Roles of Rural Areas in Sustainable Food System Transformations Molly D. Anderson Email:
[email protected] Running Header: Sustainable Food System Transformations (Accepted for publication in Development Journal, 2016) Abstract: Rural areas and their people have not received appropriate appreciation for their necessary contributions to sustainable cities and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Food systems in rural and urban areas are undergoing major transformations, due to drivers that are not always affected by population density. The health and well-‐being of rural agroecosystems and communities are interlinked inextricably with the well-‐being, resilience and food security of cities. The goals of food sovereignty for autonomy, localized markets, political participation in decisions affecting producers and agroecological production will serve the right to food of both urban and rural people. Keywords: sustainable food system, rural transformation, food sovereignty, Sustainable Development Goals Introduction Rural areas are often defined by what they are not (i.e., urban) instead of what they are. For example, the US Department of Agriculture uses nine different ways to classify ‘rural’ in contrast to ‘metro’ (ERS, 2015), reflecting some ambiguity or vagueness in use of the term. Urban areas have been perceived for some time as having superior amenities, including education, cultural and employment opportunities, and health care. This perception has driven rural to urban migration over the past century at least, such that in 2014, 54 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas and by 2050, 66 percent is projected to be urban (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2014). The inevitability of increasing urbanization seems largely unquestioned, reflected in the presence of an entire Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 11) in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda devoted to cities: ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. The SDGs have little explicit to say about rural areas, although increasing focus and investment in cities is sure to rebound on the rural. Throughout more than two centuries since the Industrial Revolution, many people have written about the negative aspects of cities, such as crime, squalor, crowding, disease, poor air and water quality. Under development scenarios in which people are able to secure decent livelihoods and achieve human rights outside cities, rural areas may be preferred places. Health benefits of contact with nature and ‘green’ areas have only recently been documented (Bowler et al., 2010); and rural areas are richer in most natural amenities. In the US, there has been a trend of people moving back from cities to rural places upon retirement or as opportunities open to telecommute, although this flow is not sufficient to counteract declining birth rates, aging populations and out-‐migration from rural areas. In nearly half of US rural counties, more people moved out than in during every decade since 1950 (Cromartie et al., 2015). Globally, youth have fled from rural areas: many of the perceived amenities of cities are especially appealing to young people. The World Bank (2007) reported that youth are 40 percent more
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likely to migrate from rural areas or across urban areas than older people are. These trends have led to a ‘hollowing out’ of rural communities and aging farm populations. The viability of rural livelihoods is especially critical for farming and fishing communities, whose assets are often tied to rural areas. Migration to cities for people from these communities means abandoning land or traditional fishing territories, traditions, extended family, burial grounds, and the places where their skills and knowledge can best be converted to livelihoods. Livelihoods reliant on food production and processing, largely rural activities, have always been vulnerable to weather; but they are increasingly vulnerable to strategic decisions made in boardrooms far removed from any accountability to rural communities. Farmers and fishers have very little control over the prices that their products bring, and little say over land-‐grabs or ocean grabs that preclude their ability to continue accessing land and other resources on which their livelihoods depend. Yet retaining a vital rural population is in a country’s interest. Retraining rural migrants, building infrastructure and providing services for them are costly; the failure to provide such services has its own drawback of urban slums. Retaining the capacity to produce a significant amount of a country’s food provides a buffer against price volatility of global markets, demonstrated during the ‘food crisis’ of 2007-‐2008 when countries that had become net food importers were hardest hit. Slowing down migration by restoring options for decent livelihoods in rural areas, especially in the most rapidly urbanizing countries—India, China and Nigeria (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2014)—would reduce the sustainability challenges imposed by urbanization and help to ensure food security. What is therefore the future of rural areas? Are they the backwater in an unstoppable river of urbanization, flowing toward glittering and increasingly ‘sustainable’ cities? Or is the concept of city sustainability even possible, without thriving rural areas? The aim of this article is to explore the particular contributions that rural areas can make to sustainable food systems, and to argue that they deserve focused attention to avoid becoming the residue of sustainable-‐city initiatives. Cities are likely to meet their food needs most effectively and sustainably through the development of regional clusters comprising the surrounding rural and peri-‐urban areas, maintained and strengthened to mutual benefits with the urban area and not merely as periphery-‐core satellites. That is, based on the current challenges to sustainability, promoting further city development without concomitant rural investment is extremely short-‐sighted. The rural role in food systems today Food systems consist of all of the activities from the production of inputs (energy, seeds, fertilizer, etc.) to food consumption, including inputs and waste management from all activities and the regulatory mechanisms that determine how these activities are conducted. Food systems are constantly in flux in response to changing natural and social circumstances; and multiple food systems exist in parallel, with actors buying and selling from different systems. In a recent article (Anderson, 2015), I depicted a typology of food system ‘domains’ categorized by the extent to which they are globalized and responsive to multifunctional signals (i.e., demands for fairness, environmental quality, animal welfare, decent livelihoods, etc.). Using these dimensions, I distinguished four major types of food systems (Table 1):
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Table 1. Food system domains Focused primarily on making profits
Focused on achieving multiple outcomes Global I -‐ Global Industrial: Vertically integrated IV -‐ "Fair Trade": processors, distributors and retailers Triple-‐bottom-‐line certified products selling products grown under contract at that guarantee added values, sold the lowest cost possible to the highest globally paying customers Decentralized II -‐ Independent Commercial: III -‐ Local & Sustainable: Independent growers, processors, Independent producers, distributors and retailers selling their intermediaries and sales venues that products in whatever markets they can offer "value bundles" to their access, but generally out-‐competed from customers through short supply chains global markets Source: Anderson, 2015. The names of each domain depict the end-‐points of dimensions, and food systems may fall anywhere on the typology. So, for example, a regional retail chain may stock foods primarily sourced through global value chains (from the Global Industrial domain) yet also seek out local organic products (from the Local & Sustainable domain) to attract customers who want to support organic and local values. All food system activities can and do take place across the rural to urban spectrum, but population density (one of the primary ways of categorizing an area as rural) determines whether certain options are possible within each activity. Large-‐scale production of grains or slaughterhouses are not suited to urban areas because large undeveloped tracts are not available, property costs are high (as they are also in rural areas dependent on tourism) and neighbours are likely to object to smells and noise associated with agricultural activity. However, labour-‐intensive production of fruits and vegetables may be a good choice on abandoned or relic undeveloped tracts in urban and peri-‐urban areas, especially if people in the neighbourhood appreciate ‘local’ produce and buy it preferentially or have limited access to other markets. Global yields of urban and peri-‐urban fruit, vegetable and small animal production are high, estimated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (2007) to provide 15-‐20 percent of the world’s food. Rural areas are the places with the most potential for increased food production. They have also been the ‘sacrifice areas’ for the Global Industrial food system and extractive economies such as mining (Freudenberg, 1992). Especially when their populations are politically marginalized due to poverty or ethnicity, they are the places where wastes have been dumped and Confined Animal Feeding Operations (‘factory farms’) built. They bear the brunt of the Global Industrial system’s externalization of costs for the sake of efficiency. Rural areas can also be human sinks: places for people who cannot fit into the demands of modernization or the more rapid pace of city life. For international labour flows, rural areas in developing countries have been an essential source of labour, especially for jobs that citizens of industrialized countries do not want. For example, Mexican and Jamaican migrants in the US tend to work much harder than US natives and take jobs in harvesting and processing food that few US natives are willing to do, especially for minimum wages. Similar trends holds across
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western industrialized countries (Constant, 2014). Just as with the extraction of natural resources, labour flows from rural areas have been exploitative. Re-‐investment comes through remittances from family members who have taken jobs in industrialized countries; but the onus is on individuals to re-‐invest, not on the companies that benefit from cheap, compliant and often well-‐trained labour. Although rural areas are usually associated with production and processing, changes throughout the food system affect production and processing decisions. Those decisions are driven increasingly by global, not specifically rural, factors and trends. The drivers of the Global Industrial food system are neoliberal economic decisions, which have facilitated its externalization of environmental and social costs in a ruthless search for short-‐term profits. Drivers of food system transformation, and relationship with population density Major trends and factors driving changes in the food system can be separated into those internal to food system activities, and those arising outside the food system yet having impacts on it. Some drivers, such as climate change, are both internal and external (i.e., food system activities release significant amounts of greenhouse gases but production and productivity are adversely affected by climate change). Figure 1 shows the effects of some of these drivers, which lead to constant jockeying for market share among businesses that operate primarily in different domains. The arrows show by their thickness the relative strength of pressures pushing food system activities from the assumptions and standard operations of one domain into another. For example, the ability of global vertically-‐integrated supply chains (domain I) to source from wherever costs are lowest and sell wherever prices are highest gives them a strong advantage over the Independent Commercial domain (II); and the disappearance of local and regional infrastructure (independent packers, processors, distributors) means that growers have relatively few places to sell or process their crops and livestock. Thus, the Independent Commercial domain is being rapidly consumed by the Global Industrial domain’s growth. Greater concentration in every food system activity is a self-‐reinforcing trend: as the food system becomes more concentrated, with power vested in fewer and fewer hands, companies at the top use their influence to thwart anti-‐trust legislation and buy politicians who will not weaken their oligopoly. These measures help to lock in concentration. In the ’Fair Trade’ domain (IV), increasing competition among certifiers and standard systems are pushing companies into becoming more concentrated, while at the same time consumer demands for products certified to be organic, humanely raised, produced with fair wages to farmworkers or other guarantees of added value push actors in the Global Industrial domain to comply with new standard systems.
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Figure 1. Dynamics of food system domains (From Anderson 2015)
How does rurality fit into this typology? Although food needs of urban areas are increasingly serviced by a few global corporations in poor as well as wealthy countries (Tandon et al., 2011; Howard, 2016), the popularity of local products from rural areas and direct marketing between farmers and their customers has also grown in industrialized countries such as the US, where the shift to Big Food happened sooner. Sometimes this interest in local food is explicitly aimed at supporting local rural economies; sometimes it emerges because of fears about the quality of food and the cost-‐cutting practices used by global corporations in their quest for efficiency (Winter, 2003; Martinez et al., 2010). Local food systems, located toward the bottom of this diagram, have distinct advantages with respect to several of the drivers of food system transformation. Chief among these is climate change, with its associated water shortages and heat extremes. While the Global Industrial domain may seem more resilient to climate change due to its ability to source from anywhere, it depends on long supply chains that can break down in extreme weather events. Furthermore, without government subsidies for infrastructure (e.g., highways, trains) and fossil fuels to support those supply chains, the costs of transportation and handling the complex logistics of a global chain would be prohibitive. Other trends leading to food system transformation that lead to greater support for decentralized food systems are the rising prevalence of foodborne and animal vector-‐borne diseases with globalization (Kim, 2016) and growing interest in direct relationships between farmers and customers. In addition, there are interesting debates about whether small-‐scale localized farmers have greater innovation capacity than global corporations, with the claim
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made that the size of global corporations renders them rigid and unable to shift direction quickly, as well as being so focused on advertising or patent battles to maintain their market share that they have little to invest in research and development of truly new products and ways of meeting their customers’ tastes (Mooney, 2015; Reich, 2015). A final trend that reinforces the power of local food systems is the growth of social movements calling for food sovereignty, the antithesis in many ways of the Global Industrial domain. Central tenets of food sovereignty include decentralization, both through prioritizing local production and markets and by resisting global food trade. A food sovereign future for rural areas is likely to have networked but largely autonomous communities that provide for more of their own food needs and trade with other communities only for what they cannot produce. Other food system trends may benefit the Global Industrial food system disproportionately and hurt rural areas: resource constraints such as ‘peak soil’ and ‘peak water’ make rural resources more highly prized, and those with abundant financial and political capital can swoop in and appropriate resources from poor communities. Rising demands for meat among those who enjoy higher incomes, and the increasing popularity of luxury and convenience foods, are more cheaply met by a system with few compunctions about cutting corners on quality to offer lower prices. In the typology above, movement toward the right side generally means movement toward greater environmental and social sustainability. Food systems on that side function equally well under conditions of high and low population density. If anything, higher educational levels in urban zones would tend to favour awareness and support of multiple outcomes from food systems. However, retaining small-‐scale and mid-‐scale farmers on their farms, keeping youth on farms, and increasing the numbers of farmers are also goals in the public interest. Producers contribute to public goods of fulfilling the right to food through abundant high-‐quality, diverse foods for everyone; and producers using agroecological practices support biodiversity and environmental quality. The knowledge that farmers, pastoralists, fishers and gatherers have about their land, forest, or waters and what they can produce is irreplaceable and best shared from generation to generation or among peers. Therefore, movement toward the bottom of the typology also supports sustainable food systems. Rural role in transformations toward sustainability and the SDGs Sustainable food systems require healthy soil and clean water; skilled farmers and other food producers; secure intergenerational transfer of resources and knowledge and dispersed, decentralized food and energy production. This set of attributes is most likely to be found in rural areas. At the same time, stable markets that can pay prices that afford decent livelihoods for farmers are more likely to be found in areas with high population density. The urban and rural are fully complementary, not ‘modern’ and ‘backward’ or ‘future’ and ‘past’. Cities must have stable supplies of nutritious food, and despite various technological promises that seem to divorce food production from land, such as vertical farming or 3-‐D food printing, the strongest guarantee of reliable, nutritious food supplies is a healthy rural population with strong motivation to produce food. This means a guarantee of decent livelihoods (fair wages and good working conditions) in food system activities concentrated in rural areas, i.e., food production and processing. It also means autonomy and the right of rural people to determine their own
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future through political participation, rather than domination by the interests of urban populations. In short, it means movement toward food sovereignty. This is not the sort of future that the SDGs encompass or are likely to facilitate. Given the absence of a strong human rights foundation to the SDGs and the need to pass through a gauntlet of corporate interests to be approved, the rights of producers to stay on their land and gain decent livelihoods from food production and other food system activities are not highlighted. While food security and the eradication of hunger are very present in the SDGs, and commendably so, where the food comes from and how producers are compensated for it are not addressed. These are vital questions to producers and the social movements that represent them, but also to increasing numbers of consumers. They should be vital questions for those developing plans to implement the SDGs as well: small-‐scale farmers using agroecological practices can produce the food necessary for diversified, nutritious, sustainable diets, while protecting environmental resources from further degradation. Furthermore, small-‐scale producers make up over half of the world’s undernourished people at present (WFP, 2016; by creating incentives for agroecological production, removing the numerous disincentives and ensuring stable markets for producers in nearby cities (for example, by contracts with schools and other institutions), progress can be made toward several SDG goals simultaneously. This will require attention to synergies across goals and to the voices of small-‐scale producers, who seek decent livelihoods and control over their resources and future through food sovereignty. Stable markets and compensation that covers their cost of food production will go a long way toward making rural areas sufficiently attractive that they are not forsaken, especially by young people who are most likely to migrate to cities yet are desperately needed in rural areas as future producers of the cities’ food supply. References Anderson, Molly DelCarmen (2015) ‘The role of knowledge in building food security resilience across food system domains’, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 5(4): 543-‐559. Bowler, Diana E., Lisette M. Buyung-‐Ali, Teri M. Knight and Andrew S. Pullin (2010) ‘A systematic review of evidence for the added benefits to health of exposure to natural environments’, BMC Public Health 10(1): 456-‐466. Constant, Amelie (2014) ‘Do migrants take the jobs of native workers?’, IZA World of Labor 10: 1-‐10. http://wol.iza.org/articles/do-‐migrants-‐take-‐the-‐jobs-‐of-‐native-‐workers Cromartie, John, Christiane von Reichert and Ryan Arthun (2015) Factors affecting former residents' returning to rural communities. Economic Research Report No. ERR-‐185. US Department of Agriculture. Economic Research Service (ERS) (2015) Identifying nine rural definitions, http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-‐products/rural-‐definitions/data-‐documentation-‐and-‐ methods.aspx Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (2007) ‘Profitability and sustainability of urban and peri-‐urban agriculture’. Agriculture Management, Marketing and Finance Occasional Paper 19. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization. Freudenberg, William (1992) ‘Addictive economies: Extractive industries and vulnerable localities in a changing world economy’, Rural Sociology 57(3): 305-‐332. Howard, Philip H. (2016) Concentration and power in the food system: Who controls what we eat?, London: Bloomsbury Academic
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Kim, Anne (2016) ‘Lettuce pray’, Washington Monthly January/February. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/januaryfebruary_2016/features/lettuce_pr ay059158.php?page=all Martinez, Steve, Michael Hand, Michelle Da Pra, Susan Pollack, Katherine Ralston, Travis Smith, Stephen Vogel, Shellye Clark, Luanne Lohr, Sarah Low and Constance Newman (2010) Local food systems: concepts, impacts, and issues, Economic Research Report No. 97, US Department of Agriculture. Mooney, Pat (2015) Mega-‐mergers in the Global Agricultural Inputs Sector. Webinar Presentation by ETCGroup. Reich, Robert B. (2015) Saving Capitalism for the Many, Not the Few, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Tandon, Sharod, Maurice R. Landes and Andrea Woolverton (2011) ‘The Expansion of Modern Grocery Retailing and Trade in Developing Countries’, Economic Research Report No. 122. US Department of Agriculture. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2014) World urbanization prospects: The 2014 revision. ST/ESA/SER.A/352. Winter, Michael (2003) ‘Embeddedness, the new food economy and defensive localism’, Journal of Rural Studies 19(1): 23-‐32. World Bank (2007) World development report 2007: Development and the next generation, Washington, DC: The World Bank. World Food Project (WFP) (2016) Who Are the Hungry?, http://www.wfp.org/hunger/who-‐are.
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