The Future of Food, Part I

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There was a front page story on today’s Financial Times about an American businessman leasing an enormous tract of arable land in southern Sudan. The story is interesting in several respects. It indicated that the businessman in question had struck a deal with a local warlord in order to ensure that he was dealing with the actual power on the ground in the region. The article also suggested that several African states may break apart in the near future, and further made the remarkable claim that those who took risks to get into these potential African conflict zones will be rewarded (as opposed, for example, to being assassinated or being dispossessed of one’s assets, both of which I would consider to be more likely). All of these angles are of the utmost interest, but I will set them aside for the time being to consider what this means for the future of food.

A map from the Financial Times of the tract of land leased by Philippe Heilberg, a US businessman

This one story in the Financial Times was worth more than a score of stories on the current financial panic and the short-term thinking that is emerging from responses to the crisis. The long-term trend is toward continuing expansions of the human population and an increase in commodity prices as a result. Arable land cannot be expanded with the ease with which the human population can be expanded, so that the production of more commodities (especially food commodities) requires a greater input of capital and labor. Even in Africa, where industrial infrastructure is almost entirely absent, we see that arable land is in demand. The current financial panic has not dissuaded those with a long-term view of things from investments that many pay large dividends in the future as the result of long-term economic trends.

This story in the Financial Times reminded me of a story on the BBC website from June 2007 about “vertical farming”. I was able to find the story again and its link to those promoting vertical farming as the future of agriculture. I need not repeat here the advantages and potential advantages of vertical farming, as these are well laid out on the previously referenced website. There is scarcely anything that can reasonably be said against vertical farming except that most people and most urban areas simply don’t have the imagination to go forward with such plans. One of the currently fashionable ideas in urban design is that of “mixed used” structures and neighborhoods, and one can in this spirit easily imagine that a “farm tower” need not be exclusively devoted to farming. Indeed, it might make the best sense to have retail on the ground level (presumably a grocery store selling produce raised in the building), business offices above that, followed by residential floors (perhaps residences of those doing the farming) with farming levels above that.

A "farm tower" where fresh, locally-produced foods could be cultivated even within an intensely developed urban area. Why isn't Dubai building one of these? Maybe they are...

Again, thinking of farming in the Sudan and vertical farming reminded me of a story on the Newshour from 12 May 2008 about the use of vacant lots in Pittsburgh for farming. There even the “vertical” aspect of urban farming has been dispensed with, and people are farming vacant lots without bothering to put up purpose-built structures, though the story from Pittsburgh was not about producing food crops but rather raising oil producing plants that can be locally processed into usable oil products. As a “rust belt” center, the population of Pittsburgh has declined from about a million to around 300,000. It would be difficult for most people to imagine this; I know it is difficult for me to imagine Portland reduced to a third of its present size. In the west, cities are still growing, while in the rust belt, formerly large cities are shrinking. This has meant a large number of vacant and abandoned lots. In Pittsburgh they aren’t wailing their woes, they are putting their vacant lots to work, and their idle industrial infrastructure to work processing the oils from the vacant land grown crops. Here is an admirable example of what used to be called “good ol’ American know-how”.

Further searching my memory for relevant items on the future of food production, I began thinking of what is delicately called the “special period” in Cuba (Período especial en tiempo de paz) after the end of subsidies (primarily imported oil) from the Soviet Union. Cuba was forced to re-think its industry and agriculture from the ground up. While the average Cuban lost weight during this period, they experienced a ninety percent cut in their petroleum imports and lived to tell the tale. Some societies would not survive such a blow to their industrial assumptions. One of the things that was done during the special period, besides resorting to organic farming, was to move farming close to the cities so the an extensive petroleum-based transportation network was not required in order to get the food to market.

Cuba was forced into changing its agricultural practices and its food distribution network, and although this was a forced transition it was also a transition to a more sustainable system, decisively giving the lie to the notion that greener practices are more expensive, less efficient, and inherently less economical than “traditional” industrialized farming practices. It shows just how far our thinking about agriculture in the developed world has come in order to be able to refer to “traditional industrialized farming”. One might as well refer to unimaginative industrialized farming unwilling to alter its practices in the light of experience. We should be willing to learn from any source that has something to teach us, whether it be Sudan, Pittsburgh, Cuba, or The Vertical Farming Project in New York City.

It is all-too-easy to blow off ideas of this kind as being Utopian and impractical. However, as the experience of Cuba has shown, organic and alternative farming can be not only practical, but, in some cases, necessary. Cuba, of course, is not a model that any but the ideologically committed would want to follow. I am not holding up the achievements of Fidel Castro as anything to emulate. Indeed, one of the lessons that the Cuban “special period” has to teach is that everything that human civilization has achieved above and beyond subsistence agriculture is expendable in times of crisis. Subsistence agriculture is a baseline to which civilization can always return when necessary, and from which all other achievements ultimately arise.

There is a sense in which it is consistent and commendable for a communist country to focus on the economic base of society instead of its ideological superstructure, but for those of us who value the higher achievements of civilization, the Cuban experience represents a step backward, although it is an eminently sustainable step backward. What Cuba has shown is that we can indeed return to the horse-and-buggy days, but whether we should want to do so is another question entirely.

None of the developments discussed above require any significant technological breakthroughs, at least in the sense of “hardware” technologies. They do, however, require a significant amount of engineering, as well as social technology and social engineering. For this, we need imagination and a willingness to experiment. It ought to be part of the Enlightenment commitment to scientific rationality to be open to new ideas, and willing to put them to a test. All too often, social inertia prevents us from trying new things not because they are impractical, but only because they are unfamiliar. For this reason, beyond the need for imagination, we also need hope for the future.

It is high time, indeed past time, to call into question the culinary-industrial complex. When I discussed the culinary-industrial complex in Lessons from a Snowstorm I characterized it as an elite movement, and when it happens voluntarily, it is a movement among elites. But in the examples above there are reasons to believe that locally produced food could become a mass phenomenon capable of feeding, sustaining, and perhaps even growing civilization. Let us at least hope that it is possible.

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I have called today’s post The Future of Food, Part I, since (as I often say) there are so many interesting issues here that I know that I must return to the topic, and soon, but when I will produce Part II is a question I cannot yet answer.

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