True Cost Groceries

by James MacKinnon and Jeremy Nelson for Adbusters

with italic additions by David Cohlmeyer of Cookstown Greens

Picture your local mega-market, with its apples from New Zealand, carrots from California, tomatoes from a place a two-week drive away. The average item we toss in the grocery bag has traveled 1,300 miles from where it was produced. How on earth do these long-distance veggies compete with local produce?

      The fact is, they can't — unless we turn a blind eye to the environmental and social costs. A New Zealand apple is cheap because fuel oil is cheap, and fuel oil is cheap because it's subsidized by taxpayers and future generations. It's like a bad TV ad: "Price does not include the $1+ billion spent yearly by the US military to secure MidEast shipping lanes; the $1 billion spent on air pollution-related illness in Ontario, the $1.8 billion the UK will spend to "adapt" to global warming, the $15-billion cleanup for every record-breaking hurricane and serious flood that spins out of the changing climate, the $200-billion US tax dollars (and $2-billion in Canada) spent every year to keep food “cheap” . . ." The list goes on. The big oil producers and users don't pay these costs.

      The great economic scandal of our times isn't the dotcom crash or even the criminal culture of the corporate oligarchy. It's an economic system that measures the "goods" without the "bads." For every pound of pesticide we count the bushels of corn but not the cases of cancer; we see the burgers without the obesity, the cows but not the cowshit.  We Canadians can take advantage of the cheap subsidized food but the poor in third-world countries have no income to afford even cheap food. So they go hungry. All they really want to do is grow and sell a little food to provide for their family. But they cannot hope to compete with cheap imports.  So in frustration they are attracted to terrorism which requires even more $-billions for “Homeland Security”.

      How do we turn it around? From the schools of economics to the local food co-op, we build a new kind of marketplace in which the price of every product tells the economic truth - we pull off a true-cost revolution in favor of the local, the seasonal, the home-grown and organic. In this new New Economy, local apples will beat out those shipped from around the world, sustainable small farms will out compete factory farming, and fresh food will cost less than fast food. The place to launch this revolution? Your own kitchen table.

 Beef. Make mine medium rare - and solar powered, please. Take a calf and put it in a field of sun-fed grass. Wait about four years. In the end, you'll have two sides of beef and a field of grass enriched with manure. How many chemical fertilizers did you use? Zip. The ecological damage? Close to zero. All you needed was time and space, the way it used to be done. But time and space are expensive in the consumer-culture pressure cooker - and that is why we ended up with the industrial cow.

      The industrial cow can't go nibbling grass - it needs to reach slaughtering weight in 15 months. Growth hormones! Antibiotics! High-fat corn! To keep the industrial cow at the feed trough, today's cornfields suck up more oil, chemical fertilizers and pesticides than any other crop. (To pick just one environmental cost, fertilizer runoff into the Gulf of Mexico has created a 12,000-square-mile dead zone; "disaster assistance" for the area's fishery rings in at $15 million while $6 billion is now being given to farmers in an attempt to halt this runoff.) Back at the ranch, stress and crowding boost the risk of disease so antibiotics are routinely given.  This mix is the ideal breeding ground for bacterial mutations. In the past 20 years there have been 30 new human diseases of which all have probably been “jumps” from animal to human hosts and probably originated in these feedlots.  Also Britain lost $25 billion to mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease from “cheap” food systems.

Again, all of us are paying the price. Obesity is now the number two killer in America, with health costs pegged at $240 billion.   Add it up. In a true-cost economy, the greenfield farmer would have the agri-cowboy roped and hog-tied. The few, endangered small farms wouldn't just have a future. They would be the future.

      In the natural economy, wild salmon is gold. The fish feed eagles, bears, seals, killer whales, ravens, humans, wolves. Floods and animals carry the dead spawners into the forest, where they fertilize the richest ecosystem in the northern world. Protect the salmon and they will feed the cycle for as long as anyone can hope to imagine. But we want sushi, lox, salmon on the barbecue - and we want more than the natural world can produce. So now we're farming fish. The ecological costs are still adding up, but here's one: it takes two to five pounds of other fish to produce one pound of farm salmon. The International Fishmeal and Oil Manufacturers
Association predicts that by 2010, farmed fish could be eating 56 percent of the world's annual output of fishmeal and more than 85 percent of its fish oil. We'll be overfishing the wild world to keep farmed fish coming to the table.

      Fish farms are factory farms that sit in free-flowing water. Waste food, feces, antibiotics, the dyes that turn farmed salmon's flesh from dull grey to an appetizing pink - all of this filters down to the seabed or out on ocean currents. In Scotland, the farms now produce a quantity of
untreated waste estimated at twice the flow of sewage from the nation's human population.

      There are other costs, like outbreaks of disease that can spread to wild fish and wipe out whole stocks. But the greatest toll is to our way of thinking. Fish farms help to convince us that we don't need wild fish - that we can trade away a few more salmon rivers for a new dam or another clearcut valley. Why not? We can always grow more fish. But when we lose wild salmon, we lose forever the billions of dollars worth of "free" ecological services they provide. We cash out of the natural economy, and we end up bankrupt.

      Genetically modified crops don't come cheap by any measure. GM farmers pay 35 percent more for patented transgenic seeds, and, knowing that their  plants are designed to be pesticide-resistant, they now dump two to five times more toxic chemicals onto their fields. That could add an estimated $20 billion per year in damages to habitat, clean water and human health in the US. But it's the same old false-economy story - the biotech giants and frankenfarmers won't be picking up the tab.  Just as with nuclear energy, insurance companies refuse to pick up the tab if something goes wrong.  We taxpayers assume all the risk; while the multi-nationals receive all the rewards.

      Worse is the fact that transgenic crops are forcing non-transgenic farmers to pay big bucks just to keep their crops "clean." They're forced to plant buffer strips to catch drifting GM pollen, wasting tens of thousands of acres in the process. The harvest, too, must be tested and segregated, heaping cost upon cost all the way down the line.

      It brings to mind those old hand-on-the-Bible promises that genetically modified crops would never contaminate the food supply. In January, organic farmers in Saskatchewan launched a lawsuit against biotech giants Monsanto and Aventis. The reason: GM canola has spread so widely that it's now nearly impossible to guarantee a crop isn't tainted by genetic pollution. That points to the greatest potential environmental cost of all—that a frankenfood gone wrong will end up out of our control, a free-living, free-breeding species in the evolutionary mix, forever. And what price do we put on infinity?

Think about all these $-billions the next time “cheap” food crosses your table.

If we don’t start doing right things right now, there will be even more costs. We are now paying about 1/3 the true cost of our food; another 1/3 is paid by taxes and distributed as subsidies (primarily to trans-national food companies); but the remaining 1/3 is being deferred for our children to deal with.  Local seasonal food is the solution.  Support it!