Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ket towns. Organic farms with default levels of livestock rely on low inputs from outside,
they are less dependent upon fossil fuels than conventional dairy farms, and so are almost
by definition highly localized. Unfortunately this scenario is not one that Weber and Mat-
thews have covered in their analysis.
On top of that, there is a whole further section of the food transport system which is
not even mentioned by Weber and Matthews - namely what happens to the food waste.
Any nutrients which have not been absorbed by humans, whether or not they have passed
through the body, have to find their way back to the land, and the further humans live from
the land that produces their food, the further these nutrients have to travel. The recycling of
fertility is the aspect of food transport that exercises the FAO most:
The cost of transporting nutrients to cropland is often prohibitive … Longer food
chains, driven by the concentration of consumers in urban centres, mean that produc-
tion systems have to bridge long geographical distances between the site of feed pro-
duction and the consumer. Decreasing transport costs have allowed the relocation of
production and processing activities to minimize production costs. Globally this pro-
cess has helped to overcome local resource constraints and allowed people in food-
deficit areas to be fed. However it also involves large-scale extraction and transfers
of nutrients and virtual water embedded in feed and animal products, with detrimental
long term consequences for ecosystems and soil fertility.
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Admittedly the FAO are here focussing on animal products, and their concern is to rural-
ize factory farms by relocating them in the rural hinterland rather than on the periphery of
'food deficit areas' (ie cities), closer to the land than the consumer. But the same problem
confronts an urbanized vegan economy: how do you get all the waste from centralized food
processing facilities, retail outlets and peoples' dustbins to cascade back to the land from
which it came? The most efficient way discovered so far is by redistributing it in sacks
of animal feed that are sold to small farmers who feed it to animals and put their manure
back on the land. The least efficient way is to drive it out to a field and dump it, but this is
wasteful and the economies of scale involved usually means that there is a problem with ni-
trogen leaching. For a vegan society, the most promising possibility is anaerobic digestion,
but again this takes food out of the food chain, and there is still a transport toll involved
in redistributing the heavy digestate that remains after the energy has been removed. None
of this crucial part of the food distribution cycle is taken into account by Weber and Mat-
thews.
The alternative is a local food economy whose citizens live where most of the food can
be grown, rather than in food deficit areas, and where waste, at whatever stage it may be
generated in the food cycle, has a only a short journey back to the land from which it came
- either via the route of an animal's gut and with the assistance of its mobility, or not, as the
