21 Oct 2008

Michael Pollan, well known and internationally respected author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defence of Food", recently published an open letter to the next President of the USA in the New York Times Magazine. While it addressed the US food and agriculture industry, much of it is also relevant to New Zealand.

New Zealand's traditional pastoral agriculture differs from US feedlot models, which rely heavily on feeding corn and grain to animals. There are, however, worrying signs - particularly in the dairy sector - that we are moving in that same direction, a direction we need to avoid if our conventional farming is to continue to contribute significantly to our international trade and meet the environmental challenges we face.

The following is an abbreviated adaptation of Michael Pollan's letter, to suit the New Zealand situation:

Dear Political Leaders

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues which will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one barely being mentioned during the election campaign: food. With suddenness which has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. Food is about to demand your attention - and unless it does, you will not be able to make significant progress on health, trade or climate change.

The Problem

The way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do - around 50 percent of New Zealand's total greenhouse gas emissions. The industrialization of agriculture has increased pollution dramatically, with chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing, packaging and transportation all contributing. Put another way, when we eat, we are consuming oil and spewing greenhouse gases.

In addition to the cost of living and climate change, many voters are concerned about healthcare policy. New Zealand's public health system absorbs one dollar in every five spent by government. There are several reasons health care is so expensive, but one of the biggest is the cost of preventable chronic diseases. Heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer are modern plagues all linked to our diet. While we have come to expect cheap, convenient food, this has come at a steep cost to our health as well as our environment.

The impact of food and agricultural policies will have implications for foreign affairs and trade as well. In the past months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots. One government has fallen. Countries will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and seek to protect them with trade barriers - incorporating environmental criteria around carbon footprinting, chemical use and animal welfare.

At issue is not only the availability of food, but its safety. People are paying more attention to food today than they have in decades, worrying not only about its price but about its origin, its healthiness and even whether what goes in their shopping baskets is fit for human consumption. Markets for alternative kinds of food - organic, local and humane - are thriving as never before.

Today's situation did not occur by chance. After World War II, the munitions industry converted to fertilizer - ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer - and nerve-gas research was turned to pesticides. Meanwhile natural products and animal by-products, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became to be seen as irrelevant.

Whatever we may have liked about the era of cheap food, it is drawing to a close. Even if we were willing to continue paying the environmental or health costs, we're not going to have the cheap energy (or the water) needed to keep the system going, much less expand production.

What we need to do

Future food policy must strive to provide a healthy diet - this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that agriculture produces and people consume. Policies should also aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. And lastly, policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.

These goals will not be difficult to align or advance as long as we keep in mind that many of the problems agriculture faces today stem from its reliance on fossil fuels, and alternative policies will simultaneously improve the state of our environment, health and trade.

The Environment

Right now, most conservation programs are designed on the zero-sum principle: land is either locked up in parks and reserves, or farmed intensively. This either/or approach reflects a belief that modern farming is inherently destructive, so that the best thing for the environment is to leave some land untouched. But we now know how organic systems would allow, for example, the State-owned Landcorp - New Zealand's largest farmer - to grow crops and graze animals while supporting biodiversity, soil health, clean water and carbon sequestration.

Regulation

Today the revival of rural economies is being hobbled by a tangle of regulations originally designed to check abuses by the very largest food producers. Food safety regulations must be made sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that a small producer selling direct off the farm or at a farmers' market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. This is not because local producers won't ever have food safety problems - they will - but their problems will be easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable.

Research

Our current agricultural research is largely directed toward the goal of maximizing production with the help of fossil fuels. There is no reason to think that bringing the same sort of resources to the development of more complex agricultural systems wouldn't produce comparable yields. Leading organic farmers, operating for the most part without benefit of public investment in research, can achieve returns comparable to conventional farmers and, in drought years, can exceed conventional crop yields (because organic soils better retain moisture).

But yield isn't everything - and growing high-yield commodities is not quite the same thing as growing food. Much of what we're growing today is not directly eaten as food but exported for processing into low-quality calories of fat and sugar. As the world epidemic of diet-related disease has demonstrated, the sheer quantity of calories a food system produces improves health up to a point, but after that, quality and diversity are probably more important.

Education

The future food agenda should also include programs to train a new generation of farmers. With the average New Zealand farmer 58 years old, we need an urgent focus on teaching ecological farming systems to their successors. Primary industries contribute 20% of New Zealand's GDP and 10% of total employment - but just 1.4% of graduates in 2006 had studied agricultural or environmental science. Retaining the ability to farm productively and sustainably will put New Zealand in as strong a trading position in the future as nations with oil reserves are today.

In the end, shifting our diet will require changes in our daily lives, which today are deeply implicated in the culture of fast, cheap and easy food. Making more healthy and sustainable food available does not guarantee it will be eaten, much less appreciated or enjoyed. Changing the food culture must begin with our children, and it must begin in schools. On the premise that eating well is a critically important life skill, we need to teach all students the basics of growing and cooking their own food.

But it is not only our children who stand to benefit from education about food. A public health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public health message. Judging by the success of antismoking campaigns, the savings to our public health system could be substantial.

The Future of Food

As well as benefiting international trade, there is soaring domestic demand for organic and local foods - with farmers' markets one of the fastest-growing destinations for food shopping. The organic and local food movements will continue to grow without government help, yet there are steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable.

You're probably thinking that growing and eating organic food carries a certain political risk, but it is not difficult to deflect the charge of elitism sometimes leveled at the sustainable-food movement. Reforming the food system is not inherently a right-or-left issue: for every shopper with roots in the counterculture you can find a family which is simply intent on taking back control of its dinner and diet. There is also a strong libertarian component to the food agenda, seeking to free small producers from the burden of government regulation, and fostering rural innovation.

This proposal builds on New Zealand's rural roots, but turns them towards a more sustainable, sophisticated future. It honors the work of farmers and enlists them in three of the 21st century's most urgent errands: to move into the post-oil era, to improve people's health and to mitigate environmental damage and climate change.

Derek Broadmore
Chair, Organics Aotearoa New Zealand (OANZ)
(With acknowledgement to Michael Pollan)

Michael Pollan's original open letter can be read at http://www.nytimes.com/