19 Dec 2004
Think Globally, Eat Locally

The essay, by Jennifer Wilkins of Cornell, is absolutely spot-on as to the cause of our agricultural problems. And the effects she discusses can be seen by any of us, every day. Read this thing. Read it all. Here's a teaser:

The United States is importing more and more food, and not just from the Middle East (which actually accounts for only 0.4 percent of our food imports). Tomatoes from Mexico, grapes from Chile and beef from Brazil are standard fare on American tables. The Department of Agriculture reports that in 2005, our nation will fail to record an agricultural surplus for the first time in 50 years, demonstrating our rising dependency on foreign agricultural production and distribution systems that may not be safe.

But they are cheaper! Remember the movie Forrest Gump? We once had a thriving shrimp fishery on the Gulf Coast - offering reasonable pay to the fishermen and providing a bounty of delicious seagoing bugs for Americans to snarf down. It's been destroyed.

I was browsing yesterday for a plate of peeled shrimp to take to our Mother Night celebration last night. These usually run around $8 or $9 here, and have somewhere between 20 and 30 cocktail size shrimp. I could not find a single one that was not labelled "Product of Vietnam" or "Product of Thailand". And the price was around $7 - a little bit cheaper than has been the norm. Why?

Well, first off, none of the packaging was inspected by the USDA, or any governmental body, even a Southeast Asian one. I know from personal experience that this kind of governmental inspection provides a more rigorous packing enviroment for cleanliness, and therefore public health. It also costs a bit more.

Secondly, while the Vietnamese fishermen may be well paid for their labors by the standards of their society, they get a pittance in terms of Western hard currency. Their employer pays no social security tax, and may manage to evade taxes altogether, given the lax enforcement in that area of the world.

There are no limits on catches, and no limits on hours worked. And the enviromental regulations that govern these operations are relaxed, to say the least.

And our fishermen are supposed to compete with them, on this "level playing field" that is "Free Trade". They are supposed to overcome all of the obstacles in their way: not just those cast by the sea, but those cast by OSHA, the IRS, Social Security, Medicare, unions, and enviromental regulations. They can't do it. And when a business can't compete, it closes.

We have two choices, and only two. We can either stop the charade known as "Free Trade", until the rest of the world plays by our rules, or we can abandon our standard of living and play by their rules. Because the "middle path" that we're attempting to follow, insisting that our companies follow our rules rigourously while ignoring the conditions under which goods are produced abroad, is leading to our own destruction.

And not just our economic destruction, as Ms. Wilkins points out. How easy is it to tamper with an uninspected, foreign food product? The former Secretary of Health and Human Services thinks it wouldn't be too difficult at all ...

When Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, announced this month that he was resigning, he made an unexpected comment: "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do." He added, "We are importing a lot of food from the Middle East, and it would be easy to tamper with that."

(link) [New York Times]

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