On Farm, Food and Business: Home Cooking in the Global Village

1 On Farm, Food and Business: Home Cooking in the Global Village Richard Wilk Indiana University From Crisis to a New Convergence of Agriculture, Agri-Food and Health A Workshop sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation November 7-9, 2008 Montreal I know over the next two days we are going to be talking about important problems and issues, but often in very abstract ways. I want to take this time to put a more personal and human face on global food issues, by talking about my experience working over the last 35 years in one tiny part of the planet, which is at the same time completely unique and typical in facing the dilemmas of the 21st century. Its always hard to talk at this point in dinner, especially if you have an unappetizing message. But if I do take some of your appetite away at the beginning, I hope to restore it in time for desert. Belize is an ex British colony, perching on the Caribbean edge of the Central American mainland. After the indigenous Mayan people were conquered by the Spanish, the area was settled by Buccaneers and pirates, the first of many immigrant groups, who give it today a population of less than 350,000. Founded mainly as a logging colony, Belize was from the very beginning a country which imported much of its food, depending on high value exports to pay the bill. When I started working in Southern Belize in 1976 it was isolated and out of the way, populated mostly by Qeqchi Maya people living a very self-sufficient life in small villages scattered through the rainforest. I had the privilege of spending a year living in one community, where I learned how their complex subsistence system worked, how they grew 52 different food crops in an annual cycle, hunting and gathering which was the quintessence of ‘sustainability’ even though we didn’t know it because the word had not been invented yet. Over the years since then I have watched this way of life has slowly collapse, as Qeqchi people have gradually learned to become consumers, switching to cash crops like rice, cacao and even marijuana to get 2 the cash to buy a host of new consumer goods, build new houses (which they find uncomfortable..), And their diet has quickly changed to include many processed and packaged foods which are now widely available in town and in a network of village shops. Yes, they are selling their corn to buy coca cola, but his is not just a matter of being brainwashed, or having bad taste, or making poor nutritional choices out of ignorance. The family and community networks which used to restrain and channel consumption are falling apart. And more to the point, imported packaged food and other products are cheap and convenient, and people now need to spend their time growing cash crops and working jobs to get the money to provide education, health care, transportation and utilities for their families. But over the last two decades they are working harder and harder, and they seem to be getting less for it, as prices constantly go up. They keep trying new cash crops, and migrating farther to find better pay, and gradually the accumulated knowledge and skills, and even the seeds which made their way of life resilient, reliable, and sustainable are being lost. This is paralleled at a larger scale in the country as a whole. When the timber ran out, sugar, citrus and cattle became the keys to export prosperity, and large export enterprises popped up around the country. But prices were low, and export agriculture could not pay the bills. I spent a good part of the 1980s working on a series of agricultural development projects with USAID, intended to introduce new cash crops, both as exports, and in the hope of reducing the import bill by making the country more self-sufficient in basic foods. Shrimp and bananas were the success stories of the 1990s. And there have been some big success stories in import substitution, particularly in chicken and fresh meat, and we passed something of a milestone in 1985 when for the first time in history, the country produced enough rice to feed itself. But the top part of this graph shows the terrible weakness in this strategy, for while we were out working to satisfy the country’s appetite, people no longer really wanted to eat local food at all. For example, wheat product imports kept going up. 3 Yes, exports surged and agriculture was modernized, especially in the 90s with a lot of direct foreign investment, business friendly tax policies, and financial deregulation. Rural and urban incomes have soared. And as we know, when incomes rise people develop new tastes, for packaged, processed food, and more dairy and meat products. And as you can see, the import bill for these products is going higher and higher. It is not just that local agriculture cannot keep up. There are two things driving this economy into ruin. First is that the prices of the machinery, fuel and chemicals for agriculture are going up faster than the prices of their export crops, so they are on an export treadmill which is running faster while their pace is getting slower. The second treadmill is that people are developing tastes for new food products at such a rate that the small local and regional food processing industry cannot hope to keep up. These people get 160 channels of TV from the USA by satellite, and over 80% of adults have been to the US or another rich country. They want to be able to go into their local supermarket to pick from 50 flavors of yoghurt. They don’t want to go to the market for some fresh callaloo – they want a pack of frozen vegetables they can throw in the microwave. So this fish exporting country imports frozen salmon. This country full of vegetable farmers looking for somewhere to sell their produce imports frozen spinach and broccoli. While fruit all over the country falls to the ground and rots, people buy canned fruit salad from Hawaii. This picture tells the whole sad story of food self-sufficiency in Belize. It is from the freezer cabinet in a small rural store. Below you have local beef, frozen in a processing plant USAID helped build in the 1980s – isn’t that great that we now have the infrastructure to freeze and distribute local beef. But in the meantime, we have started importing all these new convenience foods like frozen pizza – Now that food has become a consumer good like any other, a fashion item, people want to be global citizens, they want to enjoy the flavors of the world, to be sophisticated, to enjoy their new income with some exotic treats. So it is not just the sustainable food production system which is falling apart, it is intimately connected to a transformation of taste away from local food. The story does not end there, though. It does not have to end this way. And strangely enough the glimmers of hope are coming from the very same forces of economic globalization which seem to be causing the problem in the first place, 4 One of the places Belizean migrants go in large numbers looking for work is the USA, particularly LA, Florida and Chicago. And thrown into this incredible diverse stew of immigrants in the USA Belizeans discovered their national distinction – they were not going to be Jamaicans or generic Caribbean’s. They pulled their expatriate communities together around restaurants, and in the 1980 when nobody was looking they developed a national cuisine which was an object of intense love and pride. And I was there in the 1990s when some of these successful migrants went home, and for the first time opened Belizean restaurants in Belize. Over the last twenty years the interest in Belizean cuisine has been growing at a rapid pace. The first cookbooks were actually funded by CARE and written with the help of peace corps volunteers, but they have become more professional to feed a growing appetite for real Belizean food. And strange as it may seem the other place where we find a growing appetite for local food is in the tourist sector, which has been the only industry growing at a rate which can keep the economy growing and pay for all those imports. In ten years they went from zero cruise ship passengers to almost one million per year coming to this tiny place to be loaded up on busses to see the rainforest and reef. Nature is what people want to see, and it turns out that nature is also what they want to eat. Especially the high end ecotourists who are the preferred customers, since they spread their dollars out to smaller villages and towns. You can always tell the ecotourists because they wear khaki pants. And all over the country people are experimenting with adapting what they have – local foodstuffs and traditional modes of cooking (here is a Mayan family that has opened an ecotourism lodge, serving Mayan dishes adapted to tourist tastes)– to feed tourists who are hungry for something other than generic thai curry or Italian pasta. Just like Belizeans themselves who are starting to realize that local cuisine may be a cultural treasure, a kind of comparative advantage in a global marketplace which is awash with generic merchandise. I would argue that in the new global economy, it is exactly these kinds of cultural specificities which are the most precious form of capital, the only thing which can never be produced more cheaply somewhere else. But I have to say, when you look at this menu, you can tell we are just at the very beginning of a process of reconnecting what people eat to the local economy of food production. One area where a lot of help is needed is in turning Belizean food into a real commercial cuisine, with recipes that can be scaled up to feed a whole boatload of tourists. There are hundreds of local recipes and ingredients which nobody has yet tried 5 to commercialize, to educate younger Belizeans as well as tourists in the wonderful things which grow on local farms. So far, despite the best efforts of pioneers like the Chun Family, there is no market system which makes local products available to them. If they want local fish, they have to find a fisherman and buy from him direct. If you are running a restaurant kitchen, you buy your fish frozen from the wholesaler, and it probably comes from Thailand or Guyana. The whole infrastructure was built to get imported food from the boat to the retailer – not from farmer to market. Farmers markets are small and disorganized, and full of imported vegetables. I have been learning some of these lessons directly over the last year as I have started working with a Mayan high school in southern Belize which wants to start a business turning their organic cacao into chocolate candy for the local and tourist market. Belize produces some of the best cacao in the world, but it imports all its chocolate candy. There is a ready market, and there is definitely a taste – Belizeans are no longer going to turn up their noses at local chocolate to buy an imported bar. But it has to be a uniform high quality product, that is well packaged. And this is where we hit one of the missing pieces. Belize desperately needs technical assistance in developing small scale food processing, quality control, and packaging, machinery and equipment which is scaled right for the country, not the huge canning and freezing plants which are commercially available in a continent-sized country like the USA. We need technologies based on the principles of the new industrial economy –flexibility customization, small batches and quality – rather than the old vision of the mass produced assembly line. For too long our research and development money has been spent on improving efficiencies to scale – we need to turn around and bring some of the same technological efficiencies to small producers to reinvigorate the rural economy, give people a reason to continue growing their own local specialties. We are starting to do it here in the rich countries. Do we have to totally destroy the remaining sustainable farm economies in poor countries, or can we leapfrog forward to a rural economy which is reconnected to consumers in a way which builds healthy bodies as well as healthy communities. My sense is that the realignment and convergence that can make this possible is underway, and I am looking forward to hearing your ideas about how to make it happen over the next two days. What is lacking to connect these tastes to a reinvigorated rural economy are the tools and technologies of food processing, quality control, and packaging at a small and appropriate scale, And in a countr y where 6 the whole food infrastructure is organized to import and distribute, we need a new market infrastructure to get food from processors to consumers. so the value added goes to the people who need it most. A new paradigm is needed to make this happen, which brings expertise and interest in new ways - public and private, agriculture and cuisine, production, processing and marketing. Those new alignments are what this workshop is all about, and I am looking forward to learning how we can move forward to a sustainable food system which reconnects consumer and producers in new ways.