to a quarter of their energy budget goes on lighting – to make the food look good, not for it to be good. Most of the rest - 64 per cent - is used for refrigeration. A single open-fronted freezer costs a retailer 20,000 euros per year to run in energy bills alone.
Transport and logistics consume another big proportion of the energy guzzled by modern food systems. A team of researchers from Cardiff Business School studied the chain of actions required to make a can of cola. The whole process, starting at the Bauxite mine in Australia, and passing through the various smelting and rolling processes to the manufacture of the can itself, printing its label, filling it with the cola, and finally getting it into somebody’s refrigerator, took 319 days. Only three hours of that period were spent on manufacturing; the rest of the time was spent in storage and transport, with as many as 14 storage lots and warehouses being involved.
I extrapolate from data in Coming Clean, , an important new report by Andrew Pendleton for Christian Aid, that Tesco's 2,500 stores emit 20 million tonnes of C02 per year if the full cost of its global logistics are taken into account. That's roughly 4,000 tonnes per store
127 calories of energy are used to grow and export one calorie of lettuce from the US to the UK for every one calorie that enters our body.
To the foreigners among us at Doors 9, it was self-evident that it neither Delhi nor the world can afford for India to go further down this route. We favoured a diet of leap-frog rather than copy cat. But powerful forces are pushing India to speed up the industrialisation of food. The country's municipal authorities, and business, want food sales off the streets.
Nataranjan Bohidar, a delegate I met at the conference, summarised the reasons for this in an email:
a) those who are engaged in the business do not pay taxes - so the government does not like them;
b) they do not sell branded products - so big business does not like them, either;
c) the construction lobby and landowners cannot tolerate their occupation of commercially viable urban space, for which they pay no rent;
d) which is also the reason why kitchen gardens and urban farming are conspicuous by their absence in Delhi;
e) hygiene is also an issue "but in my view, an afterthought" Bohidar concluded.
At the moment formal stores, also known as organised retail, account for only two to three percent of of India’s $300 billion food retail sector. Most shopping is done through hole-in-the-wall stores, roadside vendors, and open-air markets.
The stakes are vast. In a Western food shop, for every ten dollars you or I spend at the checkout, only 60c ends up with the farmer. The rest - the "added value" - is turnover and profit for the industries involved.
Small wonder that multinational retailers such as WalMart (in partnership with Bharti group, the country’s largest mobile phone operator), Tesco, and Carrefour, have such big plans. Reliance Industries, for example, has set aside $5.6 bn to develop a grocery chain, and is already is opening one shop every day. And while we were in Delhi for Doors 9, Michael Duke, Vice Chairman of Wal-Mart in India. was also in town to put final plans on the joint venture deal between Wal-Mart and Sunil Bharti Mittal.
Until recently, the pressure of such huge flows of global capital would have seemed instoppable. But these are dramatically changing times. Strong countervailing positive pressures are building up.
Big bad WalMart, for example - even as its India operation prepares to wipe out the informal sector - is requring all its managers back in the USA to watch Al Gore's movie. Why? Rumour has it that WalMart's Board, and the family that owns the company, have concluded that the warnings about the impact of climate change are probably true. They fear for WalMart's future - not just because of the physical consequences of climate change, but because they fear a massively amplified anti-corporate backlash when citizens start to panic.
Which they are rather likely to do after a few more tsunami-like natural disasters.
Many multinational corporations in the food sector, having contemplated radical change, are moving much faster than most governments. In a remarkable speech last October, for example, Patrick Cescau, Group Chief Executive of Unilever, talked to a global detergent industry conference about "seismic shifts in the world we do business in. A reality gap has opened up between where we are, and where we need to be. The pressure for sustainable consumption is mounting so fast that it will be hard to keep up". Cescau continued:"Our industry’s environmental impact remains unsustainable if we all continue to do what we do now, but end up doing it for nine billion people".
Cescau said that "by applying new design principles, we can progressively drive down our usage of resources and move towards ever more sustainable consumption. Our collective challenge is to act as one on the principles of change with suppliers, NGOs, governments and retailers. Then, individually as businesses, we can seek to create competitive advantage by being the best provider under that new framework".
After Doors 9
It's easy, of course, to make a speech - or a film. Harder to change the course of global flows of capital or the inexorable, expansion-based business logic that drives these big firms.
Many politicians exhort us to adopt “green” behaviour. But it’s hard to buy green, or be green, if your pattern of life - based on the industrialsied production and distribution of essentials - forces you into un-green behaviour. If, for example, your home, and job, and sources of food, and schools, are miles apart from each other.
Eighty percent of the enviromental impact of the products, services and infrastructures that surround us is determined at the design stage - not at the point of purchase, and not at the point of use.
The situation in India nonetheless remains open.
My co-organiser of Doors 9, Aditya Dev Sood, explained, the one way one might feasibly stop the trend to force informal, small scale food supply into the mainstream global economy is by enabling small and micro businesses to do better.
With six million new mobile subscribers a month just in India, mobile communications have the potential to achieve this.
/ to be continued.
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