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Local Food and International Ethics

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Abstract

Many advocate practices of ‘local food’ or ‘locavorism’ as a partial solution to the injustices and unsustainability of contemporary food systems. I think that there is much to be said in favor of local food movements, but these virtues are insufficient to immunize locavorism from criticism. In particular, three duties of international ethics—beneficence, repair and fairness—may provide reasons for constraining the developed world’s permissible pursuit of local food. A complete account of why (and how) the fulfillment of these duties constrains locavorism will require extensive empirical evidence about the relationship between agricultural demand-led industrialization, international trade (rules), and local food practices. In this paper I can only gesture at some of this evidence and, for that reason, my policy prescriptions are merely provisional. Instead, the upshot of this paper is that advocates of locavorism ought to be attentive to the empirical-dependence of the moral permissibility of their projects. As local food ‘scales up’—and comes to be embraced as a goal of political communities—these concerns should receive even greater attention.

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Notes

  1. For a helpful taxonomy of local food practices and movements, see Werkheiser and Noll (2013).

  2. Of course, duties of international ethics are not the only source of constraints upon the permissible pursuit of local food. For example, my duty to provide for my child’s basic needs prohibits me from spending hundreds of dollars on locally grown vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes if doing so would leave me unable to purchase her school supplies.

  3. I leave aside questions about international egalitarianism, i.e. whether the existence of transnational inequalities (of wealth, income, etc.) is evidence of injustice. Even if international inequality is not unjust in itself, non-egalitarian international ethical duties may generate significant constraints on the permissible pursuit of local food.

  4. Of course, historical and ongoing relationships help to determine which parties one is most able to assist.

  5. On the economics of international trade, see Krugman et al (2012); Hoekman and Kostecki (2009).

  6. To be clear, ADLI is a transitional strategy. It makes it possible for developing societies to develop more diverse (and stable) economies.

  7. For some discussion of this point, and of what follows, see Wade (2004); Vos (2012).

  8. Note, though, that Kurjanska and Risse (2008, 48–9) admit that Fair Trade may sometimes be a sensible development strategy, and that we often cannot know when it will (or will not be) a sensible strategy.

  9. One way to resist the conclusions that I draw from Singer’s account of beneficence is to assert that at least some of the developed world’s local food practices produce goods that are morally comparable to the goods produced through ADLI. For example, consider the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) (http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/). The mission of this group is “to build self-reliance, food security and food justice in Detroit’s Black community by influencing public policy, engaging in urban agriculture, promoting healthy eating, encouraging co-operative buying, and directing youth towards careers in food-related fields.” In the context of the broader public’s abandonment of inner-city Detroit, and in the absence of healthy food options for the people of the city, the goods that the DBCFSN pursues seem to be of ‘comparable moral importance’ to the alleviation of $2/day poverty in other countries.

  10. I take these terms from Barry and Øverland (2012).

  11. Another worry is that agricultural subsidies may improve the conditions of the poorest members of food-importing societies, e.g. by making imported food cheaper. See e.g. Kurjanska and Risse (2008). However, even if some of the world's poor are made better off by the developed world's protectionism, there is good evidence that tariffs, subsidies, and other protectionist trade policies are bad for the global poor in the aggregate.

  12. If Pogge is right, then some forms of institutional unfairness can be described as (contributions to) harms. But there are two reasons why this possibility presents no problem for my views. First, if Pogge is correct, then the broader goal of this section has already been accomplished: One should acknowledge that there are stringent duties (of repair, and not fairness) whose discharge would curtail the developed world's pursuit of local food, even if one does not think that a duty of beneficence is stringent. Second, there may be other forms of unfairness beyond those that Pogge characterizes in terms of (contributions to) harms.

  13. For example, Øverland (2013) argues that Pogge’s claim that affluent societies contribute to global poverty can best be understood as the claim that the affluent exploit the global poor (and not that they harm the global poor). One way in which one may exploit another is to benefit from unfair (but non-harmful) terms of cooperation.

  14. On the 'equal benefit' test for fairness in trade, see James (2012).

  15. For further argument in favor of ‘better than fair’ terms of trade for developing societies see Stiglitz and Charlton (2006).

  16. For example, consider the efforts made by local communities within the states of Vermont and Maine to demand food sovereignty (http://vermontfoodsovereignty.net/; http://www.farmfoodfreedom.org/updates/maine-town-declares-food-sovereignty). Similar efforts have been made in some European countries (http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1825; http://foodsovereigntynow.org.uk/).

  17. Here, I need not take a side on the issue of whether beneficence ever requires one to do more than her fair share. Even if it does, questions about the further stringency of beneficence remain unanswered.

  18. Consider the following passage from John Rawls’s Political Liberalism: “Individuals and associations cannot comprehend the ramifications of their particular actions viewed collectively, nor can they be expected to foresee future circumstances that shape and transform present tendencies” (Rawls 1993, 268). See also, Thomas Pogge, from Freedom from Poverty as Human Right: “[T]he effects of my economic decision intermingle with the effects of billions of decisions made by others, and it is impossible to try to disentangle, even ex post, the impact of my decision from this vast traffic by trying to figure out how things would have gone had I acted differently” (Pogge 2007, 17, emphasis in original).

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the following persons for their assistance on this paper: Dan Hicks, Kristina Jeffers, Joan McGregor, Samantha Noll, William Schanbacher, Ian Werkheiser and the members of Oakland University's Philosophy Department.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Oakland University, 341 O’Dowd Hall, Rochester, MI, 48309-4401, USA

    Mark C. Navin

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Navin, M.C. Local Food and International Ethics. J Agric Environ Ethics 27, 349–368 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-014-9492-0

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