Free The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers Page A

surveys I’ve seen, only about 5% of the consuming public will pay more for local, organic, or sustainably grown food. That
statistic is no surprise to my wife and me. We grow vegetable starts and flowers at our small greenhouse in rural Missouri. Our customers are extremely price sensitive: the fact that we are local and employ local people matters not a whit to our typical buyer. We survive by offering the newest varieties of flowers at competitive prices. We’ve tried to carry a line of heirloom tomatoes as well, but we’ve yet to have a repeat buyer. People will read an article trumpeting the wonderful taste of German Johnson or Brandywine tomatoes, buy a few, and lose them all to blight. The next year, they ask for hybrids with blight resistance.
    Now, other growers have had better experiences branding themselves as local and selling traditional varieties. After all, our part of Missouri is notably short on upscale, trendy consumers. We live in a farming community, where people are careful with their dollars. They typically grow the latest and most technologically advanced hybrids on their farms, and the thought of paying extra for a tomato variety that is more susceptible to disease and yields less strikes them as crazy.
    If local food is just a lifestyle choice made by people with money aplenty, and if the adherence to local food is the latest example of the human need to preen, why should a book like this one need to be written? Why, indeed, should we care what Michael Pollan eats for lunch?
    We should care because ideas have consequences. Many, many more people will pledge allegiance to the local food movement than will actually pay a premium in price or inconvenience for local food. They’ll support politicians who pay fealty to the latest trends and complain about conventional food to pollsters. Consumers and voters are willing to show support for local food while letting others pay the bill for their good intentions. The notions that the past was better, local is important, technology should be feared, and trade is bad are powerful, and extremely dangerous.
    After the January, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the biotech company Monsanto donated 475 tons of seed to Haitian farmers. Monsanto is not known for being nimble in its relations with the public, but the company made sure that none of the donated seed was genetically altered.
That gesture wasn’t enough; protests quickly erupted all over Haiti and the U.S. You would have thought Monsanto was passing out free cigarettes to teenagers. “Peasant groups” in Haiti marched under banners of “Down with GMO and hybrid seeds.” Hybridization has been around since Gregor Mendel experimented with peas in the 1850s. Hybrid crops have saved the lives of billions of hungry people. Farmers in the U.S. began adopting hybrid seeds in the 1920s, and hybrids have increased yields for every crop that lends itself to hybridization. Donating hybrid seeds is not exactly pushing the envelope of food or farming technology, but breeding and producing hybrid seed is a complicated process typically done by large firms and never by individual farmers. That was enough to set off the protests.
    The Organic Consumers of America sent 10,000 emails damning Monsanto. Doudou Pierre, the “grassroots” National Coordinating Committee Member of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security, said: “We’re for seeds that have never been touched by multinationals.” 1 U.S. writer Beverly Bell explains: “The Haitian social movement’s concern is not just about the dangers of chemicals and the possibility of future GMO imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local food for consumption, in what is called food sovereignty.” 2 Church groups in the U.S. donated some 13,300 machetes and 9,200 hoes to, I guess, encourage traditional agriculture in Haiti. It’s worth noting that