The gist of it: approximately half of Detroit is sitting empty. It’s a food desert in perhaps the bleakest sense of the term: there is not a single chain grocery store left within the city limits. Given the obvious economic depression of the city, I suspect that locally-owned grocers are few and far between; most residents don’t have many options besides convenience stores for food.

Really, the answer is obvious, and both entrepreneurs and local food activists are proposing to turn the empty property into productive farms. (The bafflement of the sub-heading is that the article only very obliquely, if at all, covers conflict between activists and entrepreneurs. One presumes that the entrepreneurs are interested in factory farms?)

I, not surprisingly, am on the side of turning the empty land into community garden-style farms:

His D-Town Farm spans two acres of city parkland on Detroit’s western edge, where little bungalows with rusted awnings still line wide streets and a faded ice cream truck does laps of the yellowing boulevard. The volunteer team running it sells its leafy greens and radishes to local restaurants and farmers markets. Next year, it plans to hire two permanent employees.

“We’re trying to create an economic model, to show how agriculture could contribute to the economic recovery of Detroit,” Malini says, pushing into the brush to reveal a plastic greenhouse where oyster mushrooms will soon grow.

That model doesn’t include agribusiness. Replacing General Motors with Cargill isn’t the answer, he says.

“We’re activists. We’re concerned with the health, vitality and well-being of the black community generally. This is one part of a larger picture. So any proposal that brings in the corporate sector and disempowers community is problematic for us,” says Yakini, who spearheaded the just-formed Detroit Food Policy Council. “We’re much more in favour of smaller scale community-operated projects where people themselves have a vested interest and profit from the sale of the produce.”

Right on. No reason the farms shouldn’t be profitable to the people who operate them – but the profits should stay in the community, and the people who are working the farm should have control over what they grow and where it goes. And it should be accessible to them. Seems to me that the benefits would be much more immediate and tangible, and there would be benefits like this:

A woman up the street started sending her foster kids to help, and a movement was born. Covington erected four white boards to show movies on Saturday nights. He brought in chairs for reading sessions. He started a backpack program and hosted a harvest dinner for 90 neighbours.

Last year, he bought his old teacher’s home and the derelict store next door for $1 from the city, and $4,000 in back taxes. He plans to refurbish it into a community centre.

Looks at least some of the people in Detroit have a fantastic idea for how to rebuild their communities and their city as a whole. The article talks about the idea of planning for shrinking cities in recognition that nothing lasts (or grows) forever, and notes that North America really has no tradition of that kind of planning. I hope that Detroit’s municipal government is willing to get behind this plan.

An Agitator thread about Norman Borlaug and this op-ed from the LA Times have both been simmering away at the back of my mind, melding with the first week’s readings, to help shape some of those thoughts.

The op-ed (by Charlotte Allen) blasts Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book Cheap (which, to be fair, I have not read, though I have read a number of the other authors discussed in the article), and much of the article is concerned with food; specifically, the fact that right now in North America, food is cheap and on average, households spend a much lower percentage of their income on their food (though that average is key). However, Allen caricatures her opponents (Alice Waters and Michael Pollan, for example). She notes that they feel that food is under-priced, and then accuses them of wanting others to impoverish themselves, but ignores the rather important question of why they feel food is “too cheap.” By doing so, Allen demolishes a strawman quite nicely, but she certainly hasn’t convinced me that Waters and Pollan – and, presumably, Shell – are a bunch of elitist snobs trying to stomp down the poor in the name of foodie culture.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko posted a bit of a tribute to the late Norman Borlaug, who was one of the innovators of the “green revolution”. For those who don’t know, the green revolution encompasses a number of new developments in agriculture, including synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and hybrid high-yield crops. This is a significant challenge to the neo-Malthusian perspective; the green revolution makes it very clear that food production will not be inevitably outstripped by population growth.

The story of modern-day cheap food and the green revolution are deeply connected, and as is noted in the Agitator thread (by myself, among others), this is not an entirely bad thing. I’m an environmentalist, and I’m not an optimist of the Julian Simon school of thought; I do believe that the Earth is finite (although the limits are, to some extent, elastic), and I think that the human population will have to be limited in the long run, though I think the only way for that will work is if it’s voluntary. However, in the short run, whether or not we believe that the planet is over-populated, it is not right that people should starve if we can prevent it. And right now, we can, and industrial agriculture made that possible, both by increasing the food supply and lowering food prices. Garrett Hardin’s lifeboat metaphor is one of the foulest ideas I’ve ever heard associated with environmentalism, and criticizing industrial agriculture for enabling population growth without widespread starvation skirts dangerously close to that way of thinking.

That said, industrial agriculture should not be immune to criticism. What Charlotte Allen – and Radley Balko – overlook is that although industrializing agriculture made food prices lower in part through economies of scale and greater productivity, it also created a number of negative externalities. Tegtmeier and Duffy (2004), for example, examined the costs of soil erosion, water and air pollution, biodiversity loss, and human health impacts from conventional agriculture, and suggested that in total, 5 – 16.9 billion dollars are spent annually in the US to pay for the consequences of industrial agriculture. Those numbers are large, but they might be a reasonable price to pay to prevent hunger. However, the problems for which Tegtmeier and Duffy are evaluating costs are not static; for example, erosion imposes an annual cost, but the annual cost will go up as arable land is reduced and soil fertility is lost. When I go to the grocery store and buy a pint of strawberries that were grown on a conventional farm on the other side of the continent, I do not pay those extra costs. Society – and the surrounding environment – does.

We will pay those costs eventually – unless we take a critical look at industrial agriculture. Critical assessment doesn’t mean that we deny that industrial agriculture has helped people; it means we work to assess the unintended consequences to both environmental and human health, and look for alternative practices that can stave off those consequences while retaining the advantages. And there’s my Julian Simon moment – I think that there is plenty of evidence that with enough political will, sustainable agricultural practices can be implemented, and they do not mean either a low-productivity agriculture that will not feed our population, or a return to individual subsistence agriculture. Criticizing industrial agriculture for its well-documented environmental and health consequences does not mean that one must necessarily take an abhorrent moral stance with regard to the human population and our well-being.