[comment] As Food Prices Rise, Backyard Plots Thicken

from Red Orbit

By MJ ANDERSEN

MY NEIGHBOR called to say that she was through with tomatoes. Had I seen the paper? The city was raising water rates. She had hoped to grow tomatoes and zucchini in her backyard plot this year, but who could afford the watering? What sense would it make?

I pretended I knew all about the rate hike, which I did, in a vague, headline way. But the details, I found out later, were surprisingly grim: Water was going up 12 percent, sewer rates 19 percent. I thought of what my mom used to say, at parades or in stores or on car trips: Just hold it.

As for tomatoes. Lately, the news has been full of stories about people growing their own food, to offset climbing prices at the store. It seems we are all going to be tilling the median strips, tending lettuces in container gardens, starting seedlings on every sill. But if my neighbor is any bellwether, the movement is already in trouble.

Home gardeners may have to march on Washington and demand what farmers everywhere demand: a subsidy.

Still, most Americans are lucky. Many parts of the world face food shortages, in a complex crisis that has been building for a while.

Recent riots over the high cost of rice in Haiti are just the beginning. World Bank President Robert Zoellick has noted that some 30 countries could face similar upheaval.

Americans are used to paying relatively little for what they eat. But in much of the developing world, families may allot up to three- quarters of their budgets to food.

For many years, the World Bank and other do-good organizations discouraged developing nations from putting much effort into agriculture. Reasoning from classic economic principles, they figured these countries would be better off relying on trade to reduce poverty.

Why grow wheat when, say, Kansas can do it so well and so cheaply (never mind government subsidies)? Send the world colorful woven goods or electronic thingamabobs in exchange.

Now, many nations that once did a fair job of feeding themselves can barely rustle up a snack.

Haiti, for example, once produced nearly all the rice it needed. Then cheaper imported rice started flooding in. Haitian farmers could not compete.

Several factors drive the food price explosion. They include droughts, which have dampened supply; soaring demand in India and China, where economic growth has expanded incomes; higher costs for the energy needed to produce crops; and the diversion of some crops to make ethanol.

None of this is about to change.

Anxious nations are starting to promote local agriculture, with policies both good and bad. Help buying fertilizer, or better seeds, is good. But protective tariffs, for instance, may just end up raising prices.

There is evidence now that, contrary to past thinking, developing a nation's agricultural sector is a pretty good way of cutting poverty. So aid strategies should change.

But imbedded in the immediate crisis is a bigger debate. Food is different from widgets. A special shame comes with not being able to feed oneself; if you doubt it, ask an American mom who is down at the food bank collecting staples.

Economists rarely take pride into account, but it can matter greatly when it comes to trade.

Just as more nations now would like to be energy-secure, more would like to be food-secure, dependent on no one else for the essentials of life. They see trade as a sucker's game.

Free trade, which economists say distributes the most stuff to the most people most efficiently, cannot flourish amid this kind of mistrust.

But there is more. The classic economic model for trade depends on what the author Wendell Berry calls a "mentality of exploitation." We need a new model that allows for sustainability.

Growing more of our food locally may be less efficient. But it is often kinder to the planet, and more healthful. (Tainted spinach and tomatoes have been one cost of large-scale, industrial farming practices.)

Himself a farmer, Berry has long argued that we should have more farms rather than fewer, with more people working the land. His arguments apply in Malawi and Mexico as well as here at home.

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