Would a decentralized food system be a better option for the world?

Question

The current food system has many flaws. To list just a few:

1) The food industry is almost completely centralized, meaning that it's being controlled by a handful of multinational corporations that have power on pretty much every aspect of production. Often, these corporations do not work in the best interests of consumers and society, but are only profit driven.

2) Although there is enough food for everybody (at least currently), food is not evenly distributed.

3) Although production efficiency is high (in the US the average farmer can produce enough food for 126 people), much of the resulting advantage is cancelled out by the high levels of waste that occur along the production and supply chain.

Given the current technologies (e.g. aquaponics, vertical farming, etc.), would a decentralized system be more advantageous?

Answer 1

First, the assumption:

The food industry is almost completely centralized, meaning that it's being controlled by a handful of multinational corporations that have power on pretty much every aspect of production.

That is not right. Corporations control most of the food international distribution, not its production (which is still at the hands of the farmers) or local distribution.

Second, the question:

Given the current technologies (e.g. aquaponics, vertical farming, etc.), would a decentralized system be more advantageous?

The issue is again, that of distribution. If all of your farmers in the area are producing, say, oranges, it will no matter how they are producing them, but that they have a surplus production and someone has to sell that surplus outside their market area.

And why are all the farmers producing oranges? Because:

a. it allows to chose the optimate crop for the conditions (weather, soil, etc.)

b. investments (like machinery specific for orange recollection) are easier to amortize if you have a big production of oranges that if you have a small production of orange along some other crops.

c. it is easier to deal with a single market (for oranges) that to deal in a market looking for orange buyers, in another looking for the corn buyers, in another for the potatos buyers...potatos, some buyers for the corn.

If anything, highly technified agriculture impose additional benefits to centralization due to the economies of scale; as someone needs to provide the supplies needed by those technologies.

TLDR Farmers are not "ordered" by the corporations to grow a single crop to sell to the corporations, they do so because it gives them better rewards than the traditional system of growing multiple crops to supply only the local market. The apparition of new technologies is unlikely to change that.

¹This will depend heavily of the production model. Farms or areas dedicated to monoculture (like the famous USA belts, or cash crops) will depend more heavily on distribution corporations. Areas with more varied crops will have it easier selling a significant part of its production locally.

Answer 2

No

The entire reason for centralization is specialization. Certain crops can only be grown in certain parts of the world. Corn yields are high in in Iowa, and low in Idaho. Potato yields are high in Idaho, but rot in the ground in Florida. Oranges grow great in Florida, but not all all in Iowa (or Idaho!).

How are you going to locally distribute the production of those crops? You simply can't grow some of those crops in some of those regions.

If these farmers were subsistence farmers, then they would only eat potatoes in Idaho, corn in Iowa, and less corn in Florida (since man can't live on oranges alone). But in a 'centralized' system with distribution run by 'multi-national' corporations, each can trade with the other, and eat a well balanced diet of corn, potatoes, and oranges.

Waste

Waste does not cancel out the advantages of high productivity. Cereal productivity is in the 6000-9000 kg/hectare range for the US and Western Europe. Its is 2000-3000 kg/hectare for middle income countries like Turkey, Mexico, and Russia. It is 1700 in the Arab world, and 1400 in Sub-saharan africa. In Medieval England, yields would be 8-10 Bushels per Acre, which at 56 lbs to the bushel is about 600 kg/hectare.

So modern crop methods are at over a 10:1 advantage over Medieval farmers, and 5:1 over third world countries. Even if you assume 50% spoilage and waste, we still come out way on top.

Remember, one of the big reasons that crop production is so high is that crops are ONLY grown where they are optimally suited. You can grow corn in Idaho and potatoes in Idaho, but no one does because the yields are low. So instead corn is only grown in Iowa with thick black soils, and summer heat and rain, while cool-and-dry-loving potatoes grow in the semi-desert highlands of Idaho. Also, oranges are grown in Florida where freezing temperatures literally cause a state of emergency to be declared. Wusses.

Waste does not counteract the advantages of modern farming techniques or specialization by location.

Cutting Edge Techniques

...are expensive. They are useful for specific things that are perishable (like lettuce) but not so useful for things that store well and have to grown on huge areas (like cereals: wheat, rice, corn). The world is fed by these crops. 51% of world calories come from cereals. Even in the affluent United States, 25% of our calories come from cereals, and another 25% from meat/milk derived from animals feeding those cereals (and 35% from oils and fats!!!). That leaves just 15% of America's calories coming from fruits, vegetables, pulses and nuts. And even those aren't ideal for vertical farming or aquaponics or what have you; peas and beans have low yield per acre and need lots of space; tree crops like olives or oranges need lots of space to grow for years before they start to fruit, etc.

Cutting edge farming has a place in the world, but will never compete with specialized monoculture in producing the calories that humanity needs.

For further reference, here is a summary of the future of agriculture, from the Economist (possibly behind a paywall)

Answer 3

You ask about a more advantageous food production system. More advantageous for whom?

• There is a supermarket less than a mile from my home that is open from Monday morning to Saturday night. I can go there at 0300 at night and chose from several dozen brands of sliced bread. Sure, most of them come in plastic bags and taste accordingly, but they are fairly cheap, too.
• There are very few genuine bakers left who make fresh bread from basic ingredients and not from a dough mixture out of some factory. If I go there I pay much more and many kinds of bread may be sold out long before the baker closes in the evening.
• Similar things can be said for vegetables, fruit, meat, etc.
• I have a few boxes of pasta and half a dozen jars of tomato sauce in my kitchen. If I have to work late, or if I decide that it the weather is too bad to go out, I can make a decent dinner. If not, they will keep until next year, or the year after that.

My freedom of choice comes with several different prices:

• If there are fresh apples whenever I want, then there will be a time when unsold apples become not so fresh. Since the customers demand fresh apples, those old apples go to waste.
• The purchasing power of the large supermarket chains is used to squeeze the prices for farmers and intermediate producers.
• If the food comes out of cans or in plastic boxes, I cannot judge if food past the "best before" date is still edible. I have to trust the numbers.

A fictional world to change all this has two options:

Change the Business Model only for Food

With this option, society would recognize that food production is not an industry like any other. Depending on your setting, this could be driven by ecological concerns, protectionism, or strategic/civil defense concerns. The niche market will come under constant attack from people who want to use "modern" business practice in the food sector.

One price your society will pay is that the price of food will go up. Everybody will eat less meat. The poor might get hardly any meat at all. Instead of tasteless, mass-produced vegetables, they get the blemished ones which rich people don't want.

Last but not least, people will spend more time cooking and preparing food. Do they have that time, on top of their commute to work? Cleaning string beans is something I do only on Sundays, otherwise I reach for a can ...

Change the Business Model for Everything

With this option, your society will soon become unrecognizable. Real cab drivers instead of uber share-economy amateurs. Shopkeepers instead of parcel delivery services with Amazon purchases.

Everything will get more expensive. On the other hand, many people will have qualified jobs. It is worthwhile? Will the setting be a better world? Only the author can tell.

Answer 4

You asked a yes/no question. My answer is : Mu... the traditional Zen answer to a question asked based on false assumptions.

It is an interesting topic to explore a different type of food distro. But does that imply it needs to not be profit driven? Does being profit driven imply that it isn't in the best interests of consumers?

This is an extremely deep economic topic, probably too broad to even begin to answer in this forum. The problem is showing that just because a given system appears to not benefit consumers, maybe that is the most optimal system possible. There are certainly market advocates who would say "absolutely." Any inefficiencies are the result of something interfering... like, for example, national governments. So to improve our food distro system, maybe there's no need to change anything about the companies but instead make nations operate differently. Just a theory.

I suggest reading sci-fi The Unincorporated Man and similar works to get a good exploration of this topic.

Answer 5

Yes, but not for the reasons you theorized in your question.

Firstly though, need to clear up a common misconception implied by your question. Namely that most corporations are not profit-driven. Because 'profits' are a residuum, its what's left over after everything else is paid and it goes to the shareholders of that corporation. Corporations are not required to (nor even in some cases expected to) pay out profits to shareholders. Most corporate ethics scandals (e.g. Enron, Worldcom, etc.) are about employees misreporting earnings (which are not the same thing as profits) for their own personal gain, in a way that jeopardizes the organization itself. So it isn't necessarily that the company is greedy for profits.

Microsoft failed to pay profits to shareholders frequently during the 90's (which is fine), and if the EU prosecutors are to be believed those were not their finest hours ethically speaking (which is not). The real issue (which you mention in your question) is that corporations are frequently allowed to pursue their business without regard to the negative externalities they generate (e.g. pollution). However that too can a thornier issue than it seems on the surface.

Single-payer health insurance is contentious in the US despite its obvious advantages because it allows individuals to externalize many of the costs of their decisions like tobacco use, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, etc. It may be worth having anyway (we still have fire/car/private health insurance despite the moral hazards) but the concern is a valid one. With corporations as with individuals it is a question of trade-offs (is it worth it for a developing economy to allow corporations to run wild in exchange for the prosperity they generate? look to Africa and China for examples), for a realistic narrative you will want to be aware of these tradeoffs (it says quite a bit about the society you've created as to which choices they make along these lines).

Now back to your question. Yes, it (arguably) would benefit the world to decentralize production/distribution even though it would be less efficient because global trade is far more fragile (susceptible to disruption). It would arguably be worth sacrificing some of the optimal growing mentioned in the other answers to have a more robust system. That being said, there are different ways to spin that narratively: the naively optimized system crashes, the more robust system becomes too unwieldy, the overreaching government that tries to balance this becomes tyrannical, etc.

Answer 6

This question is pretty much a series of begged questions, undefined "hot" words and misunderstandings of the current situation.

1) The food industry is almost completely centralized, meaning that it's being controlled by a handful of multinational corporations that have power on pretty much every aspect of production. Often, these corporations do not work in the best interests of consumers and society, but are only profit driven.

This does not state what "controlled" means in this context. One could easily have said "managed" and not been as inflammatory.

This begs the question that corporations have "power on pretty much every aspect of production." One could just the same have said "influenced." There are many types of power not all are bad. Force is the type of power that is almost universally bad yet there is no contention that farmers are forced to do anything. Agricorps typically work cooperatively with farmers through contracts, which carry a normal and well considered type of power to adjudicate the terms through the courts when there is a disagreement on the terms or performance.

One could go on for the whole post, but moving to the end.

Given the current technologies (e.g. aquaponics, vertical farming, etc.), would a decentralized system be more advantageous?

Remember, farms are corporations too and the technologies you mentioned are a very capital intensive, mechanized and inflexible type of farming. Would the farming corporations want to invest in new and uncertain technologies without the assurance of access to the most efficient distribution systems. Those run by other corporations that contract in advance for product. have the technology to convert crops to consumable product, and sell in advance to product consumers. Farmers grow corn, but the biggest consumers of corn, feedlots, want specific characteristics in the corn based feeds. They don't want to just buy from the local farmer, they need a manufactured product.

The question also begs the question that these novel and unproven methods are more efficient than ground farming. That is, they will provide more crops over time with fewer inputs. Plants require sunlight. Can vertical farming provide plants with as much sunlight as ground farming? It certainly will still require fertilizer. Can any be saved?. Can fertilizers required for "organic" farming be used? Are the savings enough to offset the high capital costs? Vertical farming is a long term capital investment requiring a big corporation with long term financing to scale up to the most efficient factory levels.

If this technology was currently more efficient, the agricorps would move into the new farming business themselves and cut out those pesky contracts and guarantees given to their suppliers (the farmers) right now. Have you thought that this could have the opposite effect of what you desire by making farm production more centralized?

Answer 7

Decentralization created by an increase in the capacity of individual humans to produce food efficiently would definitely be better for the world.

Decentralization created by a central authority waving a gun around will just repeat the famines of the 20th century.

Answer 8

Food shortages in the world have nothing to do with food.
It has to do with warlords, dictators, and infrastructure of a given region.
Eradicate the first 2 and build the last and the world can easily fed more than they could eat without changing anything else.

To do that, you'd be declaring war on North Korea and having worse situation of guerrilla Warfare than the Iraq war in Africa... If you want to do that, thanks for starting WWIII