A different homeland security

At the Common Ground Fair, “Victory Farms” are promoted over the perils of globalized food

By Lance Tapley

In response to the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a long-range, strategic idea of homeland security germinated this past weekend in Unity at the Common Ground Country Fair, the venerable celebration of “ecologically sustainable practices” attended annually by tens of thousands of Maine people and visitors.

The idea is radically different from the military- and police-oriented approach to be taken by President George W. Bush’s new cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security, although it is not in competition with it.

Simple, patriotic, and modeled in spirit on the World War 2 “victory garden” movement, it is the promotion of local, small-scale agriculture. Its advocates say it would mean a guaranteed safe and healthy food supply; less dependence on imports from unreliable, faraway countries; and a stronger American economy replacing dependence on multinational corporations.

Also, many people at this one-time-hippie and, after 25 years, still-somewhat-counter-cultural fair wanted to reduce the foreign hatred of America that led to the terrorist attacks. They felt the hatred had a root cause in resentment over increasing American economic, military, and cultural power in the world. A limit on food globalization, which is led by huge American corporations, would be one way to reduce the resentment.

And such a curb would have the benefit of reducing other risks of a global food system such as the spread of mad cow and hoof-and-

mouth disease and — for those who don’t want to eat it — genetically modified food.

On the last day of the fair, Vandana Shiva, a scientist and food reformer from India, spoke about the dangers of food globalization. These dangers were also among the concerns at a national gathering in Unity village of big-corporation critics called the New Chautauqua, which was held in concert with the fair. In fact, the promotion of local, small-scale farms seems so needed, timely, and promising that some prominent members of the 30-year-old Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), the Common Ground Fair’s sponsor, appear to be elevating it to a level equal with their touchstone of organic purity (no chemicals used in growing food).

But formidable barriers would have to be scaled in the nation and in Maine before the population could turn back to greater reliance on local food. Some barriers are economic and some are social, although many in the end are political. Nevertheless, there is some optimism they can be surmounted.

Dealing with 21st-century food dangers

A safe and secure food supply means many things. Looking at the international context in the most dramatic sense, it means food that is not contaminated intentionally by terrorists or resentful foreign agricultural workers, or unintentionally by food-production methods that do not meet high standards and are unhealthy. The United States government’s food-inspection system supposedly regulates the safety of imported foods, but generally only on a sampling basis. It would be physically impossible, given the enormous quantities of food imported into the country, to examine every shipment or item for all possible threats.

We already have food-security issues on the homefront. At present, the public isn’t informed about which crops and foods produced in the US have been genetically modified, and the state doesn’t have current figures on pesticide use by farms. But things are far more unknown on the global market: the degree of pesticide residues in imported food, for instance. “The guy in China — you can’t talk with him about his use of pesticides,” says Eliot Coleman of Harborside, a Maine organic farmer and author of two books, The New Organic Grower and The Four Season Harvest.

Or, as State Senator John Nutting, a Leeds dairy farmer and Second District Republican congressional primary candidate, puts it: “You really don’t know what’s there unless you buy it from your local farmer. Mexican tomatoes sprayed with pesticides banned in the US are getting through under NAFTA,” he warns, because “only one tomato in 100 is tested.”

A secure food supply might also mean fewer imports from unreliable sources. “It’s somewhere between absurd and suicidal for any nation to depend on its food supply from any other nation. It’s the most fundamental thing for national security,” says Jim Hightower, a featured speaker both at the fair and the New Chautauqua event. An author and commentator, he also is a former Texas agriculture commissioner. “Why do we do it?” he asks. “We are a food-production machine in this country. We have the soil, the climate, and the world’s best farmers.”

Hightower feels that global corporatization of agriculture hurts the US both in exports and imports. “It’s absolute insanity to put our farms on an export basis. It requires overproduction,” he says, and it means dependence on “dicey,” unstable markets.

And importing involves similar problems, says Hightower. For example, the American apple industry has in recent years been attacked hard, particularly on the West Coast, by cheap Chinese apples, especially apples for the juice market. “China produces seven times the vegetables and fruit we produce in this country,” Hightower says. “Ninety percent of the frozen crayfish we eat now come from China, when you can practically pick them up off the street in Louisiana.” But, he points out, nobody knows what the future relationship will be between China and the US.

“We finance these entities like bin Laden, and then they come back and bite us on the butt,” he says in his down-home Texas manner. “Now we’re gonna move our food supply off-shore. Certainly China could be a huge bite on the butt in the future.”

Hightower insists that foreign imports, because of agribusiness’s monopolization of food production and distribution, do not necessarily mean cheaper food. “Mexican tomatoes are not cheaper than California tomatoes,” he asserts.

A more home-grown food supply could also lead to less dependence on multinational corporations that might be tempted to put private — or other countries’ — interests before the American public’s interests. And the anti-corporate globalization critics at the New Chautauqua sessions weren’t just thinking of Americans. They believe that a local agriculture movement is a way to restrain America’s economic power from impoverishing farmers in undeveloped nations by forcing their countries to adopt “free trade” policies that turn diverse national agricultures into export-oriented, one-crop monocultures.

Food independence may offer Americans psychological benefits, too. The patriotic element of suburban folks producing their own vegetables in victory gardens during World War 2 gave many in our country a sense of participation in a great collective effort. Patronizing the local farmer — in effect, having “victory farms” — could be imbued with a similar social purpose.

Back to the agricultural future

The story of what happened to the apple industry in Maine is a tale of what happened to local agriculture. It was related in a Common Ground Fair talk, “The Case for Local Agriculture,” by John Bunker, a MOFGA activist who has a small farm and works for Fedco Seeds in Clinton.

Bunker began by informing his audience, which had assembled in a soiled canvas tent, that the first apple orchard on mainland Maine was probably established in what is now Old Orchard “before 1600,” by English fishermen. As Maine was settled, trees were planted everywhere from European seed (the apple is not native to North America), and then from local seeds and grafting. Eventually, thousands of orchards sprang up, each one different because generations of trees adapted to local conditions. Occasionally, by chance, trees bearing superior eating fruit were produced, and scions from these trees were used to establish orchards of Red Delicious, Macintosh, Golden Delicious, Baldwins, and other varieties. But, until around 1820, orchards were basically noncommercial.

In the early to middle 1800s, apples began to be shipped to England, other countries, and the American South. Apples became Maine’s most important agricultural product. For shipping, however, predictability and good storing qualities were demanded. The middlemen wanted certain varieties, even if the taste wasn’t great, and “if we’re all growing Baldwins we’re basically in competition with each other,” Bunker observed.

The competition among commercial apple growers got stiffer when, after the Civil War, the West was settled and the transcontinental railroad opened up a national apple market, including competition from around the country. Because apples were now sold nationally instead of locally, “by the early 20th century, prices were permanently depressed” for apple growers.

And this process of “globalization,” Bunker said, has continued to this day, with Chinese apples now driving Michigan and Washington State growers out of business in the same way that those states had caused many Maine orchards to fail. Bunker took special note of the fact that, in 1850, premium apples were selling in Maine for $1 a bushel. In Maine in 2000, he said, juice apples were selling for less than $1 a bushel.

But this story isn’t just about competition. Bunker noted that the competitive advantage that Washington State enjoyed, as it helped undercut much of the Maine apple industry, was subsidized by federally financed irrigation, tax credits to big farms, and taxpayer-supported transportation infrastructure — in the same way that the price of imported oil does not include the huge military costs incurred protecting the Middle East oil fields. “We’re all paying to destroy the small, local apple industry,” he said. If the true costs were counted, maybe local agriculture would be cheaper than global agriculture, he continued.

In making the case for local agriculture, “I don’t mean to be isolationist,” he said, “but we need to be aware of what we are doing.” Moreover, he felt, as long as we allow corporations to squeeze everybody in the world to make profits, “people around the world are going to hate us.”

Russell Libby, MOFGA’s director, says that while a local-food emphasis for the group was accelerated by the events of the past few weeks, it had commenced before, although “we don’t want the local farmer to be imitating big industrial agriculture.” He notes that fewer chemicals are needed with a non-industrial agriculture, as the products don’t have to be shipped thousands of miles.

As part of his organization’s reaching out to the general farming community, on November 10 MOFGA is sponsoring, at its 35-acre fair site and headquarters in Unity, a celebration of apple farming, including an “apple tasting” and an apple-pie contest. The event will bring together representatives of all segments of the apple industry, including those who spray their apples with pesticides. It’s called the “Great Maine Apple Day.”

And Libby says he is working to get a consensus with the rest of the agricultural community on what to recommend to the state agriculture department on how it should spend $1.4 million it recently received in a federal farm-promotion grant. “I’m arguing for farm stands and local marketing efforts,” he adds.

Big barriers to smallness

There are large barriers to a resurgence of a viable local agriculture, however. Many economists would say there is the not-so-small matter to overcome of the economy of scale. There also is the economic “law” of comparative advantage in which a country or region — say, China with its cheap labor to harvest apple crops — has an advantage over countries or regions where the population might be better off maximizing its advantage, such as — for the US as a whole — a more educated population. This is the principal idea that drives free trade.

But these economic laws can be challenged. Contemporary agriculture “is the application of the industrial system based on an input-output model,” says Stu Smith, former Maine agriculture commissioner and now an agriculture professor at the University of Maine. “The idea is that you put in inputs — you purchase pesticides, fertilizer, and equipment — and then you produce undifferentiated output at the farm gate.”

“Undifferentiated output” means there is a uniform product from all farms of a kind. Buyers then will purchase others’ products as readily they will purchase yours. In other words, they will have no preference for your particular product except in price.

“This system depends on the economy of scale and leads to ruthless competition and to larger and larger farms,” Smith says. He notes that Maine used to have 6000 potato farms, but now there are only 500. “Eventually we’ll have 10 huge potato farms and 10 dairy farms!” he fears.

But, like John Bunker, he and some other experts believe that local food could be considered as cheap as imported food if the true costs to the consumer of global, corporate agriculture were calculated. There are always those big tax breaks. There is also publicly supported university research. And an expensive industrial marketing and distribution system “takes 80 cents of every consumer dollar,” Smith says. Now, with a more security-conscious, and therefore possibly more expensive, international transportation system, the shipping cost of importing food from far away may go up.

It isn’t as if the government has only supported agribusiness, however. The state’s agriculture department has helped create or promote both local farmers’ markets (of which there are currently 54) and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) clubs — in which a group of consumers has an agreement with a farmer to buy his produce, often with payment in advance. There are around 150 of these in one form or another in Maine. The state also has a “Get Real. Get Maine!” $200,000 annual Maine-farm-products newspaper and TV marketing campaign.

Some small farmers, though, don’t feel the agriculture department is doing enough to help them. “There are well-meaning people at the Department of Agriculture, but they don’t have the funding or direction to know what to do,” says Bunker.

The state’s deputy agriculture commissioner, Ned Porter, defends the “Get Real” program as “very well received” and maintains it is too early to judge the campaign as it’s in its first year. Porter also says the department is leaning toward spending the $1.4-million grant to promote small farms’ products.

But over the past few decades, the 3300-member MOFGA and its fair probably have been the most effective entities promoting community farms. As a result, small-scale organic agriculture is booming in Maine. Certified organic farms in the state have tripled in the last five years to around 12,000 acres — to between two and three percent of farm acreage statewide, the highest percentage in the US, MOFGA says.

And, at the University of Maine, the state’s agricultural-research institution, more work is being done on how to aid small-scale agriculture. “When I was farming in the 1960s,” Stu Smith recalls, “the University of Maine was doing research on the efficacy of pesticides. But now we’re researching the benefits of green manures.” In terms of helping small-scale, sustainable agriculture, “we’re not doing too bad here.”

Yet he thinks more study directed toward helping the little guy could be conducted. This would consist of research designed to help make the small farmer “competitive at the consumer level because he wouldn’t have to go through the industrial distribution system” and pay all its costs, Smith says. This kind of farmer typically would have diversified crops, and would not have huge sums invested in capital equipment. Such a farmer would sell directly to the consumer at a local farmer’s market or farm stand rather than to the Boston wholesale market.

In spite of the growth of farmers’ markets, though, undoubtedly the state’s supermarkets will continue to be where most people get most of their food. And the supermarkets are not unreceptive to local products. Shop ‘n Save recently ran a $3.99-a-pound special on lobster to help the state’s lobstermen unload their excess catch as a result of the air-transportation delays caused by the terrorist attacks.

As for Shaw’s, “when it’s available, we’ll source it locally as much as we can,” promises Bernie Rogin, the company’s New England spokesman. The typical local farm supplies Shaw’s with milk, fruit, or vegetables and gets its product into three or four stores.

Rogin believes “it is far too early to tell” the effect on food production and distribution of the international war on terrorism. Even immediately after the attacks on New York and Washington, “it didn’t impact us. Transportation continued. Only New York City was a problem, and we could go around New York City.”

He seems personally sympathetic to the notion of food independence. “After World War I, the British went through some analysis,” he relates. “They discovered in the war they had been too reliant on off-shore food. So they established land trusts to keep land in agriculture. Then when World War II occurred they weren’t isolated from food.”

However, Rogin describes the supermarket business as a “global search for product.” His company is in a good position to conduct the search, since a British firm, J Sainsbury’s, owns Shaw’s.

“We have to stay on top of things because the consumer’s preferences are constantly changing,” he says. “There is a willingness on the part of the American consumer to experiment. It’s hard to believe, but salsa outsells catsup in the good old U.S.A.” This implies that Americans might have to make a few sacrifices in variety if they were strictly to shop locally.

Rogin is a soothing public-relations man, but Shaw’s approach to local farmers has irritated John Nutting, the state senator and farmer. Last year he accused the company of making it hard on Maine farmers by requiring them to take their product to Massachusetts to be distributed in Maine. Nutting claims Shaw’s does business with only six Maine farmers on a regular basis, as opposed to Shop ‘n Save and Associated Grocers of Maine — a large food distributor. He says each buys from around 150 Maine farmers.

Nutting feels that Shaw’s, which, like its two counterpart companies, gets about $1 million annually in a state capital-equipment tax break (the Business Equipment Property Tax Reimbursement or BETR), should be asked to buy from at least 100 Maine farms to qualify for the rebate, and he has a bill to require this ready for the next legislative session.

Some people believe public indifference to where its food comes from is the big barrier to the expansion of local agriculture. Others say taste is the only factor that counts with the public, aside from price. And Eliot Coleman isn’t sure Americans have a great sense of taste. “It’s hard in agriculture to sell quality,” he laments.

Coleman tells a story of a trip he took though southern France. He would go into food stores in small towns, stand in line with Frenchmen buying groceries, and observe that absolutely everyone was buying fresh bread and vegetables along with their cheese and wine: “No processed foods at all.” In France, he also notes, every town has its special wines and cheeses and other foods with their highly treasured tastes. The US public, he suggests, has a long way to go before it prizes tasty local food in this manner.

In the end, the possibilities for public education and changed economic policies on agricultural matters will be fought out on economic and, considering the government’s subsidization and promotion of agriculture, political battlefields. Here, few would dispute that the giant agribusiness corporations have the upper hand. In politics, their power is exercised through donations to political campaigns and intense lobbying. What has shaped the global import-export-oriented direction in which the country’s agriculture has gone? Stu Smith answers simply: “The politics of agriculture. The industry has political clout.”

But an aroused, concerned, patriotic public could change this direction. So, the next time you’re driving down the road and you see farmer Bob or Jane in front of a table with some corn, hit your brakes. The security of our country may depend on it.