Tag: Ethics

Food Politics

Human control over the production and distribution of food has led to there being food politics. Eating is one of the simplest and most basic pleasures of human existence. Now you cannot enjoy a meal without offending someone. If you eat meat, you offend those interested in animal rights, or those concerned about climate change, water conservation, rainforest destruction, or food inequality. If you do not, you offend those farmers who take a pride in their husbandry. If you eat fish, you offend marine conservationists; if you do not, you offend fishers. Conventional or organic; GM or GM-free; fair or free trade; wild, local or global? 

For the ethically aware, food packaging is now covered with the icons of various labelling schemes. The market asks you to pay a small premium for the fair treatment of workers, avoiding overexploitation of the environment, giving animals better conditions, and so on – which turns morality into a luxury commodity, and hence a weapon for all sides in the class war to beat each other with.

That is before the thorny issue of nutrition is tackled. Marketing boards for virtually every foodstuff from blueberries to mackerel have funded or drawn on research proving the nutritional benefits of the product they push. They are not the only ones: charities representing special interest groups also fund research. Thus, it is impossible to know, without a Ph.D. in the biochemistry of digestion, whether, for example, veganism is a natural, healthy diet, or a suburbanite fantasy propped up by vitamin pills.

It might be argued, indeed it has been argued, that all that matters is price. Food labelling is consistently resisted by industry. It is astonishing how our society’s leaders can promote an economic ideology that works only if everyone makes decisions with complete knowledge, and then allow themselves to be lobbied so as to prevent consumers from accessing information. That said, we clearly don’t entirely trust the market when it comes to food, as testified by various governments issuing incentives to farmers. Food security is a discourse that has emerged relatively recently. As well as concerns about whether we can actually grow enough food to feed everyone (whether now, or later this century), there is also the potential weaponization of food. In the latter case, countries with a food surplus could use that to their strategic advantage against countries that need to import food. Alongside all that is speculation by investors, believed by some to be responsible for the Arab Spring through causing a spike in grain prices. The market has no answer (except, “Devil take the hindmost“) for what happens when it fails to provide everyone with enough to eat.

Contrast all this with picking a blackberry from a bramble (assuming, for now, the bramble is on public land, on uncontaminated soil, and a respectable distance from chemical sprays – perhaps we should imagine picking a blackberry from a bramble several millennia ago). The blackberry has no label telling you it is suitable for vegetarians, has been fairly traded, grown by labourers working for a workers’ co-operative, is free of artificial colours, flavours or preservatives. It has no breakdown of its salt, carbohydrate, protein and fat content. You pick it, you put it in your mouth, you chew it, it tastes delicious.

If we can make such a mess of food, if we can turn eating from heaven into hell (unless you are willing, and indeed in the luxurious position of being able, to ignore the issues), what happens when all ecosystem services are provided through engineered biomes? 

Ecosystem ‘Services’

The concept of ecosystem services has its origin in the desperation of ecologists to provide some means of expressing the value of ecosystems in the dominant language of the day: that of the marketplace. For some reason the values of such things as flowers, crows, oak trees, marram grass, basking sharks, garden snails and millipedes are not apparent unless they can be expressed in monetary terms capturing the contribution they make to sustaining human existence. Without monetary values thus expressed, they are, in economic terms, ‘externalities‘; things that cannot be factored in to the analysis. The proper way to treat an externality is to acknowledge it, and to include that acknowledgement in the decision-making process. In practice, externalities are simply things to be ignored. Many argue, therefore, that ecosystem services, contingent valuation, and other efforts to express the value of the ecosystem in the language of the market place, are pragmatic approaches that at least prevent these matters being ignored by the “blind leaders of the blind“. Nobody seems to talk of doing a proper job of economic analysis in the first place…

The concept of ecosystem services is, however, a compromise too far. The language of ‘services’ is confused with the consumer culture. It implies we have a choice. We do not. We are not customers of the ecosystems we inhabit (even if we are consumers of it); and if we are not happy with the service provided we have only a limited capacity to move: We cannot currently take our custom to another planet, for example; and even within our home planet, people’s capacity to move may be limited by wealth, health, or institutional barriers such as immigration controls. This monopoly of planet Earth over our location breaks the assumptions of market theory; for now, it is one monopoly we are powerless to prevent. But those with paranoid tendencies might suggest it is no coincidence that the hegemony of the market place is responsible for environmental destruction on a massive scale. How else are we to end the tyranny of Nature’s monopoly?

Services also implies substitutability. Suppose we design a machine that performs an ecosystem service more efficiently than that provided by Nature. As rational consumers we should discard the natural system in favour of the newly invented machine. For example, bees provide a pollination service for a number of crops we consume, including almonds. Latterly, however, this service has become unreliable and inefficient. There is a gap in the market for a more reliable pollinator. Perhaps one day this gap could be filled using advances in nanotechnology. Nanobees would be solar powered robots that would collect pollen, and redistribute it where it is needed. These nanobees could be designed to focus on particular species, so that pollen is used efficiently and sent only where it is useful. The nanobees could perform genetic analysis of the pollen to optimise the flowers it fertilises to deliver a better cropped product to the consumer. The nanobees could also collect nectar and deliver it to a honey manufacturing machine. Plus, nanobees would not sting. With the development of nanobees, no-one need ever depend upon unreliable, inefficient natural bees again. The bee would be irrelevant to human existence; if bees could not make a living for themselves from whatever humans do not need, then they could safely be allowed to go extinct. That is progress.

It is one thing to discard an old car for a new one that is more efficient, or to throw away a phone and replace it with a shinier model with more features. Surely it is a different thing altogether to discard a species in favour of a machine? Clearly there is a moral dimension. Another ‘externality’ then, but one that has in the past enabled us (albeit not without a significant struggle) to legislate against slavery despite enormous economic incentives not to. That said, slavery is still a significant contemporary problem. John O’Neill, now at the University of Manchester, has made a damning critique of contingent valuation, arguing that it is either bribery (if you are paid to compensate you for the loss of an ecosystem amenity), or extortion (if you are asked to pay to stop someone destroying it).

But the moral dimension disappears when all the consumer sees is the (fiscal) price. Suppose nanobees could be mass-produced for a fraction of a penny each. All you will see in the shop is better quality produce at a lower price. Bee-pollinated fruit won’t be as good, and it will cost more. How much more will you be prepared to pay for the poorer quality product just to save the bee? There is the extortion. Not in your face, not backed up with menaces, but side by side on the shelf, passively waiting for you to decide which to buy. Is this scenario so far-fetched? Exactly the same phenomenon occurs today with fair-trade produce (how much more are you prepared to pay to ensure the producer got a fair price?), and similar ‘ethical’ labelling: organic, cruelty-free, labour behind the label; there’s one for every flavour of do-gooder. And if you can’t afford to pay the extra? Thus the marketplace corrupts concern for anything other than money into something bourgeois. Ethics is merely status-signalling.

Ecosystems are not our servants; indeed, given our dependence on them, the relationship should be quite the opposite. The problem comes when we evaluate ecosystems and their constituent parts in terms of the transformations they achieve – their function: the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide, sunlight and water; the manufacture of salicylic acid; the pollination of almonds. Function can be seen in quite mathematical terms – the domain of the function is a series of chemicals in particular locations, and any physical resources (sunlight, heat, etc.) before the transformation made by an organism; the range is the same after. The transformation is the mapping the function performs. If we see things purely in terms of functions, we can ask ourselves whether a particular transformation can be achieved in a different way. An ecosystem is thus simply a series of functions that, if it is sustainable, forms, in broad terms, a circle – a loop where the domains of each function in the ecosystem are the ranges of others – for every producer of oxygen, there is a consumer. 

The services culture takes this further, attributing human values to functions. These values give purpose to an ecosystem that is otherwise without purpose (simply a self-perpetuating loop that repeats until it can’t). Functions that have high human value are preferred to functions that have low human value. Where humans have the power to interfere, the circle is distorted: the distortion of the circle shows the values, the degree of distortion the power. Hence the forest becomes a field, the meadow a motorway, and the floodplain a housing estate. Ecosystems are circles within circles – each life its own self-replicating loop. What is distorted in the ecosystem is also distorted in the organism, all to reflect human values. So it is that the aurochs becomes the cow, the jungle fowl the broiler chicken, the boar the pig; thus does grass become wheat, rye and oats; and jungle becomes cattle ranch and palm oil plantations. Everything, from individual plants and animals to biomes, is distorted according to its utility. The circle is broken and becomes a line: the line of human progress, leaving in its wake chemicals that are not broken down or used by other parts of the system.