Can CEE traditions help to correct the world's gross food imbalances?
By Nathan Johnson
The political and economic changes taking place in Central and Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union have touched practically every walk of life for people living in the region, and one of the most radical changes involves how food is grown, procured, distributed and sold. Despite the fact that the Western 'supermarket model' has spread quickly throughout CEE, intensifying global food shortages and recently leaked concerns that biofuels production is to blame for sharply escalating food prices should be clear signals that existing models related to food production, distribution and consumption are seriously, even fatally, flawed.
Photo: Flickr
Something to chew on
A World Bank study leaked to the media in early July revealed that biofuel production is to blame for pushing up global food prices by roughly 75 percent, far higher than earlier estimates. Reacting to recent surges in agricultural commodities, the World Food Program's Josette Sheeran has already warned of an impending "tsunami of hunger," while European MPs quickly agreed in July to slash bloc-wide biofuel targets from 10 percent of transport fuels by 2020 to just 4 percent by 2015.
The reduced target levels and Sheeran's stark metaphor are just two hints at the magnitude of the global food crisis. With more than 6 billion people on the planet, the United Nations estimates that nearly 1 billion suffer from chronic hunger. But even this number "leaves out those suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition," claims Fred Magdoff, professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Vermont in Burlington. "The total number of food insecure people who are malnourished or lacking critical nutrients is probably closer to 3 billion — about half of humanity."
Magdoff, in a recently published article in the Monthly Review titled The World Food Crisis: Sources and Solutions, outlines some of the principle reasons behind today's soaring food prices. The first is "related directly or indirectly to the increase in petroleum prices." Developed ostensibly to lessen the dependence on petroleum products, the use of food crops such as corn (for ethanol), soybeans and palm oil (for diesel fuel) clearly means that less food is produced and distributed for human consumption. Bloomberg, for example, estimates that roughly one-third of the US corn crop will be used to produce ethanol over the next decade.
According to the New York Times, a second reason is increased demand for meat in Latin America and Asia — China especially — driving upward the prices of corn, soybeans and soy cooking oil, demand for which has risen sharply to feed cattle, pigs and poultry. In fact, global per capita meat consumption has more than doubled since 1961.
Magdoff highlights a third important reason: Key countries that were formerly self-sufficient in terms of food are now importing food in large quantities, namely, China and India. Part of the net food loss in these countries is that farmland (primarily used to grow rice) is being given over to development projects.
Hyper-activity
Central and Eastern Europeans, generally wealthier and in far less immediate danger from food shortages than many other nations and populations around the world, are witnessing a rapid diffusion of supermarket and hypermarket-based retailing networks, a trend that began in earnest in the mid 1990s. The first wave of supermarket expansion in the region took place in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, and accounted for 40 to 50 percent of food retailing in these countries within a decade. The region's second supermarket wave broke over Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia, where the share of supermarket-based food retailing stood at 25 to 30 percent in 2004 but is growing rapidly. Income and urbanisation conditions in Eastern Europe existed for the region's third wave to have risen earlier, but policy reforms lagged; as a result, supermarket-based food retailing was as low as 10 percent in Russia in 2004 but the country has since emerged as a top FDI destination, according to the Journal of Agricultural and Development Economics.
Supermarket retailing is closely identified with notions of progress and development in the post-communist era, but not everyone believes that everything from bygone days deserves to vanish like the dodo.
"Rocketing oil prices and security of supply has raised big questions about intensive food production that relies on long transport chains," Joe Smith, senior lecturer in Geography at The Open University, told Green Horizon. "The supermarket model so successfully exported to CEE has severely damaged the ecological, economic and social sustainability of regional food systems."
Petr Jehlicka, another geography lecturer at the Open University, has carried out extensive work with Smith in both Poland and the Czech Republic concerning traditional and evolving food practices. The pair are critical of government/NGO environmental policies and approaches that fail to properly take into account the popularity and potential of traditional food procurement practices in these countries.
"[CEE] countries could lead the way in demonstrating how different approaches to food can greatly reduce the environmental impact and insecurity of supermarket-driven systems," Smith said. "The region sustains grow-your-own and barter traditions alongside other locally based food systems that should be nurtured.
Encouraging the expansion of [these practices] could see CEE countries lead the world in sustainable food."
The researchers argue in one study, An Unsustainable State: Contrasting Food Practices and State Policies in the Czech Republic, that much of today's 'sustainable environment' literature focuses on responsible and informed consumption, and tends to be "dismissive of ideas of restraint and restriction" and voluntary simplicity. Hence there is an "abundance of useful information on a range of issues framed by the current neoliberal discourse on sustainable consumption such as fair trade, organic food and air miles."
This is not to suggest that Smith and Jehlicka resist such market options and practices, which they do view as complementary to self-provisioning, etc; they do point out, however, that "both fair trade and organic food remain negligible phenomena in Czech society" in terms of money spent. Czech citizens, for example, spent only a little more than EUR 200,000 on fair trade products in 2006, while just 0.06 percent of food sold in the country in 2003 was organically produced, according to the researchers.
There's no place like home
CEE countries, despite the rapid shift away from Soviet-era policies, are uniquely positioned to teach some valuable lessons to the 'free-market West' that were learned through decades spent in 'economies of shortage.'
Another Smith and Jehlicka study, Stories around Food, Politics and Change in Poland and the Czech Republic, explores some of the "diverse responses to 'transition' that are resistant or alternative to dominant narratives of linear progression towards Western 'normality.'"
The authors claim that "in the years preceding the political changes of 1989, there were widely shared practices of thrift and self-reliance at the individual household level in many spheres of everyday life in CEE countries." Some of these practices included self-provisioning and barter, and originated from government policies that resulted either in "high costs or unavailability of fresh fruit and vegetables."
Another factor was that state-related work, if undemanding or unfulfilling, allowed many people the leisure time necessary to grow their own food, and to share or trade edibles with friends and neighbours.
It would seem that expanded consumer choice in a market-based economy is inimical to self-provisioning and barter, but other market and cultural forces to consider are that urban populations are pursuing higher incomes and have less free time, and that there are more households with two working parents. Also, rapid expansion of car ownership, along with improved infrastructure provision (water, electricity), has converted many former smallholdings into private dwellings.
But contrary to expectations, "suburbanization and the growth of supermarket shopping [in the Czech Republic] has not eradicated widespread systems and self-provisioning" (Food Stories). A Smith and
Jehlicka survey from 2005 revealed that 41.5 percent of Czechs sampled used a garden or allotment to produce fruit or vegetables for personal consumption. Another surprise is that economics do not appear to be the primary motivating factor. In fact, those Czechs with the highest living standards are more likely to grow their own food (43.6 percent) than those with the lowest (35 percent).
A provocative case study like this shows, in Smith and Jehlicka's own words, "how official discourses of sustainability [have] ignored culturally and historically embedded, socially widespread and largely non-market practices. This is despite the fact that they are closely compatible with ideas of sustainable consumption as reduced or lower consumption."
Circumstances demand that we must seek ways to tackle the world's pressing food shortages and environmental threats. For many people in Central and Eastern Europe, some of the best answers might lie just outside the front door.
