Harvard and Sustainable Food

Last fall, when introducing Al Gore at Harvard’s Sustainability Celebration, President Drew G. Faust asserted, “Universities are the world’s greatest source of ideas and innovation.” Theoretically, ideas generated by university scholars are disciplined by the scientific method, vetted by peer review, and made accountable through open publication with clear authorship. Talk radio, the blogosphere, and even The New Yorker operate by a lower standard.

Unfortunately, even our best universities sometimes stray from Veritas into mere “truthiness.” Harvard’s Sustainability Celebration last fall also featured a session on “Sustainable Food,” timely in 2008 because a sudden increase in international food prices had pushed 100 million more people around the world into hunger, on top of the 850 million others–mostly in rural South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa–who were already suffering from chronic malnutrition before prices went up. Yet none of the invited speakers at Harvard’s session on food had much interest in this larger problem, or any academic standing to address it. One was a celebrity restaurant owner from San Francisco, the second led an organization called Slow Food USA, and the third was a noted playwright and actress from New York. Apparently Harvard had found no reason to seek the opinion of a trained nutritionist, or a demographer, or an agroecologist. Not even an historian.

The message from this panel of non-scholars fit perfectly with bi-coastal elite fashion: Our food should be organic, local, and slow. These ideas have no scholarly pedigree. The assertion that food should be grown without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer (“organically”) can be traced back nearly a century to an Austrian mystic named Rudolf Steiner who also believed in cosmic rhythms, human reincarnation, and the lost city of Atlantis. The idea of eating locally comes from the founder of a community-supported kitchen in Berkeley, California. The idea of slow food was first popularized in 1986 by an Italian radio journalist.

If we take these ideas seriously for the moment, what might a fully organic, local, and slow food system actually look like? The closest approximation we have is not New York City or Berkeley, California, but rural Africa, where 60 percent of all citizens are small farmers growing food without chemicals, for local consumption, and still preparing meals in a traditional fashion. The downside? Average income in rural Africa is only $1 a day and one third of these people are malnourished.

 Virtually all food in rural Africa today is de facto organic, because small farmers there cannot afford to purchase any nitrogen fertilizer. Fertilizer use per hectare in Africa is only 1/10 as high as in Europe or North America, causing crop yields per hectare to be only 1/5 as high as their Northern counterparts. Total production level has been declining on a per capita basis for the past three decades.

African food systems are also highly local. Most food production is consumed on the farm, and the portion marketed does not travel far. This is because of high transport costs linked to a poor road system. Roughly 70 percent of all rural Africans live more than a 30-minute walk from the nearest all-weather road, so when seasonal rains are good, surplus production cannot be moved easily for sale in another district at a higher price. Even worse for these true Locavores, when the crops fail in a drought, food supplies from nearby surplus regions cannot be brought in.

 Food systems in rural Africa are also painfully slow, especially for the women who prepare the meals. In order to serve a meal of nsima (maize), African women must first spend a season planting, weeding, harvesting, and storing their corn, then they must strip it, then winnow it, then soak it, then lay it out to dry, then carry it to a grinder or pound it by hand, then dry it again, and then finally—after walking to gather fuel wood and water—build a fire and cook it.

These organic, local, and slow African food systems are also bad for the natural environment. Attempting to grow more food to keep pace with an increasing population, Africa’s farmers have shortened their fallow times, which exhausts soil nutrients. They also expand cropping and grazing onto more erodible lands, cutting more trees and destroying more wildlife habitat. Roughly 70 percent of all deforestation in Africa comes from this expansion of low-yield farming. It would be better if these farmers increased crop yields on land already cleared by applying some nitrogen fertilizer, but that would violate the mystical organic taboo.

A plea, then, to Harvard’s splendid new graduating class of 2009. When you leave the university, be wary of seductive ideas not sufficiently vetted by academic scholarship. When endorsement by academic specialists is missing, there are usually good reasons. Also, think globally, not just locally, before you embrace a fashionable new choice. The non-academic purveyors of fashion seldom do.

Robert Paarlberg is Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and a Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of “Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa.”