 Hi everyone and welcome to the latest episode I guess of Big Ideas Live. I'm Janet Nielsen, I'm your host and I'm actually on site today as if you uh if you normally watch you normally know that I'm uh I'm in one screen and my guest is in another but I'm actually at the University of Toronto, Mississauga with our guest today who's professor Pierre Derichet who's a associate professor of geography here and he's also the co-author with his wife of this great book The Local Forest Dilemma and if you've been paying attention to my emails you'll know that by attending tonight you are going to be entered into the draw to win one of five books and we're going to talk tonight about whether or not we can feed the world which I think is an important question so I guess we can get right into it and I wanted to start off with the question that I learned from the book which was or not it's not really a question it was sort of a lesson that I learned and I really liked I appreciated it in the book was when we're unhappy people a lot of people are unhappy with how we grow our food now but they kind of look at it as it is now and then say well we should go back to how it was but they don't ask why did we change things in the first place and I think that's a good question to ask so why don't we talk about why we grow our food the way we do now yeah of course no system is perfect and there's always room for improvement I mean after all the most sensible definition of progress you can think of is creating lesser problems than those that I assisted before and that's exactly what happened through the development of our modern food supply chain people tend to forget that you know you don't need to go back all that far in time but two centuries ago before the advent of the railroad and the steamship most of the food that people were eating was produced not even within a hundred miles of where they live but probably more something like 50 miles and that's because land transportation was so bad so yes if you lived in a coastal city you could import cod from Newfoundland but moving cereal grain over a land was very difficult so even for a city like Paris all the way up to the early 19th century most of the grain supply was really within 50 miles of the city but what happened then in the 19th century is that James Watt came along this steam engine came along and suddenly it became possible to move large quantities of food economically over long distances and so increasingly what happened is that people discovered that growing certain types of food in certain locations just made more sense than trying to grow everything close to you so people stopped producing most of their foods for themselves they stopped producing a lot of different things rather inefficiently close to where they live and they began to import food from locations that have better growing conditions for certain types of food yeah which is great um I that was like as I said one of my favorite lessons from the book um and we're going to get a little bit into economics here uh because something that I've noticed when people talk about local food is for instance in Canada the push for local food often comes from somewhere like uh British Columbia where they can grow a lot of things and in economics there are two concepts called absolute advantage and comparative advantage so BC especially um the the more fertile part the lower mainland yeah not not up in the mountains it's hard to grow things in the mountain but the lower mainland in BC you can grow almost everything and in somewhere like say uh sorry we've gotten a little bit Canadian we aren't we're let's say Berkeley the United States a lot of it came from Berkeley which is more close to the central valley of California and the the one region yeah valley and others so for sure whereas if you've got somewhere like Montana or somewhere like uh Moose Jossus Gatchewan I can almost guarantee that no one will ever get a box of strawberries that says grown in Moose Jossus Gatchewan but I mean maybe but why did that what why did that happen and I'm sure that you know if you haven't gone back in time maybe a hundred years ago perhaps some people were growing strawberries in greenhouses in Moose Jossus I have pictures that I use in some of my presentations of people growing cucumber near Minneapolis Minnesota and people used to have actually huge greenhouses close to uh large cities a century ago because it was the only way to get fresh produce I mean you could ship things like you know dry cod wine cereal grains over long distances but before the advent of modern preservation technologies refrigerations you actually had a lot of greenhouses around large cities but eventually even those disappear and why was that well think of it this way there are as Janet was saying both absolute and comparative advantages in growing food so yes if we cross the border here we're in Toronto there is a botanical garden in the Buffalo that was building about a century ago and they have a banana tree in there so you can grow a banana in Buffalo but why don't they grow more than just one banana why don't they have more than one banana tree well because it just doesn't make sense economically you need to heat the greenhouse yeah and this requires a lot of natural gas or electricity or I mean it's the same the building is a century old a lot of steam in that case so it just happens that you know a location like Guatemala or Honduras just has better conditions to grow bananas so this is basically what happened in North America people stopped producing things at expensively large greenhouses because they realized that you know upstate New York for example might be good at growing apples but for growing citrus fruit well Florida just has the better climate yeah and even if you look at orange production these days a lot of people don't realize that Florida produces oranges mostly for juice and processed food whereas the oranges that you find in your supermarket will come from California why is that well California has a drier climate you have less of a fungus problem they can produce higher quality products so even within areas that can grow oranges some are actually better than others yeah for growing certain things so this is really absolute advantage but then you've got this you've got other cases where you could grow where two regions which will be at different levels of economic development could grow the same type of food but in those cases what happens is that while in some places labor costs or the jobs that people can get will either make it attractive to work in producing the types of crops that require a lot of labor let's say produce but in other regions of the world people might have better opportunities they might be a bit better educated they might be able to design software to produce other things so in the case of comparative advantage some people have simply an advantage in specializing in certain things rather than others even though they might on the surface of it have the same type of agricultural conditions or physical geography conditions yeah and some examples we were talking a little bit about this beforehand we don't just dive into these things with you guys we do talk about it beforehand and so some examples well one that jumps to mind that we actually didn't talk about is coffee this is one of the reasons that people are very concerned about trying to get a better a better deal for coffee farmers is because coffee is extremely labor-intensive as far as I know that you just have to pick well actually no no there are two types of coffee there are two types they're Ravista and Arabica Ravista is the kind of a cheap one that is that comes from Brazil which is grown in flat plains and you can actually mechanize and make a nice production okay but the higher quality stuff the shade grown on hills and stuff is actually very labor-intensive and so yes okay so I used to work I used to work at a Starbucks and so to them all coffee must be done by hand but they don't use Ravista beans so yeah and another one that I had to study it in school was snow peas in Guatemala so you can probably grow snow peas just fine in California but the the American workers in California are probably not you know it's hard work to bend over and and pick peas in the quantities that you would need to supply an American for themselves yeah and and that's really what comparative advantage is about it's about the relative cost rather than the absolute cost so unfortunately hopefully one day this changes if you live on kind of the low the lowland mountains in Guatemala that's you're not giving up that much to become a snow pea farmer there you don't have that you're actually improving your standard yeah you don't have many other options whereas if you were a snow pea farmer in California you may be able to you might be more efficient at growing snow peas than people in Guatemala but you've got better yeah you can you can go work in in San Francisco or you could start a startup like everyone else in California and so that's kind of that's kind of the point is by taking advantage of the relative costs that's how we really make people better off and why in my opinion at least we should be a little bit less concerned about when our when our food comes from poor farmers the best way to improve things for them is to improve their their options let them as long as they're free to do what they want if they specialize in export crops it's probably because it is the best option available to them and again our ancestors used to be subsistence farmers they used to produce all their own food at one point they got out of farming or they specialized in one type of farming they improved their standards of living that way and that's how everybody's better off consumers got more food at a more affordable price and paradoxically by specializing in export crops those poor farmers even though they might not be paid much by North American standards are still earning a better living than the options that would be available to them in the absence the opportunity of exporting these foods and even though they're not growing their own food they have pretty constant access but then then now they have the money to buy food from people who are better than them at producing those other types of food yeah and so um i think it's a really important lesson to learn because it's a it's a little bit counter intuitive to think that you know really California they can grow a lot of food so why did they only specialize it well i mean they actually grow a lot of kinds of food but um why did they specialize at all yeah but California for example used to produce a lot of grain in the 19th century interesting but at one point in time the northern plains were open with the event of the railroad and so grain production shifted i'm talking about wheat and you know barley things like that shifted from California to places like north and south dakota and what farmers did in California rather than great bankrupt is that they began to grow citrus fruits and other things for which their soil and their climate was better suited and everybody was better off in the end the farmers in the dakotas were better producing wheat the farmers in california were better at producing citrus fruit and in the end both farmers could both get citrus fruit and wheat more cheaply than if the people in north dakota tried to grow citrus fruit in greenhouses and people in california to grow grain in an environment that was not as suitable as the dakotas well there is this notion that you can improve the lot of agricultural workers by paying them more to produce essentially the same product that they were that they would be trying to serve at the moment well there are two things i believe that fair trade advocates do not understand the first is that the best way to help agricultural workers is paradoxically to get them out of agriculture farmers in north america are wealthy because one percent of our population one or two percent of our population produces most of our food so the best way to to help an agricultural workers to make it more productive and you know to give them more machinery and more things to produce what they do but the thing is once you do that you don't need a lot of workers so the best way paradoxically to help a lot of migrant workers and less advanced economies is to provide them you know full-time well paid city jobs this is exactly what happened in a country like canada or the united states a century ago about 40 percent of the population was still involved in farming most of them were very poor and in time though better city jobs were created the people who remained in the countryside became much more productive this is why farmers today are relatively wealthy in north america and uh and this is why we have a huge middle class because people left the countryside to move to cities the other problem with fair trade is that i don't want to get into the technical details but there is a huge ideological dimension behind it so for example if you buy fair trade coffee it must typically come from a producer's cooperative which will not allow let's say for example children to work but the problem is that the less advanced economy like used to be the case in canada the school year is often scheduled around the harvest period of the main crop so for example in canada tante canada used to produce a lot of potatoes and the school year in atlantic canada was scheduled around the potato harvest meaning that the kids would be off school when they were needed to harvest potatoes okay and this is an income that the family really needs this is why it was scheduled around but fair trade often prevents the employment of children which provides supplemental income for the family that they often need but ultimately the problem with fair trade is that it's basically built on charity you're asked to pay more for what is often a lesser quality product rather than let the best producers spontaneously emerge and it's had to say but you don't build a thriving economy on charity so what this country needs is a real economic development better opportunities out of the countryside and let the people who will remain in the countryside become more productive yeah this is how we will really help people through free trade and specialization then other lines of work yeah and we could easily talk for an hour about all of those questions but um if anybody has more don't feel like you can't ask about fair trade just because i said that but i do have another question from phil so he says my friend says that the seller of an apple produced overseas and ships to america externalizes the cost of carbon dioxide emitted by transporting the apple can you comment on this yes uh well it's typically not true uh so prices are not perfect in the agricultural sector because if you have production subsidies we've got barriers to trade but you've got to ask yourself well we can produce decent apples in north america why do we see apples from new zealand chili or south africa at certain times of the year and as a geographer i will tell you that the main reason is latitude so in the northern atmosphere in the northern atmosphere we harvest our apples typically in september or october you want to eat them in april or may what do you do well you need to put them in cold storage and your iso2 concentrations there's a cost associated with that you will have some losses due to spoilage and so if you want to eat a north american apple in march or april there's a use of footprint associated with the storage and losses associated with storage now if you if you buy a new zealand apple in march or april what happens well in the southern hemisphere seasons are inverted so of course in north america we think of christmas as occurring in winter right but you go to new zealand it's the middle of their summer we do it all wrong exactly and so what happens if you buy a new zealand apple in march or april well it was probably on the tree like 10 days before right and so you don't have this huge footprint associated with storage the argument that it's environmentally better so there are a few reasons that people think this they think go on well there's one reason really it's transportation is a big one yeah and 95 percent of our transportation system is powered by fossil fuels yes so we see it's mostly obviously uh well you know diesel products bunker fuels and ships and so the idea is that well you know you burn fossil fuels you emit greenhouse gas emissions if you produce things closely well you don't need to move things over long distances and therefore it is better for the environment but the problem when you do that is that you you forget why historically agricultural productions began to move to other regions and that's because transportation is only a tiny tiny fraction of the overall environmental footprint of producing food so for example when you produce food well you might need irrigation water if you use green houses well you might need natural gas to eat the greenhouse you might need grow lights not just from marijuana but for all sorts of other things if you have a short day yes if you have a short day you need that yeah and so what happened in europe for example is that again historically people used to grow a lot of tomatoes in places like england in green houses but what happened over time is that uh the production naturally migrated along the mediterranean coast because now more irrigation water is available there and they have non-eated green houses which are the advantage of of course protecting the tomatoes from the elements the wind and other things but also keeping more humidity around the tomatoes so they get tremendous yields along the mediterranean coast and they need a lot less energy to produce a tomato than having to build a heated greenhouse in a place like england and so even though you might need to truck the tomatoes from spain to england the amount of fuel that you burn during that is much less than the amount of carbon fuels that you need to heat your greenhouse around well almost around england so this is only a one aspect if we're in ontario why don't we buy ontario tomatoes this is a lot of tomatoes are grown in ontario why don't we buy things here and then we have farmers in ontario and farmers have a good job and then they will spend money they will buy restaurants and they want a barista thank you and they'll have more money for the barista will then get a haircut and they will then you know exactly yes so what's the problem with that well the problem is that you should buy food based on price and quality so if you always try to best to get the best deal that you get in terms of food that leaves more money in your pocket to spend on other things so the problem well look at it this way okay we still do not import food from outer space as far as i may be wrong on that so good quality food will need to be produced somewhere and obviously at certain times of the year the best quality food will be produced close to where some people live so at certain times of the year it makes perfect sense to buy local food when it's in season i mean that's the best quality price ratio you can get go for it i don't have a problem with that the problem i have is when local food activists tell you well you should pay more for lesser quality in order to keep those inefficient farmers in business because again if you if you keep them in business then they will spend money locally and other people will benefit but if you do that if you pay more for less quality food then you have less money to pay for other things so suddenly you don't have the money to go to the movie theater if you still do that you cannot maybe you have to give up on the haircuts maybe you won't be so generous when you tip the barista if you can still afford starbucks so that's the thing you need to go beyond what is immediately visible so if local farmers give you the best quality price ratio at certain times of the year please then you're creating real wealth but if you're maintaining inefficient people in business then no it's a form of charity which is not really charity because in the end you're making everyone else better worse off people have to remember that the feminine malnutrition were defeated by one thing long distance transportation and that is because i think of it as edging your bets or spreading the risks of food production the more you rely on people all over the place the more it is likely that people in some regions will have very good years you know bumper crops while other people elsewhere will have very terrible years but if you can move a lot of food cheaply between locations then people who have good year can help people who have bad years but of course a few years on the road the people who have a terrible harvest might have a bumper crop while people like good years might have a bad harvest so food security historically was achieved by spreading the risk and delocalizing essentially food production i've put a couple of freeman articles the freeman is a publication of feed the foundation of economic education and it's the first one is called droughts famines and markets and the second one is called debunking the shop small saturday rationale if you go to fee.org which is our website you can just look them up and you'll find them very easily if you have any questions about anything we talked a bit about today or future events you can contact me my email is on the screen there at janielsonfee.org and i want to thank pier for appearing with us today and talking about these important topics if you have any other questions don't hesitate to let us know but for now we're going to sign off thanks guys