I believe Rod MacRae (shown here) is one of a handful of experts to develop a critique of today’s food system based on its bad business case and its failure to do proper scenario planning.

If you don’t like reading arithmetic, you will find his writings tough going, but as soon as you subtract that problem, it pays to keep on reading. This is powerful stuff that more food system critics need to understand.

Just to be straight about my relationship with Rod, he’s the one who taught me food math back in the mid-1990s, when I called on him to help with the economic case that Jack Layton, Gary Gallon and I were trying to make for our newfound Coalition for a Green Economic Recovery. We enjoyed our conversations so much that we decided to work on a book together, and the result was our 1999 book, Real Food for a Change, which was also co-authored by my wife, Lori Stahlbrand. If I may say so, this book was one of the first to make the case for local and sustainable food that fostered “health, joy, justice and nature.”

Subsequently, I replaced Rod as manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, and he became a consultant and popular professor of environmental studies at York University.

Apart from knowing how to add, Rod is steeped in agriculture and ag policy. We’re different on both scores. I don’t check the math on my restaurant receipts, let alone charts in articles. And I am into the city side of food.

So, apart from presenting what Rod has to offer everyone, I will throw in my own two cents worth about how a city perspective could add new dimensions to Rod’s work.

A nice intro to his mindset is a 2009 article on why the Ontario government should invest in helping farmers transition toward organic. You may or may not think knowing more about Ontario is meaningful to your life, but you will get the method, which should be applied to every jurisdiction in the world.

The gist of the case he and his co-writers make is that organic is the only high-growth area of the farm economy, and governments should stop seeing it as a modest niche that is simply tolerated. In fact, he says, whether or not organic is a niche is a red herring.

The business case is much more a throwing down of the economic gauntlet. He shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that when more farmers transition to organic, the government and population will save tens of millions of dollars in healthcare and environmental expenditures. No More Mr. Niche Guy is his case.

MacRae’s business case is that the government should invest in organic rather than wasting money two times – once to encourage farmers to farm the wrong products in the wrong way, and then again to pay for medical and environmental clean-ups and medical damage done by the very projects the government subsidized.

The biz case for smartening up in Ontario is that spending $51 million over 15 years to help increase the number of organic farmers from today’s 489 to a possible 5343 will save the government the better part of $2.18 billion.

MacRae’s business scenario would also save farmers $18.4 million a year they now spend on fertilizers and $9.1 million a year they now spend on pesticides, and an uncertain amount (unknown due to terrible book-keeping by farmers and the government) on sub-therapeutic antibiotics for factory-raised livestock. The farmers also benefitted because they sold their food for a hefty organic premium.

But the government made much more money than the farmers. In this scenario, the government would save $145 million a year it is now spending on environmental clean-ups – that’s without counting global warming emissions or human health impacts from pesticide residues, which would also be dramatically reduced.

Over the 15 years of MacRae’s scenario, the $51 million total cost of his proposed deluxe transition program led to savings of $2.18 billion. Return on Investment doesn’t get any better! Since Ontario is in deep debt, it would seem to be time to smarten up, and do this kind of thing more often!

In devising this scenario, MacRae is thinking like a European. He is thinking of funding and supporting farmers because they will provide public benefits, not because they will make more money for themselves, which is the North American way of thinking about farm supports.

MacRae is also thinking of how to use money from one budget, agriculture, to create savings in other budget lines – environment and health. That’s just not a way of thinking that North American ag departments can grasp. There may be long lasting silos on many farms, but none so strong as the silos in governments.

The European programs he imports for his scenario are fairly simple. One swath of them can be called “supply push.” Cover the farmers losses while they are transitioning from conventional to organic, for example.

European programs also cover “demand-pull” – methods of encouraging sales. Improve and standardize labeling so shoppers recognize and respect them, for example.

Both methods are foreign to the thinking of North American governments, who prefer blunt instruments such as cash giveaways to any and all people who grow corn for use as car fuel or pop sweetener.

If I had my druthers, MacRae would have checked out two other possibilities:

MacRae’s more recent publication is from 2015, and again features a business case for different food policies. The publication is called Dollars and Sense: Opportunities to Strengthen Ontario’s Food System.

If Ontario food policy staff are so smart, why are they making the province poorer? Ontario is rich in land, sun, water and ingenuity – all the qualities needed for diverse agriculture and fish. So why does Ontario import $10.9 billion worth of food more than it exports? And why is the percentage of imports going up substantially every year. Is it time to check and see if a mistake has been made?

The first thing that strikes anyone who looks at the charts is that the deficits are across the board. They’re substantial ($2.8 billion in fruit and nuts, for example) in areas where winter gets in the way of year-round production.

But imports are also substantial in items that grow perfectly well in Ontario, There are major imports of dairy, and of beef, lamb, pork, chicken. Ontario imports over 7 million tons of lamb, for example. An unbelievable 70 per cent of Ontario farm acreage is planted in soy and corn. But other than grains gobbled up by the industrial system that Ontario ag policy is beholden to, there are shortages of flax, rye and buckwheat, the most nutritious and eco-friendly of grains.

Climate cannot be blamed for all the fruit and vegetable imports. Ontario has a deficit of apples —  8.6 kilograms per person – even though they store well for most of the off-season. The same is true for other vegetables that store well, most notably carrots.

Ontario carrots store well enough that they can be exported to an island in the Caribbean I visited this winter (see my picture on top). But we import tons of carrots.

According to MacRae, if we reduced imports of foods we grow well by 10 per cent, we would reduce our trade deficit by a billion dollars a year and create 1600 new jobs and $33 million in new tax revenue.

Please fill in the blanks of the two missing words in this sentence which best explain the thinking needed in senior levels of the government: It’s the _ _ _ _ _ _ _,  _ _ _ _ _ _ !

The deficit looks even worse if we count the agriculture opportunity of growing a healthy diet, instead of the industrial diet favored by the ag policy people. If we ate the local fruits and vegetables and grains that grow well in Ontario, there would be huge unmet demand (a deficit) in almost every standard food – sweet corn, oats, apples, green beans, wax beans, white beans, cabbage, apples, and potatoes, for example.

Just take one example. If we grew the oats we should eat for breakfast or baking, we would plant 25000 more hectares in oats that would generate 241 new jobs and $3.8 million in taxes. (Isn’t arithmetic interesting?) However, it might cause a decline in sales of laxatives.

MacRae doesn’t even try to hazard a guess as to what the savings would be if the provincial government actively tried to promote healthy eating and discourage unhealthy eating. But chronic disease accounts for over half Ontario’s health spending and food is implicated in more than a third of chronic disease, so savings are bound to be huge if the province makes good food easier and more accessible to have.

I think there are two things MacRae might have checked out if he had a more urban perspective.

The city has as much to lose or win as the countryside on this file, so we should not divide the world into two separate spheres of urban and rural.

20 Comments on "It’s the Food Economy, Stupid!"

Apneaman on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 12:29 pm 



Meaningless progressive babbling. Let’s slightly reform the cancer in the terminal stage and pretend it matters.

PracticalMaina on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 1:10 pm 



I don’t know Apneaman, this is a very important topic. Progressive babble is important in trying to keep Monsanto in relative check. I have scene an article lately that puts agricultural methane emissions above that of the fossil fuel industry. Pretty tough for me to believe with the huge leak in Cali as well as large scale fracking in the US, but either way, massive emissions.

It blows my mind going into a grocery store and seeing the easy to grow crops he described Buckwheat, flax, rye, and one he didn’t hemp, in the organic section with high high prices, when these are some of the least input dependent crops you can grow. Buckwheat and hemp, specifically, I know for a fact, will grow on land that is not capable of supporting many other crops.

Apneaman on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 1:41 pm 



Practical, I call it babble because nothing has changed. Idle talk and wishful thinking. We are a cancer and you cannot tweak or reform a cancer. The hour is much later than you realize. If you add up every sincere effort every person who actually gives a shit made, it does not even rate in the aggregate. The only large scale change you will ever see will be ones that are forced upon us by circumstance. Consequences from our growth obsession. These will be short term band aids that will also be meaningless in the big picture, because we went too far and have pushed this planet into a state that is going to be very unfriendly to us. Going to wipe us out. Apes Fucked up the carbon cycle, the hydrological cycle, the nutrient cycle, the oceans, land and atmosphere and wrecked a stable climate that agriculture and civilization evolved under and cannot survive without. We did some of this unknowingly, but most of it we have done in the last 50 years after we knew damn well what would happen if we did not curb our desires. So what was our response? Globalization. If we want to claim that morality and responsibility exist, then we deserve our fate. I don’t really believe in that. We are a meaningless species living meaningless lives in a meaningless godless universe. Cause and effect is all. Do this and you will get that. We are now getting that. That has inertia and can no longer be stopped and is non linear – which should be obvious by the recent leap in global temps.

Apneaman on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 1:58 pm 



Self-Reinforcing Feedback Loops (Part 2 of 3)
Updated frequently, and most recently 17 March 2016.

http://guymcpherson.com/climate-chaos/self-reinforcing-feedback-loops-3/

Positive feedback is a process that occurs in a feedback loop in which the effects of a small disturbance on a system include an increase in the magnitude of the perturbation.[1] That is, A produces more of B which in turn produces more of A.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback

PracticalMaina on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 2:16 pm 



Well Apneaman, people cant be expected to look out for the survival of the species right now….. they have very pressing issues, like college basketball brackets, or going to a presidential campaign to throw a sucker punch.

Apneaman on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 2:34 pm 



Practical, apes is freaking crazy and getting worse by the day. Even here in goody two shoes Canada the monkeys are doing crazy shit for quick dopamine hits.

Man hijacks transit bus to go to Tim Hortons

http://www.kingstonregion.com/news-story/6396519-man-hijacks-transit-bus-to-go-to-tim-hortons/#.VuwsjFjGFnM.facebook

PracticalMaina on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 2:38 pm 



Wow, another reason for electric trolleys, cant redirect the route very easily.

Apneaman on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 3:04 pm 



NOAA Agrees: February 2016 Was Earth’s Warmest Month in Recorded History

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/noaa-agrees-february-2016-was-earths-warmest-month-in-recorded-histo

Apneaman on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 3:10 pm 



Joe Romm: Hottest Winter On Record By Far Drives Devastating Weather Disasters Globally


“This extreme warmth — caused primarily by the accelerating human-caused global warming trend (with a boost from El Niño) — is a key reason a number of countries have already “set records for the all-time most expensive weather-related disaster in their nations’ history” this year, as meteorologist Jeff Masters has explained.”

http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.ca/2016/03/joe-romm-hottest-winter-on-record-by.html

Dredd on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 5:57 pm 



Not to mention the hot ice (Zone AL, Quadrant SW, Sub-quadrant SW).

makati1 on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 7:27 pm 



“We are a meaningless species living meaningless lives in a meaningless godless universe.”

Well put, Apneaman. We are so puffed up with our own self-importance, we cannot see that we are just an unimportant blip in a vast universe. Intelligence? What is that in the overall plan? Four plus billion years without it. A blip of time as the ape stood up and then destroyed his support system. Another four plus billion years until the sun goes nova and engulfs the planet. Done.

Food will be a problem. It already is for about a billion plus of us. Soon every one of us will be wondering where our next meal will be coming from. I stopped reading the article when I saw the source. Dreamers who may actually believe they can change the direction the species is heading if they write enough “should do” or “can change” articles. Bullshit! They need to take a few courses on psychology and see the error of their ideas/dreams. We are a herd stampeding toward the extinction precipice. A few may work to the outside of the herd and avoid the fall, but they too will not last long in the polluted, over heating world that is left. Not all of the dinosaurs died when the comet hit, but they did not last long after in the decimated world of that time.

Apneaman on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 7:59 pm 



mak, could we have made a meaningful world? Think of our super intelligence and all the great art and literature. Notice how the majority of it is from eras gone by? Who is a great man in these times? A fucking asshole like Steve Jobs. Big fucking whoop – he pushed a bunch of people to make portable tv/phone/computer combos. That’s greatness in this age. An E toy maker. All most all the core R&D was done by the MIC and paid for by a couple of generations of US taxpayers. Think of the great states men. Who we got today? Trump, Hillaray. Look at the culture – it’s decadence. Look at the people with no meaning other than mindless consuming. More consumption every generation and the depression, suicide, meaninglessness and loneliness marches in lock step with the corporate profits. Treating the human misery this culture produces is one of the most profitable industries ever. All this science and knowledge and technology and power and we have reduced ourselves to chasing the lowest common dopamine denominator. A society that is singly mindedly bent on unquestioningly consuming every single resource…MORE MORE MORE….. that’s all we do. What would you say to a child if he asked you what was the purpose of consuming the world for these plastic goodies and fake experiences? Is this it? Is this the peak of human achievement? This shit-hole dopamine addicted corporate consumer culture. Anyone please feel free to explain it to me.

Go Speed Racer on Fri, 18th Mar 2016 10:08 pm 



if there is a food shortage, do we have to cancel the food fights in the cafeteria?

Davy on Sat, 19th Mar 2016 7:33 am 



This Canadian has a great point but with iron wings. The real issue with food is not competition with the current system. That would be the case if we were not at the end of growth with limits and diminishing returns. If we had a bright prospering future ahead these ideas make sense as investments. The real issues is the addition of local permaculture to the mix as a way to integrate unemployed, displaced, and disenfranchised people into a new purposeful way of life. It is about mitigating food insecurity. It is about adapting to a world powering down and decaying where food insecurity and teaming masses of unemployed people helplessly struggle to find meaning.

We have Billions of people too many. That is the inconvenient truth to our predicament. If for some reason we had reached our limits of growth with 2BIL people we would have a very different problem ahead. If we had leadership with different motivations instead of corrupt global capitalism with a political industrial nexus things would be different. What we have now is a civilization that is overpopulated with unsustainable global support system based on consumption and global distribution. That will not end well in a world decaying and powering down.

We must manage what we have and include permaculture ideas into the mix. Our industrial agriculture is going to lose its ability to feed us which will mean food insecurity. People will lose tradition employment and need purpose. Climate change is going to change our abilities to grow things and where. We are going to have to include more animal and human power into this equation on smaller plots. Traditional inputs that kept soils healthy will have to return. Seasonal foods and local foods will be the norm not because that is better but because that is all we can afford. Traditional preparation and preservation will have to return because it is likely the grid is going to destabilize and industrial products to manage food will become unavailable.

It is a big unknown how the coming collapse will happen. There are so many possibilities. A quick one will rid us of the consumption issues and overpopulation relatively quickly. In 5 years population could easily drop by half. A hybrid world of slow collapse with a dying industrial civilization will be far different than a quick hard collapse. It is likely we will have a combination of events over time and in different locations according to the combination of risk factors and fate. Those who complain about and want a quick end to industrial agriculture with its globally dispersed monocultures should be honest with themselves about the consequences. Some here on this board relish the idea of massive loss of life. That is all they talk about indirectly of course and not their people but those they hate. The sad truth is there are no good choices. Some are better than others but all have tradeoffs. Slow loss of life will mean more climate destruction. Quick loss of life means a horrible end to industrial man. If your life is good now enjoy it because it will not last. We are all going to be faced with deprivations and loss.

techkno on Sat, 19th Mar 2016 5:52 pm 



The Fermi Paradox, offered by Enrico Fermi, physicist, who created the world’s first nuclear reactor asks the question, “Where are they?” He was referring to extraterrestrials. Ironically, he has been called the “architect’ of the nuclear age and the atomic bomb.
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization’s level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to utilize. Earthlings are almost a Type I civilization. Carl Sagan said 0.7. There could be Type II or even Type III civilizations which harness correspondingly more of the available energy from a host star or even a galaxy. But…”Where are they?”
It is speculated that a ‘filter’ exists through which life or sentient life either does or does not pass. An asteroid strike seems to have filtered out the dinosaurs. Are homo sapiens ‘filtering out’ ourselves with our technology, ie climate change, population overshoot, toxins, industrial food, radiation, weaponry etc.
The Drake Equation, N=R* x fp x ne x fe x fi x fc x L, tries to calculate the possible number of intelligent species capable of communicating across the vastness of space. SETI has not found them yet. So, “Where are they?”
The reason we aren’t visited by advanced extraterrestrials is that there are none. They got filtered out. Evolution is a universal constant. I think Darwin had it about right. But we need to factor in testosterone. That’s the chemical secret ingredient that made us ‘apes’ so successful. Sure the big brain and the opposeable thumb and walking upright helped. But with out the hostility, the acquisitiveness, and paternalistic societies we would not have procreated our numbers to 7 billion.
Having said that, I am not ready to give up. We can get thru this self imposed filter. The first task is to repudiate the GOP,(as in Republicans), the second task is to expose the Democrats for the collaborators that they are.
Then we need a new formula for a viable society. Think Green Party.

Apneaman on Sat, 19th Mar 2016 6:11 pm 



techkno, some good points. Good luck with your fight;)

New and troubling (for apes) research shows that the meteor was only part of the reason the dinosaurs went extinct. CO2 from volcanism is also to blame.

Double Catastrophe Wiped Out Dinosaurs: Deccan Traps Volcanism and Chicxulub Impact

“An international team of scientists from India and the United States has uncovered evidence that a massive comet or asteroid impact on Earth 66 million years ago accelerated the eruptions of volcanoes in what is now the Deccan Traps of India for thousands of years, and that together these two catastrophes wiped out the dinosaurs and many other groups of organisms.”

http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/science-deccan-traps-volcanism-chicxulub-impact-03299.html

http://news.berkeley.edu/2015/10/01/asteroid-impact-volcanism-were-one-two-punch-for-dinosaurs/

makati1 on Sat, 19th Mar 2016 8:10 pm 



Ap, we lost the chance to be great when WW1 made the US wealthy and it became arrogant. I do not know what the world would be like today had that not happened. We may actually have facilities on the moon and maybe Mars and be expanding out into the universe. We were given the mind and the resources to do so, but we took the greedy, power hungry path to our extinction instead. Who could have known that two bullets fired by a teenager in 1914 would lead to this?

It is too late to turn back. The resources are gone and the minds of too many are warped and channeled to our destruction to change. We allowed greed to take over and now the bill is coming due 100 years later. So be it.

Pass the popcorn.

bug on Sun, 20th Mar 2016 7:42 am 



Techno, good post.

Mak, you say we may have gone to the Moon and Mars and would have done great things
Without WW1. My feelings are that we would have screwed those place up also, and they would be militarized and economised/exploited like all else human touch.
Our DNA makes us do that, our DNA makes humans race to the cesspools.

makati1 on Sun, 20th Mar 2016 9:32 am 



bug, you can blame DNA, but it was our leaders who took us down the wrong road, and have kept us on it for the last 100 years.

bug on Sun, 20th Mar 2016 10:49 am 



Mak, do our leaders not have this dna?
Our leaders are the same as the garbage that votes for them, they same as the trash they lead.