For the record — I believe in buying local as much as possible. On Saturday I went to the local farmer’s market and on Friday I went to the local market as opposed to going to Berkeley Bowl (which by the way I love) — buying local is importnat for our communities, for the planet and for our children’s health. Oh and btw — perhaps if we bought more local — we’d have less reason to spend $100 billion dollars a year on the war.

DON’T BUY RICHARD CONNIFF!

Richard Conniff’s thin polemic against the millions of Americans who are buying local is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s old yarns about trees polluting. His argument is provocative, contrarian, entertaining – and almost entirely wrong in the facts and the logic.

Why buy local? Most people are doing so, not to save carbon, but to save their economies. As I lay out in my book, “The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition,” local businesses (compared to nonlocals) are more reliable generators of local wealth and provide hedges against a catastrophic corporate departures (which communities become vulnerable to if they don’t prioritize the locals). The locals also attract tourists, retain the best and brightest (those who underlie Richard Florida’s “creative economy”), promote smart growth, improve social equality (see the studies of the late Tom Lyson from Cornell), and facilitate political participation. (Details are available in the free download, “A Letter to Bellingham,” at www.smallmart.org <http://www.smallmart.org/> .)

Most importantly, compared to nonlocal businesses, local firms generate far more income, wealth, jobs, and tax revenues per unit of business – often two to four times as much. A report released in San Francisco three weeks ago showed that a 10 percent shift of retail spending from chain to local would create 1,000 jobs and $200 million more in output. A study from Iowa State last September found that localizing an ethanol plant, because of the multiplier impacts, more than doubled the number of jobs created in Iowa.

Just buying local food can have tremendous economic benefits. In 2006, Professor Michael Hamm, at Michigan State University, found that a modest shift to local food purchasing in Michigan could increase net farm income by $164 million (16 percent), generate 1,889 jobs in the state, and augment statewide personal income by $187 million.

Richard Coniff understands none of this. Had he actually reviewed the literature on the subject, he never could have written that “the urge to buy local is often just a disguised version of the urge to punish someone foreign.” In fact, communities across the planet are underinvesting in and underspending on highly price-competitive local enterprises, and they are tossing precious money on expensive and unnecessary imports. That’s money that could be used for lots of other activities – including more trade. If I spend more on a global bank’s mortgage, rather than one from my credit union, I will no longer have thousands of my dollars that I might be able to spend importing wine from French and Italian farmers.

Conniff’s argument that buying local food hurts U.S. farmers also has no empirical basis. In fact, study after study has shown that those farmers who shift from producing global commodities to local niche products, who switch from global food chains to local distribution systems, can substantially boost their income.

One reason for this is that global food distribution has become remarkably inefficient. According to economist Stewart Smith from the University of Maine, every dollar spent on food today typically leaves seven cents in the hand of the farmer. More than 70 cents goes to distribution. Whenever production gets very small relative to distribution, localization – even if it means higher production costs – can cut total costs, because distribution costs are brought way down. Indeed, localization, done properly, puts more money into the pockets of farmers and consumers.

The inefficiency of global food distribution also underscores the fallacy of Conniff’s argument that buying local somehow increases greenhouse gas emissions – that New Zealand lamb “shipped to Europe [is] four times more energy-efficient than home-grown European lamb,” or that “sea freight can be surprisingly efficient, even from heavy manufactured goods.” The actual production and shipping of goods, together, are a tiny part of the overall cost, both in dollars and energy. What these arguments leave out are the costs of middle people, refrigeration, packaging, advertisers, truckers (after the sea freight), and so forth.

The Economistmade quite a splash a few months back with an article arguing, like Conniff, that local food was environmentally bad because its transportation was less efficient. That conclusion came from the work of Dr. Chris Foster at the Manchester Business School. Foster’s paper, in fact, was a summary of stale literature on the subject, most of it looking at inefficient, old local food distribution systems, and none of it taking into account the full range of carbon and other costs from today’s global food systems.

I wrote Dr. Foster about the basis for this conclusion, and he replied: “Dear Michael: We haven’t actually done a study of local food, although some media coverage of our recent work might suggest otherwise (but then, who believes what they read in the press?).” Apparently, Richard Conniff.

Conniff is right that local food can be done in an environmentally irresponsibly way – any decent activity can be done indecently. That doesn’t mean that local food is bad for the environment. It just means that buyers should be mindful of local, plus environmental performance, plus labor performance, and so forth. Most localvores, to use Jessica Prentice’s wonderful term, are mindful about this bigger picture.

What we do know, empirically, is that local food is more likely to be environmentally benign than nonlocal food, for several reasons. The ability of consumers to know, to inspect, to improve, and even to sue local farmers makes them far more trustworthy sources of food than agribusinesses in places like China where faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats can easily lie about their environmental performance with impunity. (This trust problem calls into question the supposed environmental benefits of Chinese compact-fluorescent light bulbs.) It defies logic, moreover, to believe that food shipped 15,000 miles will leave a smaller carbon footprint than food shipped 15 miles (especially once we rebuild local food distribution systems that chains have taken apart over the past generation). Every unnecessary mile that food travels invites contamination, nutritional deterioration, spoilage, sabotage, embargoes, and financial dislocations from rising oil prices.

The emerging worldwide “buy local” movement is really about smart consumer choices. The slogan being used in the 55 networks of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) is to “Think Local First.” Note that it’s not “Buy Local,” or “Buy Local at any Cost,” or “Buy Local or You Suck.” Thinking local first helps consumers pay attention to all the parts of a purchase – price, quality, durability, ecological impact, transaction costs, trustworthiness, and so forth. And what has become clear is that the more consumers know, the more likely they are to buy local, because what’s driving much of their nonlocal purchasing today is not smart shopping but dumb obedience to billions of dollars of big-box advertising.

(Michael Shuman, an economist and attorney, is the author of seven books, including “The Small-Mart Revolution” and “Going Local.”)

Michael Shuman
Vice President for Enterprise Development
Training & Development Corporation
202-669-1220
Shuman@igc.org
www.smallmart.org <http://www.smallmart.org/>

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Don’t Buy Local! <http://conniff.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/dont-buy-local/>
By Richard Conniff <http://conniff.blogs.nytimes.com/

A lot of people have begun to lose their appetite lately at the thought that their food travels, on average, 1,500 miles from farmer to dinner plate. Buying, instead, from local farmers looks increasingly appealing: We get fresher produce (and benediction from Alice Waters), while also preserving open space and protecting local jobs.

But what’s really lifted the “buy local” movement out of the foodie realm and into general public awareness is fear of climate change: It suddenly seems dangerously profligate that we spend 36 calories of fossil fuel energy transporting one calorie of California lettuce to a consumer in New York. Likewise that apples in a New England supermarket come from New Zealand, or potatoes in Ireland from Cyprus, or flowers in the Netherlands from Kenya. Carrying carbon to Newcastle seems to be among the chief functions of modern international trade.

So my first reaction was to think that buying local makes a lot of sense. And if it’s true for food, what about the pots we cook that food in, or the furniture we sit on, or the cars we drive to the supermarket? When does “Buy American” morph from jingoism to progressivism?

And yet buying local may not be the simple answer we’re looking for. For starters, it’s more likely to hurt American farmers than help them. Agriculture is one area where the United States still enjoys a trade surplus, amounting to $5.66 billion last year. But the “buy local” movement is strongest in Europe, where it got its start, and American agricultural products feature prominently among the targets.

The “local” label also says little or nothing about a product’s actual environmental friendliness. A resident of Sacramento, for instance, can take comfort in buying “local” rice, but it’s still likely to be rice grown in a heavily irrigated desert, at huge environmental cost. In the overall carbon footprint of a product, the cost of transport often turns out to be relatively trivial. For instance, a New Zealand study recently made the case that better conditions make lamb grown there and shipped to Europe four times more energy-efficient than home-grown European lamb.

The opposite is true for products that must be air-freighted, like flowers and certain fresh seafood; good sushi probably comes with a huge carbon footprint. But sea freight can be surprisingly efficient, even for heavy manufactured goods. I asked an environmental group, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, to calculate the cost of getting an average car from Tokyo to San Diego, and we were all surprised that it came to between 1,000 and 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s close to what the same car will typically produce every month for the rest of its driving life.

But how do you factor a product’s total carbon footprint into the debate over international trade? For instance, would it make sense to impose a carbon tax at our borders, so countries that fail to control their global warming emissions, like China and India, don’t get an unfair competitive advantage over countries that take global warming seriously? Great idea. Kyoto-signatory nations in Europe are already talking about taking that kind of stand–against the United States.

Or maybe we could piggyback on cap-and-trade systems like the one already functioning in Europe. These systems impose mandatory overall limits on global warming emissions within a nation or region, but allow businesses that do better at meeting targets to sell carbon credits to businesses that do worse. To enter a market with a cap-and-trade system, an importer would have to compensate for a product with a big carbon footprint by adding the cost of carbon credits into the price. Such a system would catch countries or individual manufacturers that refuse to act on global warming (again possibly including the United States).

But either the carbon tax or the credit system is likely to lead to years of litigation through the World Trade Organization, according to Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. That’s because the subtext in both approaches is confrontational and protectionist. Avoiding the us-and-them mindset and seeking collaborative solutions makes far more sense when scientists increasingly suggest that all of us together could soon be up to our knees in the rising consequences of global warming.

So where does all this leave the individual shopper trying to make good choices? Tesco, Britain’s largest retailer, is now working to put a “carbon label” on every product it sells. Instead of the comfortable illusion of environmentalism provided by the “buy local” idea, this label will detail the actual global warming cost of a product. And that will probably show that it makes sense to buy that compact fluorescent lightbulb, even if it was made in China. And, yes, the climate will probably be better off if you buy a Prius manufactured in Japan, not a Cadillac Escalade made in the United States.

Beneath the surface, the urge to buy local is often just a disguised version of the urge to punish someone foreign. But as a way to fix global warming, fretting about where your salad was grown is like thinking you can win a war by calling your sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.”