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Commodity vs. Community — The High Price of Cheapness!
By Billie Best

(March 2005) Each time we spend a dime on food we are voting for the system that produced it. Fake food vs. real food. Fast food vs. slow food. Commodity food vs. community food. These are the choices we make every day. These are the choices that will shape the future of our hips, our families, our hometowns, our species and our planet.

When you choose between commodity food and community food you are choosing between a faceless-placeless food system and a place-based food system. Sure, you may be in a hurry, you may not have many options to choose from, or you may just have a yen for junk food. But regardless of which kind of food you choose, it’s important to appreciate the impact your purchase. Billions of research dollars are spent every year to learn how we spend our money. If we change our buying habits, we can change the world.

Food is the biggest market on earth. There is no market force more potent than hunger. Securing an abundant food supply is the prime directive behind every action of every living thing. Modern humans are no exception. No matter how we mechanize, computerize, and plasticize our world, we cannot reduce the need for food, or the importance of its nutritional value to our quality of life. Food is our connection to nature and the natural world around us. Civilization cannot change the fact that humans are animals, prey and predator. Our bodies are 70% water and home to trillions of bacteria. We are just another link in the food chain powered by the sun.

What separates us from the other links in the chain is our ability to use technology to build a food system, and our arrogance in believing our technology can command and control the natural world. For more than a decade, elite Ivy League business gurus have been promoting “natural systems” as the ideal organizational model for large enterprises. Their theory is that if very large organizations are divided into networks of autonomous networks (like nature), the organization can learn faster, innovate quicker, and be more responsive to change.

Global commodities are the antithesis of natural systems. They couldn’t exist without centralized command and control of production, distribution and pricing. The commodity system will likely fail because it is as unnatural as trying to make all the water on earth pink.

The natural world, the most complex organism we know, is one giant food system. It is a community of communities, simultaneously a functioning whole and an infinite number of individuals, independent and interdependent, self-coordinating, self-regulating, continuously seeking stability, and continuously productive. Natural systems utilize their complexity to continuously adapt to change. Complexity gives us ways of doing the same thing differently. Natural systems rely upon diversity to create the alternatives that make adaptation possible. Diversity gives us options for different approaches. And natural systems employ competition to regulate diversity. Competition tests different approaches to show the advantages and disadvantages of our options. Commodity agriculture seeks to control rather than adapt to nature. A food system designed for optimum human health depends upon complexity, diversity and competition to produce the highest quality food. Commodities depend upon standardization rather than complexity, consistency rather than diversity, and market consolidation rather than competition.

Nature is continuously balancing the needs of individuals with the needs of the whole. For us humans, sustainability is the process of adapting to nature’s balancing act. Sustainable agriculture must continuously adapt to natural systems to create an abundant food supply. Commodities leverage the imbalance between supply and demand to control the whole at the expense of individuals, with the goal of generating maximum profits for an elite group.

We live in a time when it seems that all of modern culture is being commoditized: consumer electronics, air travel, radio programming, music, telecommunications, housing, water, money, genes. We have become junkies for a bargain and the world knows it. Rich people are shopping at Wal-Mart because it seems foolish not to. But lurking behind that sale price is a social and environmental surcharge headed right for your wallet.

The true price of cheapness is pushing commodity producers in all industries to seek ever-increasing government subsidies, often in the form of tax breaks and advantageous trade agreements. If the pattern of government-subsidized cheapness continues, someday you’ll be able to shop at Wal-Mart for free, but your taxes will be so high your family will have to live in a tent. All milk will come from the same cow in California. Organic but boiled to death, it will last a year in the bottle, but you’ll have to learn to drink it warm because you won’t be able to afford to run your refrigerator.

The system isn’t going to change over night and we don’t want it to. We don’t want catastrophic change. We want sustained incremental change, one person at a time, one family at a time, one farm at a time. We want to learn to live differently on this planet. We want to rebuild the lost relationship between cities and their surrounding countryside. We want to create a system of place-based agriculture that supports rural and urban economic development, food security, open space preservation, water and air quality, regional self-reliance and indigenous culture. And when we eat bananas, pineapple, coffee and chocolate we want to know we are supporting sustainable agriculture in another land.

Meanwhile, nature is mounting challenges to the commodity system in the form of super weeds and super viruses, avian flu, mad cow disease, the reduced efficacy of antibiotics, and soybean rust. Fiscal conservatives are challenging the wisdom and fairness of agriculture subsidies that distort markets. Social liberals are fighting for living wage laws, and fair trade/fair made policies. Rural communities are demanding community sovereignty and an end to corporate personhood. Environmentalists are appreciating the eco-services provided by sustainable agriculture. And taxpayers are beginning to make the connection between spraying poison on soil and expensive drinking water.

How can you help? Next time you are looking for a bargain, step back to take a more holistic view of your purchase. What is the social impact of buying apples from China? What is the environmental impact of pork ribs that cost $1.59 a pound? What is the economic impact of spending ten or twenty percent of your weekly food budget on foods that are grown in your own region? Think about more than how you benefit from paying a low price. Think about whom you hurt by paying a low price. Then spend your money in accordance with all of your values, and please, indulge yourself. Money isn’t worth anything if it doesn’t make us happy.