A worker uses a chemical spray to clean chicken cages at Hong Kong’s Cheung Sha Wan chicken wholesale market, which was declared a bird flu-infected area. Photo: BOBBY YIP
In the quest for someone convenient to blame for Australia’s latest food scare, spare a thought for the poor old consumer – because, whether we know it or not, it is all our doing.
You see, we Australians have become addicted to the idea of really cheap food. And nowadays, cheap comes with toxic, pretty much regardless of where your food originates.
This is the inevitable result of paying our own hard-working farmers and fishers so badly for what they grow for us, that half of them go out of business, and we have to replace them and their produce with heavily industrialised stuff from heaven-knows-where on the planet, much of it grown and processed by methods that would make your toes curl.
Today Australia imports more than 80 per cent of its fish, 20 to 30 per cent of its fruit and vegetables, and a great many other processed foods worth about $12 billion a year, as part of the globalised food chain. The Aussies who used to produce this component of our diet are long gone. And a lot of this imported food is toxic either because of the huge quantities of chemicals used to grow, process and pack it – in the case of food imported from the Americas – or because of chemicals, heavy metals and disease-causing organisms in food produced by the emerging world suppliers in Asia and Africa, where rules are lax, hygiene is MIA and uncorrupted inspection a distant dream.
Let me unpack this a bit. Over the past 20 years or so a profound but extremely quiet revolution has taken place. The world’s food supply, which used to be handled by millions of small traders, local markets, family food firms and so on, has stealthily been taken over by about 20 absolutely gigantic food corporates. There are 10 mega-processors, which own most of the brands in your supermarket, creating an illusion of diversity. There are four huge grain trading houses which dominate world trade in the six main grains human society relies on. And there are several colossal world supermarket chains.
In food, there has been a massive concentration of market power in the hands of a tiny number of people. Up to half the world’s traded food supply is now dominated by these big companies, who owe allegiance to none but their few shareholders. Effectively, they determine the price and quality of food for the human race. Naturally, these giants are in ferocious competition with each other for market share – and one obvious way to compete is to lower their input costs. The food giants do this quite simply, by screwing farmers and farming systems. Everywhere.
You see when there are only 20 big companies and more than 1.8 billion farmers, the market power lies entirely with the companies. In practice they exercise this by saying “If you can’t produce me 1000 tonnes of identical green beans/tomatoes/prawns for 2¢ a kilo by next Thursday, I’ll buy it from Chile/Thailand/China/Kenya instead.” Then they calmly shut down traditional, high quality food industries in Australia, Britain, even the United States, by abandoning them and shifting production contracts to some developing country. And when that can’t grow the food cheaply enough, they abandon those growers and shift somewhere else.
Meanwhile, back home, in order to secure our custom, they bombard us with messages about “cheap, cheap, cheap food is good”. It isn’t good. It’s toxic, and here’s why.
In an industrial food economy the cheapest way to present low-priced, flawless produce, unscarred by insects or moulds, is to poison them. To kill a fungus, as you’ll know from any personal infections you may have had, is bloody difficult. Anything that will kill a fungus will also, used in excess, kill a human. Thus, in the name of eye-appeal and cheapness, the modern food system – farm and factory – is saturated in fungicides, not to mention a host of other preservatives and synthetic additives, some even made from coal! That, in a nutshell is the problem. The US alone uses some 6000 synthetic chemicals to grow and process its food (Australia, rather fewer, but far too many nonetheless). And if you think China is plagued with food scandals, you should read what the US system is delivering its consumers.
Then there is the other kind of cheap food, sourced from newly industrialised and developing countries because their labour costs are so low and their government regulations so lax. Here not only is chemical management poor, but water is often highly polluted. In China, for example, where 700 million pigs produce 1.4 million tonnes of faeces and 7 million tonnes of urine every year, a disturbing amount ends up, untreated, in rivers and waterways along with other wastes, including human and industrial. That’s where the microbiological risk comes from. And China is by no means exceptional: many of the intensive fish farming and vegetable industries of Asia use water that is highly contaminated. On the great river floodplains and deltas of a dozen Asian countries rice and vegetables are laced with naturally-occurring arsenic from the soil.
Other aspects of cheap food are equally alarming. The 10 kilograms of topsoil that vanishes with every meal you eat is the result of paying farmers too little to look after their land as well as they would like: it forces them into over-production. The shocking waste of one third of the world’s food is the result of a system that attaches such a low value to it, we’d rather send it to landfill than eat it. The obesity and diabetes pandemics are the result of a world diet that is too cheap, with poor nutritional balance and added endocrine disruptor chemicals. The staggering blowout in the healthcare budget is the direct result of the diet-related diseases now implicated in the deaths of three Australians in every four. The stream of farmers leaving the land in all countries is the result of a global market signal that says they are no longer wanted.
So when we demand cheap food, we not only risk self-harm because of the way it is produced, we also evict farmers, degrade farmland, turn rural communities into ghost towns, cause untold waste, and undermine society’s health and safety.
It is clear there is something profoundly wrong with the world food system. It is all about short-term profit for a very few – and to hell with the economic and social “externalities”.
The cure, if one exists, is for all of us to value our food a little more, demand it be produced by less toxic and more natural systems and be willing to reward local farmers much better for growing it sustainably, with care, skill and wisdom.
Do yourself and the country a favour: eat fresh, eat local, eat natural, eat Australian.
Julian Cribb is a Canberra science writer and author of The Coming Famine and Poisoned Planet.