Putting a value on the human effort in our stuff

Picking up on the urban migration thread, I’ve been researching what’s been driving that mass exodus from the world’s rural areas. In my travels, I came across The Story of Stuff, which I highly recommend. I love it for giving such a succinct explanation of such a huge and complex subject, for the wonderful way in which it’s presented (I wish more corporate presentations looked like this), and for the way it’s promoting grass-roots distribution of the message. In it, Annie Leonard explains the linear processes which determine where the stuff in our lives comes from and where it goes: extraction > production > distribution > consumption > disposal.

Our rate of consumption of Earth’s natural resources (in the past three decades, we consumed one-third of the planet’s resource base) is clearly unsustainable. And as multinational mining companies start moving into undeveloped and developing countries to exploit their resources, we’re now subjecting the inhabitants of those countries, in a much deeper and more significant way, to globalised economics. It’s no longer viable for them to sustain themselves off the land, and they are forced to work in mines and to move on to factories in urban centres to manufacture the products.

In developed countries, the economics of food production mean that the land simply cannot support small, specialist farms any longer. Instead, agriculture is an industry, the vast majority of it conducted on a terrifyingly huge industrial scale. (If you haven’t heard of Concentrated Animal-Feeding Operations or CAFOs, read this horrifying article by Raj Patel from The Observer Food Monthly, which explains them from about half-way down.) And so, even in developed countries, people are still emigrating from rural areas to urban conurbations.

As Leonard points out, the problem with this chain is that it’s not a cycle – it’s linear. We keep on taking good clean stuff out of the ground, but only putting toxic stuff back. (Even in agriculture, we’re taking the nutrients out of the ground and putting synthetic chemical fertilisers in, instead.) It’s totally unsustainable. And until we break the way that most consumers in developed (and increasingly in developing) countries see consumption as a means of fulfilment, we’ll never break the chain. We need to get back to valuing the human effort in the things we surround ourselves with. Good old artisan-crafted, high-skill, low-intensity local production.

Feeding our supercities

Have you seen 19.20.21.org? If not, take a look.



It’s an interesting, and well-presented, exposition of what it calls the “defining megatrend of the 21st century”: that by 2050 more than two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, up from 50% of the global population right now. And in 1900, it was only 3% of the global population. Have a look at the timeline provided on 19.20.21.org.

Aside from the fact that it’s a fairly staggering rate of growth, why does it matter? I’ve recently been learning the answer to that, in Carolyn Steel’s outstanding book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, in which she explores the historical relationship between cities and their sources of food, and projects an increasingly despairing future. As she says, there is an inherent contradiction in cities because they “shelter us but can’t sustain us”.

It was manageable when the scale of cities meant that the peripheral farming belt was able to produce sufficient quantities of food, distributed quickly enough, to feed the cities. But as cities have grown, their inhabitants have become reliant on an increasingly fragile distribution network to move food fast enough to get to us. And in the process, we’ve been put at the mercy of the global economics of supply chain management, and just-in-time processes.

These processes are the reason why when you or I go to Sainsbury’s or Choices or Wal-Mart, and find that there’s no more of our preferred brand of washing powder on the shelves, the sales assistants always answer that there’s no more in the back. Supermarkets don’t keep stocks in the backs of their stores any longer; they use those areas for cargo unloading. Instead, when their Point-of-Sales machines register that they’ve sold x items, they trigger an automatic stock re-fill request to the nearest distribution centre (probably somewhere between 50 and 100 miles away if you’re in the UK), and that item will be sent on a truck with whatever else is low in stock.

That might sound fairly reasonable, until you imagine the impact of some disruption to the distribution chain. It actually happened in Britain during the fuel strike in the summer of 2000. Those hauliers didn’t know how close they were to winning that battle; in fact they were only a matter of two or three days away: Britain was on the verge of nationwide food shortages precisely because supermarkets keep no stock. The huge quantities of food backed up in the distribution centres and simply could not get to the supermarkets – the points of sale. You can terrify yourself some more about what almost happened in 2000, and the other uncomfortable processes that supermarkets run in Felicity Lawrence’s excellent book, Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate.

So now, with an even greater exodus to cities, how secure is the future for city inhabitants and the food that they eat? The answer is: not very. Government no longer has any control over it. So unless you feel comfortable with putting Lee Scott (President and CEO of Wal-Mart) in charge of your food security, you might want to start informing yourself.

Food production, distribution and security seems a pretty glaring oversight on the list of things the 19.20.21.org project is going to consider.