“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”

James Hanley in reply to Rufus F. says:

Rufus,

See Erik’s comment here on buy local. I’m in full agreement with him.

As I see it, the buy local movement has two main threads, one about goods and the other about food. The goods thread is that we should buy locally so that the money stays in the local economy, presumably helping it to thrive. Sometimes people propose the use of local currency. Of course those communities that propose to keep all their money in their local economy would be royally screwed if every other community did that.–these folks don’t realize how many dollars flow into their community from elsewhere, and how hard they’d be hit if everyone followed this model. Essentially they’re implicitly arguing against the benefits of trade. (I could go on at length here about the difficulty of defining what’s “local enough,” and the meaninglessness of political boundaries vis a vis the gains from trade, but I’ll resist.) As economist Russ Roberts likes to say, “self sufficiency is the road to poverty.”

The food angle of buying local is less about boosting the local economy, and more about a mixture of environmentalism and concerns about “food security.” The environmentalist concern stems from the extensive use of transportation to move foodstuffs (a dairy near me here in Michigan ships all of its product to George, for example) and the not-always-environmentally-friendly practices of industrial-scale agriculture. As to transportation, assuming we’re not going to sacrifice things like bananas and oranges, transportation is actually less energy intensive than local production. As to industrial-scale agriculture, to a large extent that’s a problem of American agricultural policy–it’s not necessarily the outcome that a less manipulate market might produce (although there’s no doubt about the economies of scale of producing, say, corn or soybeans, where there’s no economic logic to buying a combine to operate an 80 acre farm).

The food security arguments I can’t quite parse; they seem to be based on a belief that the international transportation creates instabilities and risks, and that local production is more reliable and dependable. I can’t quite parse it because it seems so fundamentally illogical to me. We know that local agricultural disruptions occur with regularity around the world, mostly due to weather, sometimes to political violence. And we can that see famines happen where local disruptions coincide with poor connections to distribution systems, and don’t happen when local disruptions occur in places that are well-connected to distribution systems. (One of the most fascinating things I heard recently was about Wal Mart’s capacity, based on their thorough records of sales, to predict what supplies people would need and want after a weather disaster (those needs and wants both differ according to type of disaster and locale–southerners, for example, want Strawberry Poptarts; not just Poptarts, but strawberry flavored ones), and to get those things there quickly with their highly efficient distribution system.

I hope I coherently explained both what buy local means and what are my objections to the approach. None of that, of course, is to suggest that people ought not buy local. They should spend their money as they please (and who in their right mind can resist going to the local farmer’s market).Report