Just a quick reply on this one, maybe elaborate later. As Wendy Wolford and I found in writing our book on the landless movement, the MST, in Brazil, poor farmers who are land reform beneficiaries have found farmers markets to be an ideal tool for them. It puts them producing a wide diversity of market-hedging products, gaining various kinds of value-added bonuses, avoiding intermediaries, and, last but not least, builds political support and understanding among urban consumers, many of whom have grotesque, media-built images of who the MST folk are. It has also made for building coalitions with other small farm and consumer groups.
Angus Wright Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies California State University, Sacramento -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Kai N. Lee Sent: Wed 1/31/2007 1:06 PM To: gep-ed@listserve1.allegheny.edu Subject: Vegan and Environmental Impact A fine conversation. Let me ask a GEP question: how scalable is local, agroecologically enlightened food? There is good news around us in the US, from farmers markets to the expansion of Whole Foods. Yet the latter is laden with ambiguities - as one can also see at Trader Joe's and the newly greening Wal-Mart. In a provocative and well-written essay called "Unhappy Meals," which appeared in last Sunday's New York Times magazine (still posted on nytimes.com), Michael Pollan urges Americans to pay more for their food. His point is that the proportion of income devoted to food has dropped by about half in the last two generations, and that there is abundant evidence that this has been a mixed blessing for both public health and the environment. Pollan also says, wistfully, that Americans would be better off thinking of food in terms of culture and community than as (cheap) fuel. Being a member of the wish-I-lived-in-Berkeley class, I of course agree with Pollan. But the gimlet-eyed social scientist wonders how self-absorbed all this talk seems to the rest of the world. Hence my query about whether as either social policy or smart business we have yet found the intellectually tractable center of this discussion. Maybe agroecologically enlightened food production is scalable: anyone have data? In Ghana a year ago, I saw billboards advertising rice grown in Texas and California, whose low prices (counting transportation across the seas) had decimated the poor farms of the west African interior. The marketable food fish in even the remote archipelagoes of Indonesia are virtually gone: a result of all the American money flowing from Wal-Mart into China. These are different issue of local food than the farmers market, but not less important ones. Cheers, Kai Kai N. Lee, Rosenburg Professor of environmental studies, Center for Environmental Studies, Williams College, Kellogg House, 41 Mission Park Drive, Williamstown MA 01267 USA. Voice & voicemail: 01 +413-597-2358; fax: 01+413-597-3489. http://www.williams.edu/ces/ces/people/klee/klee.htm
