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Comment by namdnay | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it do more to encourage local food production and consumption? Thus reducing pollution while at the same time boosting farm economies in poorer countries which were previously flooded by lower-cost imports from richer highly efficient food-producing countries?

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> Wouldn't it do more to encourage local food production and consumption? Thus reducing pollution

No, local food production increases pollution. The lowest pollution is obtained when food is grown in the climate most suited to it.

Transportation energy (or pollution) is absolutely minuscule compared to energy used in growing the food.

Optimizing for transportation costs in food production is a horrible idea from an environmental point of view, because the other costs so dwarf it as to make it utterly irrelevant.

Yes, absolutely. There's a reason that growing the food in another country and shipping it is still cheaper than growing it locally. All those energy costs get compounded together in the final cost of the product, and typically being cheaper means it cost less energy. (There are other factors that come into play of course, like farm subsidies.)

I agree that you need to grow food suitable for the climate you are in. How does this clash with local food production? If you locally grow food that is adapted to your climate, surely that's the best solution?

I have difficulty believing that eating imported pineapples in the UK pollutes less than eating local apples

> If you locally grow food that is adapted to your climate, surely that's the best solution?

So what you are saying is no one should eat bread in the UK? (The UK is not great at growing wheat.) I don't need to give a lot of examples, you get my point I hope.

> I have difficulty believing that eating imported pineapples in the UK pollutes less than eating local apples

Do apples grow well in the UK? Do you need lots of chemicals to grow them? (Pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer, etc, etc.) Do you need to spend a lot of time (i.e. energy) managing the trees, or do they just grow themself?

Importing a pineapple costs basically nothing (both in terms of energy and money). If growing a pineapple in HI uses less stuff than growing an apple in the UK, then yah, eating imported pineapples pollutes less. (I don't know if that's the case or not.)

It's easy enough to tell: Just compare the cost of the fruit (per weight).

Local food production is a noble goal. Just sort of hoping that some industries will fail and force people to grow food locally, or starve, is not a very good strategy for achieving that goal.

It's a delicate curve. Perhaps gradually increasing tariffs can support the actual increase of local production. Perhaps taxing oil consumption to subsidize poorer countries farmers is another way to go.

> Local food production is a noble goal.

As an end in itself? Why?

Me personally? Buying local food supports the local economy, providing some support for a local food supply. It's a little bit crazy, i know, but if something weird happened, at least some food could be sourced locally. Most farmland around me tends to get paved. So supporting local farmers helps a bit with wildlife habitat and gives rain a place to soak back into the aquifer. I can talk with farmers about what they spray on their food. Finally getting stuff right when its in season tastes really good. Sweet corn from the farmers market or the side of the road is just unreal about 1 week of the year. I can never quite catch that in the grocery store.

All else aside, none of that suggests that local food production would be a noble goal for anyone outside your area.

I completely agree with you!

> Wouldn't it do more to encourage local food production and consumption?

It would, only by making food more expensive -- specifically, by driving up the transportation costs so that the more-expensive-to-produce local food was competitive with less-expensive-to-produce imported food. This might be pleasing to those with an ideological preference that other people should eat locally, but the other effect is increased cost of living for everyone.

And leading us back to a time of poor nutrition for large parts of the world that currently rely on shipping to bring fresh and varied food.

Fresh food is better than preserved food, I won't argue that. But people got by with preserved food for a long, long time. We've gotten used to eating fruits and such out of season, but maybe that's going to get expensive again.

People lived without medicine for a long time too, I'm not sure if we want to live in those days though.

Which parts of the world would those be? From what I've read the problem is often the opposite - cheap grain imports from the USA destroying agricultural economies in Africa for example.

I really don't think there are large parts of the world that would not be viable through local agriculture.

Obviously, there will be islands etc for whom this isn't viable, but I doubt they were getting food by massive ships anyway.

Most of the northern hemisphere. You know, all those places where nothing grows for 6 months out of the year where prior to shipping food we had to rely on canned and preserved foods.

Come on... "Most of the northern hemisphere... where nothing grows for 6 months"? In northern finland maybe, due to lack of sunlight. They grow greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers all year round in the Netherlands, and cabbage, spinach, root vegetables can be grown in winter without heating.

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