Does Local Production Improve Environmental and Health Outcomes?

Modern agriculture is increas­ ingly under attack by critics who blame the industry’s specialization and concentration for a number of societal problems, from global warming to rising health care costs. The critics contend that today’s industrial agriculture is too dependent on fossil fuel, and too eager to ply consumers with cheap but nutritionally bankrupt calories. Among the critics, locavores, like best-selling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan, and famed chef Alice Waters, advocate a communitybased food production system in which consumers buy goods that have travelled less than 150 miles from farm to fork. The rise of modern farming would seem to be one of the great successes of the last century. Propelled by the Green Revolution, agricultural productivity in the United States grew at an average 1.9% per year from 1948 to 1998, exceeding the rate of growth in the U.S. manufac­ turing sector. Similar productivity gains were achieved elsewhere around the world. A doubling of food production in the second half of the 20th century saved the world from mass starvation as its population doubled to six billion. Because of modern agriculture, farm­ ers were able to produce more food per person for more people—without expanding farmland or farm labor demand. In fact, 50 million acres of land were released from farming in the United States over the last half-century, and the percentage of the national workforce employed in agriculture fell from 16% to less than 2%. Norman Borlaug, consid­ ered the father of the Green Revolution, credits science with saving from conver­ sion to farming an area of land equal to the U.S. east of the Mississippi River. Critics of our current food system don’t deny these achievements. But they blame the transition to industrial farm­ ing for simultaneous increases in the amount of energy embedded in food products and heightened rates of obesity among the American public. The case against industrial agriculture has been articulated in major box-office draws like “Food, Inc.,” and “Supersize Me,” featured in cover stories for Time and the New York Times Magazine, and detailed in New York Times bestsellers by Pollan. Amid growing concern about climate change and health care costs, it has become almost conventional wisdom that the federal government’s farm pro­ gram has created a food production and marketing system that poorly serves societal interests and that new policy is needed to coordinate a return to our agricultural roots. Economic theory and empirical evidence suggest, however, that this new conventional wisdom may be quite wrong. This article considers whether a food system based on local production would improve outcomes in the key areas its proponents assert the current system lets us down: human health and environmental preservation.