Once upon a time everybody ate local food. No one called it that back then, of course. People just hunted, gathered, tilled the soil, and grazed livestock—all, for the most part, relatively close to home. But then small agricultural settlements grew into towns, towns grew into cities, and eventually the city became a place where you moved to get away from farming.
Covering the flat roofs and roof terraces of Bologna, Italy, with soil-free gardens could supply 12,000 tons of vegetables per year, or 77% of what the city’s inhabitants consume.
Lately we’ve come full circle, as the local food movement has reignited our interest in eating what’s produced nearby. A turning point came in 2001, when a study of food distribution systems in the midwestern US showed that produce travels 1,500 miles on average from farm to plate. That little statistical morsel focused major attention on “food miles” and the possibilities for reducing them.
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, so an interest in local food quickly morphs into a discussion of urban agriculture. But just how compatible is the landscape of modern cities with large-scale food production?
A smattering of studies, mostly in the United States, suggests that a lot of little vegetable plots can add up to something pretty major. In Cleveland, for example, converting 80 percent of every vacant lot to food production could supply about half of the produce, one-quarter of the poultry and eggs, and all of the honey consumed by the city’s residents.
Vacant lots are plentiful in Cleveland, a city that has been hit hard by both deindustrialization and the foreclosure crisis. But not all cities have so much slack. New York City requires between 162,000 and 232,000 acres to grow all its fruits and vegetables, according to an analysis by Columbia University’s Urban Design Lab. But it has only about 5,000 acres of suitable vacant land.
Producing a city’s entire food supply locally, not just its fruits and vegetables, gets even trickier. If all the grassy areas in Seattle—every lawn, public park, and soccer field—were pressed into agricultural service, they would yield crops (a combination of beets, squash, potatoes, carrots, dry beans, barley, kale, hazelnuts, and apples) sufficient to meet the total nutritional needs of just four percent of the city’s residents.
On a global scale, one-third of the urban footprint would be necessary to produce the vegetables consumed by urban dwellers. But this overall statistic hides a lot of variability: in some countries—such as Laos, Nigeria, and Cuba—the entire area covered by cities is smaller than the area required to grow vegetables for the urban population; other countries—such as the United States, Australia, and Brazil—could manage this feat on 10 percent or less of their urban land.
In general, denser cities will have more difficulty achieving food self-sufficiency. That means there’s a trade-off between different aspects of sustainability: a city can have high population density or lots of locally grown food, but probably not both. The old real estate adage that you can’t make more land applies here, although some people have tried getting around this constraint by proposing that we farm underground or in high-tech high-rises.
Looking up can also improve the picture somewhat. One analysis found that covering the flat roofs and roof terraces of Bologna, Italy, with soil-free gardens could supply 12,000 tons of vegetables per year, or 77 percent of what the city’s inhabitants consume.
Still, there might be more opportunities for old-fashioned, in-the-dirt farming in cities than we’ve yet realized. More than half the world’s urban residents live in small-to-medium-sized cities, which also tend to be less dense and therefore have more room for agricultural production compared to the biggest metropolises.
And maybe it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that at least 800 million people grow food in and around cities. Many of these people are poor, and growing a bit of supplemental produce can make a real difference to their economic and physical health.
In the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya, families who engage in sack gardening, a space-efficient method in which vegetables such as kale and Swiss chard are planted in soil-filled sacks, eat a wider variety of vegetables compared to other families. This is because they are able to both eat the vegetables they grow and use money earned from selling their crops to buy other foods.
Food production isn’t the only benefit of urban agriculture, either. Farms on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia, might provide a buffer to the bush fires that periodically threaten the city ; urban farms in Antananarivo, Madagascar, can also help with flood protection if they’re properly sited.
All of this suggests that the real question is not so much about food miles as about food security, and how the food system fits into a broader vision of a sustainable urban world.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.