Sustainable Food and Local Currency
A Grower's Perspective
An issue that comes up frequently among CSA farmers and other sustainable growers is the class divide along which our produce flows in traveling from farm to mouth. The cost of a CSA share, like that of local, organic produce, tends to preclude households without a certain amount of disposable income.
Farmers and food activists have been searching for years for a way around this. Most feel that healthy, chemical-free food is a fundamental human right, and (speaking as a grower here), while producing food is a privilege and a joy, there is a certain frustration that the ever-widening wealth-gap inevitably precludes a large number of people from enjoying a decent standard of eating.
Occasionally, there has even been a mood of self-chastisement about this among growers, as if — by being, perhaps, more assiduous or clever in our production — we ought to be able to overcome the class-bias of the capitalist market. This sentiment began to ease somewhat when mass production entered organic agriculture and forced us to discern more rigorously the distinction between food that's merely organic and that which could be considered truly sustainable. We now routinely look past the healthiness of food per se to examine the health of the economic and physical systems that produce and deliver it.
"Sustainable" production is not so easy to define as is "organic," but parsing its elements causes us to examine the various ways that capitalism subsidizes certain production methods and "externalizes" (i.e., abandons responsibility for) certain costs. Getting food from seed to mouth — whether organically or otherwise — is extremely energy-intensive, and doing it for the end-prices we currently witness on grocery store shelves is not possible without mass-production and the cheap oil that enables it.
Petroleum is not only vastly undervalued but largely "uncosted" in terms of its environmental impacts; if it were to begin to reflect its actual value to us along with its remediation costs (or were it to disappear completely, as will happen of necessity in time) we would soon find ourselves forced to employ millions of extra hands in order to bring the harvest home each season. Mass production has made food artificially cheap over the past several decades by all but eliminating its labor costs. Consequently, Americans pay a far smaller percentage of their incomes for food than the citizens of almost any other nation.
But, sustainable production of food is something that is inherently labor-intensive. Diversified, small-scale production (rather than monocropping) is required, as is avoidance of heavy machinery, which — in addition to gulping down non-renewable resources — is steadily degrading soil structure. Because sustainable food production is labor-intensive, we will never find a way to make its end-product cheap, at least if food producers are to be given a living wage (part of what makes sustainable food "sustainable"). At the same time, because household budgets have adjusted over the decades to cheap, oil-subsidized food, few of us could withstand the sort of increase in price that would be necessary to give sustainable food producers a truly living wage. As it is, organic food is out of the reach of many consumers, and most small-scale organic farms can barely survive financially, even with a punishing work-load during the growing season.
What is to be Done?
Various CSA programs around the nation have addressed the problem of the expensiveness of sustainable food by subsidizing a certain number of their shares to effectively match the subsidy that conventional farmers take by way of burning up the planet's fossil fuel, poisoning the land with pesticides and herbicides, destroying soil structure, etc. That has the salutary effect of lowering the price toward the level of conventional food for a limited number of shares, but this ad hoc strategy is of questionable merit in the long run.
Subsidizing by donation inevitably requires surplus money from somewhere, whether philanthropic donations to food programs (ever harder to come by in a souring economy) or direct government subsidies (not a strong likelihood in the foreseeable future). Plus it requires a certain number of labor hours devoted simply to the task of enticing money out of deeper pockets, and that time will likely come in the form of volunteer hours, that is to say, unpaid labor. So, not only do we remain dependent upon the good graces of those with extra wealth for donations, but upon a subsidy from unpaid labor (willing though it may be) in order to tap that wealth, all in an effort to correct the injustice in one specific part of the capitalist marketplace. If sustainability in our food-systems is what we're after, this ongoing set of back-flips will never do.
It's clear that sustainable growers can never match the price that corporate mass-agriculture brings to the shelves, nor should we aim to. While we need to employ every (sustainable) efficiency possible, the strategy for making sustainably-grown food available to all must be wider in scope. What's needed is a permanent, structural alteration to entire local economies so that money is not so "scarce," and wealth not so concentrated. Local, supplemental, citizen-issued currencies could play a key role in enabling this.
Such democratically-controlled currencies circulate only locally to prevent wealth generated by a community from draining away to distant corporate coffers or stockholder's pockets. They can't be lent at interest, one of the primary mechanisms by which wealth concentrates and credit ("new" money) becomes scarce. And they're typically denominated in hours-of-labor to encourage equalization of rates-of-pay, a stepping stone toward redistributing wealth in such a way that all of us might be able to enjoy sustainably-grown food — and growers be given a living wage for it.
It's important to note that this is supplemental exchange-media — it actually constitutes a permanent addition to the local money supply, and one which cannot become concentrated in the hands of a few (which is what happens when the supply of interest-bearing money is increased). Because you can't make money from money with local currency, the increase in the money supply enriches all equally and represents a permanent increase in purchasing-power, mostly directed into the hands of those who will be purchasing basic goods and services with them rather than luxuries.
While holding enormous potential, local currencies work only as well as the number of participants using them; in this way they are like dollars. Neither is "backed" with something of value for which it can be redeemed; in both cases, "backing," or essential value, comes from the panoply of goods and services purchasable with them. In the case of the dollar, this includes essentially everything. So it's obviously essential for a social-justice oriented local currency to broaden its number of users as far as possible so that it can become strong enough to actually re-shape the local economy against the powerful molding effects of the dollar.
But, the food economy is a good place to start; indeed, it's an ideal engine to inspire local currency expansion, for several reasons:
- All consumers need food, and fairly constantly, so a maximal number of people will be exposed to local currency, ideally spreading its use and diversifying the local currency economy as quickly as possible;
- Workers in food production are notoriously underpaid, both in the farm-field and in the kitchen, so boosting their wages through the use of supplemental currency would function not only to stimulate demand for other basic goods and services, but to ensure that the farms and other establishments that employ them have reason to want to get paid with local currency;
- Most localities can provide some percentage of their food locally (often a significant amount), and because this is often in the form of fresh consumables, rapid turnover ensures rapid cycling of local currency through the production chain; and
- Retail food purveying is a fairly large employer in every locality, and since labor is always a local cost, even establishments which don't source their food locally can always use local currency to pay their labor expenses.
On a more symbolic level:
- Since one of the things money does is to track (in reverse direction) energy flows in the economy, it would be appropriate that the "Round River" (to borrow Aldo Leopold's phrase) — the river of energy that flows out of the soil, into plants, animals and people, and then back into the soil — be mimicked by monetary flows that also originate and remain local.
Carpe Diem!
Even if you're not a member of a CSA or other local food program, it's important to remember that — as a consumer — you play an inevitable role in shaping the global economy, both in terms of what's produced and how the profits from that production are distributed.
It is not enough to just purchase conscientiously, though that is obviously an essential starting point. Even if you avoid buying all corporate food products, you still have no control over where your dollars go after they leave your pocket. You may use a dollar to buy a local head of lettuce, but dollars are always drawn to where they will return the highest profit. After your dollar enters the grocery store till, it will be deposited in a financial institution whose business it is to make as large a profit as possible from its financial assets; if Cargill or Monsanto or Archer-Daniels-Midland can offer the best return, there's not much you can do about it. It is now, as they say, out of your hands.
If we want to choke off the supply of dollars to corporate mega-giants we need to be doing more than just making conscientious purchasing choices — we need to be using local currency. Only through such grassroots, democratic mechanisms — along with supporting fair-trade and other sustainability practices — can we ensure that our small role in the marketplace is one which helps distribute the benefits of global commerce equitably amongst the world's people.