Local Food = Local Jobs

Michael H. Shuman (author of "The Small-Mart Revolution" and "Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age") has a new report out: "Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a Global Marketplace." It contains a bunch of case studies (I'm partial to "Cabbages and Condoms" restaurants in Thailand) and is available for download here in whole or in part. His HuffPo article is here.

A study done two years ago found that a 20% shift of retail food spending in Detroit redirected to locally grown foods would create 5,000 jobs and increase local output by half a billion dollars. A similar shift to Detroit-grown food by those living in the five surrounding counties would create 35,000 jobs - far more than ever will come out of the multibillion-dollar bailout of the auto industry. The experience of microenterprise organizations around the country suggests that each of these jobs can be created for $2,000-3,000 of public money--a tiny fraction of the price of the last stimulus.
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Some 73 cents of every U.S. dollar spent on food goes to distribution, including advertising, trucking, packaging, refrigeration, middle people, and so forth. Seven cents goes to the farmer. A local food business, like the Oklahoma Food Cooperative we studied, has reduced distribution costs to 20 cents on the dollar, which means lower prices for consumers and more income for farmers.
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This is also why local food is important globally. The worst way to help poor Bangladeshi farmers to get out of poverty is to continue buying their produce, since even under fair trade standards maybe a penny or so of every food-sale dollar reaches them. It's far better for Americans to help Bangladesh residents become more self-reliant on food by sharing our best models of CFEs (and their sharing their best models with us) to encourage local ownership of economic stimulating local food businesses. Plus, the community wealth generated by greater food self-reliance will give us more purchasing power to buy those items, like coffee or bananas, that only can be grown in the global south. Spreading CFE models in the name of creating jobs and food security everywhere is the kind globalization all of us can embrace.