Food externalities are a joke.
For what (we hope) will be remembered as the (scariest) blink of an eye in the history of humanity, a brief 70-ish years of time, humans pretended not to be part of the natural world. Constructing lives and identities as far as possible from the animals, plants and ecosystems that enabled our own existence.
As we face the second quarter of this century, thought leaders and scientists alike very much agree on the immense existential risk we face as a consequence of these decisions, made without planetary boundaries considerations, guided by shareholder value creation. The food system is a living proof of this, with manufactured inefficiencies that create faster turnover, shifting the logic of some foods as commodities (spices, some of the oldest) to all foods as commodities. This, in turn, creates vicious cycles of hunger, dependence, and marginalization of some of the most important people on this planet: small-scale farmers & rural populations.
As challenges increase in complexity, multi-disciplinary, systems-based approaches gain ground as sensible ways forward. In this logic, making progress in one realm rather than looking like a linear, focused action, becomes a myriad of strategies that aim to address the system as a whole. We see this notably in the One health approach (that acknowledges a shared ecosystem with all living forms, and thus spans its action across food safety to animal health for achieving better public health) or the Planetary Health Diet (that leverages hundreds of science-based data points to optimize a diet for both “human health and environmental sustainability”). This is exactly the case of Fundación Futuro’s action in food, a systematic effort towards their larger goal of mitigating the effects of climate change by the conservation and sustainable management of the Chocó Andino region (by enabling new avenues for sustainable livelihoods of rural communities).
We are now at a crossroads, a transition period that is far from frictionless, whose ultimate goal is to get us to a (food) system that operates equitably within planetary boundaries. A blueprint has been proposed with the Doughnut economics, describing a sweet spot for all to operate (including of course businesses) between an ecological ceiling and a social foundation based on equity and social justice. Even for the most skeptical, market-driven decision makers, there are concrete signs that this shift will occur: increased liability of investments due to crop failures related to extreme weather, consumer shift towards new environmental purchasing criteria, increased geopolitical tensions that threaten to upend global operations, the general need for a different kind of economic structure for an ecologically constrained world and government’s climate action to mitigate climate-spurred social instability.
But while we transition, bottom-up initiatives in the food space such as MashpiLab, aimed to empower and add value to the producer at the heart of agricultural communities face incredible financial challenges, with the need to compete in a very uneven market, where products stand in faceless shelves with little accountancy of the hidden costs (a.k.a. externalities) involved in these products such as water, soil & air pollution and land use, but also compensation, child labor and health & safety of the people involved to name a few…
Looking into the future, we envision food costs rising to account for those previously hidden costs to reflect on a much more accurate way the work humans & ecosystems do to support all food products to be produced, processed, transported, marketed and more, contrary to our current state of affairs where the “costs of the global food system outweigh its monetary value”. By doing so, we will not only favor small producers that enact best practices both environmentally and socially, but we might also be on the way to creating a truly profitable food system that creates more value than what it takes.
Such value should and will most definitely be generated by and for the food system’s VIPs, small-scale farmers & rural populations, especially those who have transitioned or have traditionally farmed with low inputs, by selling produce at fair prices, processing products that are competitive in a no-hidden cost market, assuring its own nutrition and creating a booming decentralized food scene where products are not made anymore for people far away in cities, sometimes across the globe. MashpiLab describes a scenario where farming and cooking in rural areas might become a sought-after occupation in the future
