Pork Chop Politics

Much to my dismay, the Atlantic Monthly has taken its web content out of the public domain. Alas. Well, the article you should be able to read online but no longer can is about pork. And agriculture. And a little about something I've had on my mind.

Since I read the paper copy, let me just share with you one of the article's central premises - that new forms of sustainable agriculture, being led by organizations such as Niman Ranch, produce products of superior quality and inferior quantity that is worthy of some kind of premium.

First, let me share an experience of this pork connoisseur:

Not long ago I found myself in a New York City hotel room reaching for slice after slice of leftover roast pork. I had brought it with me on the plane after a dinner at Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, held in part to honor Laughing Stock Farm, where the meat had been produced. ... Alone in my room, I concentrated fully on what seemed to be a new kind of meat. Its creamy texture and deep flavor were distantly familiar. I wondered which meat it tasted like as I kept eating, enjoying the fat as much as the lean. As the last piece disappeared, I remembered: pork - the kind I had first tasted in Italy, dispensed from roadside trailers in slices on bland, puffy rolls.

The secret of this pork's success, of course, is that the pigs were "naturally" raised. The farmer was making goat cheese and, in true farming fashion, was feeding the leftover whey to his pigs. The combination of a normal piggy diet with a normal piggy lifestyle had produced normal piggy meat. This wonderful flesh is contrasted to the product of farm-ranching which both strives to boost the "leanness" of its meat and fails to pay attention to its flavor:

When last I wrote about pork, it was the very lean pork the industry had spent decades developing for consumers worried about fat. The cooks I talked to were almost uniformly in despair over 'the other white meat.' Bring back the old pork! they cried.

Now, I don't mention this because of any great love of pork (though here is a recipe for pork cookies). I mention it because I want to discuss shrimp. Well, not exactly.

For this, I have another firewalled article in mind, about the struggles of Louisiana shrimperies. Apparently the shrimp industry is struggling against the recent inflow of farm-raised shrimp from Southeast Asia. According to the Economist, the response has been an intense lobbying effort to impose steep tariffs on shrimp coming from abroad. As the Economist points out, an alternative solution that the Louisanans don't seem to have explored is the idea of going "premium" by demanding more money for "wild-caught Caribbean shrimp".

Which could bring me to the Oakland Farmer's Market where really great local grown vegetables can be had from my local farmers.

All of this is, and a great number of other agricultural examples to boot are the material preconditions of my real topic, which is the subject of free-trade in agriculture.

I believe that America's agricultural subsidies are both wrong-headed and destructive. This belief rests upon two pillars, with one buttressing counterargument.

The first pillar is a simple economic one. It is wildly inefficient for the United States to be one of the largest agricultural producers in the world. Even before Bush sowed the fields with another $600 billion in subsidy, America has been forced to protect its agricultural industry with lavish subsidies and punishing tariffs. The reason why we throw up these distortive barriers is that, quite frankly, it costs more to produce food in the United States than it does elsewhere. Even with all our efficiencies, and all the mega-farms stretching from horizon to horizon, American agriculture gets creamed by its competitors. Cotton, sugar, soya, garlic, shrimp, catfish, beef, pork, and on and on and on.

The side effect of these policies is damaging in two ways. First, for Americans, food is more expensive than it would otherwise be. Now, if you think raising the cost of every sugared good for 240 million Americans is worth preserving a few thousand jobs in Florida, then so be it. I don't think that's the case. Jobs come, jobs go. Take it from me! Nothing "incentivizes" a person to find a job like losing one!

Secondly, the developing world is denied an export market for one of the products it can produce at the lowest cost. Moreover, the loss of agricultural markets is devastating to the poor. Unlike mineral resources and what-not, agriculture is a field which naturally disperses its proceeds widely across the populace, rather than dumping it directly into corrupt government coffers. If you're anything like me, you've probably come to believe that the capacity for individuals to accumulate capital is a necessary prerequisite for development, entrepeneurship, and material improvement. People accumulate capital by trading something they have (or can produce) for something someone else needs. Furthermore, the absence of a market for the developing world's agricultural products drives people in the developing world off of the land. They head to the cities, where infrastructure is inadequate and employment is negligible to (in many cases) scrape out difficult lives in the squalid capitals and conurbations of the Third World. I could go into greater detail about all this, but I fear I've already taken too much of your time. The simple point is that broad-based access to a source of livelihood is denied to millions throughout the world because the market in global agriculture is as fucked up as it is.

But Geoff! you might cry. If you eliminate all subsidies and tariffs on agricultural products, you would knock the legs out of American food security! A nation must produce its own food so that, in the event of a disruption to global commerce, there won't be famine!

Um.

Well, enter the premium market. When I was in college, I took a course on sustainable agriculture. The professor was a practicing farmer whose enthusiasm for the subject surpassed his academic rigor. But just because it was easy, doesn't mean it wasn't also educational. One of his big issues was topsoil erosion. It's a well-known secret, that most of American agriculture is practiced as large-scale monoculture. Monculture is the growing of a single crop on a plot of land again and again. The problem with monoculture is that different crops require different levels and kinds of nutrients, and the same crop planted again and again tends to yield diminishing returns over time, because that crops "special needs" are most heavily taxed. A rotating system tends to diversify the "drain" of resources, and also to diversify the "reinvestment" of resources into the soil (especially mixed with sane fertilization and composting practices). Wind erosion (the blowing of top soil off of the fields) is also greatly helped by rotating annuals and perennials in the same soil. A pernnial grows for several years in a row, whereas an annual has to be replanted year after year. Perennials can restore the soil by leaving root matter to biodegrade, and they hold the soil down better than annuals do. So, again, a sane farmer would generally adopt a long-term rotation cycle which has at least one perennial in it. If said farmer keeps a herd of cows, he can even practice HRM (holistic range management) techniques, and try giving that poor field a couple of years as "wild growth" and turning it over to the cows for pasturage.

The point is merely that a diversified and sustainable agricultural practice (read: inefficient) tends to minimize the environmental stresses of agriculture.

All of this is, needless to say, far more expensive than the contemporary system in place.

The one compensatory benefit, however, is it yields MUCH better food.

Which is where we get to my vision of an agricultural utopia. First of all, the developing world is capable of producing enough food for the world, and using techniques which, though not necessarily environmentally kosher, are still less destructive (on the whole) than many modern American practices. Small-holders can produce "normal" food, and the deep discount in the value of their labor relative to that of an American would make their food drastically cheaper.

Meanwhile, American agriculture need not be "devastated" in return. American mass agriculture would probably (read: hopefully) be destroyed. But if all the food in the supermaket were goods of less than perfect freshness (on account of production and the shipping times needed to deliver it to transoceanic markets), the most noticeable difference to the American consumer would still be the drastically lower price. And since the price of basic commodities would fall so much, it stands to reason that there would be at least some amount of disposable income available for buying the dramatically fresher and higher quality products of a much smaller-scale American agriculture.

Which is the long way of saying that, from a demotic perspective, I can't see any compelling reason not to liberalize the trade in agricultural products. It seems like it would be good for the developing world, it would be good for the American consumer, it would be good for American agriculture (if we presume that small-scale sustainable agriculture is preferable to large-scale environmental rape agriculture), and it would in all likelihood make better food available...

Just a thought, at any rate...