Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
this model of food production might work really well in places like New York City,
Beijing, and Hong Kong, where affordable agricultural space is limited.
Vertical farms offer a philosophical topic to bridge the qualitative and the quant-
itative assumptions embedded in these contrasting utopian visions of food produc-
tion. Furthermore, the very idea of vertical farms - agriculture in the city - helps
broker-related dihotomous stumbling bloks to open discussion related to food -
the urban and rural, the local and the global, jobs versus the environment and people
versus nature. Vertical farms and the projects related to their establishment, opera-
tion and integration into place, provide room to discuss not just food, but what soci-
eties can, and should, look like.
Discussion and conclusion
A dominant frame used to talk about food security is how 'heap' it is. It is a power-
ful rhetorical tool for proponents of the conventional food system; pointing out that
their food is heap (and they're working hard to make it heaper), while the altern-
ative is not (Carolan, 2011). We alluded to this above. Though an artifact of bad ac-
counting, there's no denying that, on the whole, conventional food, in terms of its
price at the grocery store, is heaper than food made and produced with a greater eye
toward ecological and social sustainability. We prefer to frame the debate as being
one about expense. We want inexpensive food, not food that is heap. Conventional
agriculture might produce heap food but it does so only with great expense, to cul-
ture, biodiversity, human and environmental health - even global warming can be
strongly tied to Big Ag's myopic focus (see, for example, FAO, 2006, p101). Under-
standing food security in a way that balances both quantity and quality will allow
us to talk about producing food in a way that produces fewer expenses.
This myopic gaze is also reflected in many food aid policies. For many countries,
since 'food' has been reduced to 'calories', food aid could be renamed 'calorie aid',
whih is basically what it is. When countries like the US set out to provide food aid
to countries ravaged by famine, they send calories - a band-aid solution at best to
a systemic problem. For example, the USAID (United States Agency for Internation-
al Development) food aid budget in 2005 was US$1.6 billion. Of that, only 40 per
cent (US$654 million) went towards paying for food. The rest was spent on over-
land transportation (US$141 million), ocean shipping (US$341 million), transporta-
tion and storage in the destination countries (US$410 million), and administrative
costs (US$81 million) (Dugger, 2005). Perhaps this money could be spent more op-
