Texas author James McWilliams doesn’t like the idea of promoting “eat local” initiatives. In fact, he wants to see more genetically modified organisms taking up crop land. He also thinks there should be subsidies to feed people, and there shouldn’t be subsidies to raise livestock. He expresses these thoughts in his new book Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibility. As Jesse Bogan accurately observes in Forbes magazine’s interview with McWilliams, organic food lovers will not love this book. Yet, many in “big agriculture” might not either.Now, McWilliams doesn’t think eating local is completely a negative. As he states in the interview, it is good for people to know where food comes from and how it’s produced, and farmers markets bring communities together and help maintain city agriculture spaces. Still, McWilliams believes that in a world where the population could reach 9 billion by 2050 (that would be roughly 3 billion more people inhabiting the planet than do now) there is need to be more efficient in food production. That is, more healthy food needs to be produced on a much larger scale while using less land and other resources.
As far as meat is concerned, McWilliams problems center on how livestock is raised. Among his concerns are the amount of fertilizer needed to raise corn for feed, the amount of natural gas needed to make the synthetic fertilizers, the amount of water used in feedlots, and the fact that livestock is given growth hormones as well as vaccines. McWilliams also cites manure lagoons that give off greenhouse gases in the form of methane as problematic, and finally, the fact that it also takes energy to incinerate or recycle the 60 percent of the carcasses that do not make it to the market or are used for other purposes. McWilliams argues ‘“that if the average American meat eater gives up eating meat once a week, that would be the equivalent of eating all of your food locally.”
The middle ground, according to McWilliams, is in large farming operations. But the farming operations need to be diverse. So, instead of large grain fields dominating the Midwest you would have large farms raising vegetables like tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers that can be grown closer together and would use less pesticides and fertilizers, which in turn would yield a healthier soil. However, McWilliams does acknowledge that today’s farmers have it tough, and though many would like to raise diverse crops, there simply isn’t the money to do so. To that end, McWilliams argues there needs to be incentives for agribusiness to turn to green production standards.
Those who are engaged in producing genetically modified crops, such as Monsanto or Syngenta, do not escape McWilliams criticisms either. The complaint he has for these companies is their focus on creating genetically modified corn, soy, and cotton, which encourages monoculture production, and such production “is environmentally unsustainable in the long run. I sometimes wonder why a company like Monsanto or Syngenta doesn't engineer a genetically engineered cassava that can be drought resistant and make that available at a fair price to farmers in Africa. Or a genetically modified blight-resistant rice for Southeast Asian farmers to ensure stability of their local food supply.”
Again, the problem is profit margins. “So what happens is a company like Monsanto develops a reputation of just being coldly profit driven, and, as result, a lot of consumers who quite frankly may not be all that informed about genetically modified organisms end up dismissing the technology itself as being somehow inherently evil, when, in fact, it has the potential to achieve real environmental benefits if it were applied in different ways.”
At the end of the interview Bogan plainly asks how McWilliams would define himself as he doesn’t necessarily support the path agribusiness is currently taking, but he also doesn’t think eating local or supporting organic agriculture is going to achieve the dual goals of providing enough healthy food to sustain the world’s population while preserving the environment. Not surprisingly, McWilliams doesn’t like to be labeled as belonging to one camp or another, nor does he think such positioning helps move forward the debate of food production and consumption. Instead, he prefers to occupy the “gray area” where ideas are not confined by entrenched positions.
To read Bogan’s interview with McWilliams on Forbes’s website click here.
Posted: 09/11/09
