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The blame being put on modern agriculture for America's growing rates of obesity and obesity-related illnesses is misdirected, according to Steven Sexton, a University of California-Berkeley Ph.D. student in the department of agricultural and resource economics.
Sexton, who published an article on the welfare effects of "locavorism" (the preference to eat locally grown foods), believes a local food system would greatly increase costs of food production by imposing constraints on resource allocations, thereby directly affecting consumer welfare through higher food costs.
Since fresh produce consumption typically rises as income rises, Sexton said locavorism would effectively make consumers poorer. As a result, he said, they would sacrifice health and diet.
While it may be beneficial from a health policy perspective to increase the relative cost of grains to reduce the surfeit of cheap calories, Sexton said it is not clear that locavorism would accomplish this unless cost increases were biased toward grains.
Instead, he said the inefficiencies of reallocating food production are likely to be greater for high-value crops like fruits and vegetables so that, if anything, local food production would disproportionately raise the prices of the very foods that should become cheaper from a health policy perspective.
Second, Sexton believes locavorism would block access to fresh produce for millions of Americans who live in climates that cannot, for many months per year, grow fruits and vegetables outside of climate-controlled, energy-intensive greenhouses. Such a lack of access to fresh produce would impede health objectives, he noted.
Also, Sexton said, the argument that flawed public policy has fueled the industrialization of agriculture and produced a glut of cheap but nutrient-deficient calories by subsidizing major commodities like corn and wheat is simply not right.
He pointed out that agricultural economists overwhelmingly reject the notion that farm policy is to blame for the obesity epidemic in America and that while grains have become relatively cheaper, sugar has become more expensive as a result of current policy.
In Sexton's opinion, the obesity epidemic is more directly related to technological innovation that has made labor less strenuous and food products cheaper, meaning people are eating more but burning fewer calories.
Real benefits?
Some critics of modern agriculture have asserted that an alternative food production system would improve environmental and health outcomes, but the University of California-Berkeley analysis shows that the benefits of locavorism are unlikely to be as substantial as asserted, and it is possible that any benefits would be dwarfed by the costs of less-efficient production and reduced access to nutritious foods.
Sexton, who is behind the work, believes the debate about the future of agriculture must weigh the uncertain potential for environmental improvements under local production with the more certain risk to vulnerable populations.
"With the global population expected to grow to more than 9 billion by 2050, today we face a challenge to feed the world, much as we did 60 years ago. The sources of tremendous productivity growth in the past, however, are largely exhausted, at least in the developed world, and the rate of productivity growth has begun to decline. If mass starvation is to be avoided in the current century, then we must either forsake natural land -- including tropical forests -- or renew our commitment to crop science," Sexton said.
Modern food production often gets blamed for increased energy use, public health issues such as obesity and climate change. Critics currently appear to be targeting the federal government's farm program, which they said improperly rewards farmers based on production levels instead of such things as energy conservation.
Sexton pointed out that farms have become increasingly more specialized, with the result being a reduction in the average number of commodities produced per farm, which, in 1900, would have been five but today is 1.5.
The use of soil enhancements and damage control agents has risen throughout the years. Likewise, specialization and trade have increased demand for energy to transport crops and food products to buyers. Sexton estimated that today's fresh produce travels an average of 1,500 miles from the farm to the consumer.
"As a consequence of the energy demands throughout the supply chain, agriculture consumes 14% of the national energy budget. Transportation of food products alone consumes 5%," Sexton noted.
Advocates of locavorism say food production must be transformed to one characterized by small farms growing multiple crops that market directly to consumers and local retailers and that this type of food production system would be better from an environmental standpoint.
According to Sexton, reducing food transportation miles and increasing biological control of pests and soil fertility would reduce the carbon intensity of food production, but doing so risks a return to historical farm yields.
In the 1930s, the average farmer produced 13 bu. of wheat and 20 bu. of corn per acre. In contrast, today's farms, which number 2.2 million and occupy an average of 414 acres, are able to produce an average of 44 bu. of wheat and 164 bu. of corn per acre.
"While it is surely true that a small, diverse farm today can improve upon the yields of the early- to mid-20th century by employing modern seed varieties and other scale-neutral innovations, it is certainly also true that high yields today reflect modern agriculture's exploitation of two basic principles of economic efficiency that the locavores either ignore or discount: comparative advantage and economies of scale," Sexton said. "It is the inability of a local food system to exploit these forces that could render it a net contributor to global warming and environmental damage rather than a net reducer." | 
