The economy often appears to be a large, ramshackle institution, a law unto itself. This is partly due to the skills of those who really control it and partly because it is both a large ramshackle institution and a law unto itself. If the economy was only made up of money, it might be easier to make a case for saying that it can be controlled, if not managed, at some level. The truth is that the economy comprises much more than mere money and is constantly manipulated by economic factors that strengthen the relative strengths of one component over another.
City life 3.0
On the surface, urban life appears to be very deeply compartmentalised, when large populations find themselves living cheek by jowl while maintaining social separations, such as class, race or status. However, there is no separation in nature, the planet has a single atmosphere, a single ocean, not to mention shared land masses. Ultimately, all nature’s resources are shared, with an often over-generous share being taken by humanity. The planet does not respond or challenge this phenomenon, but continues to meet all demands made of it, by human and animal alike, on a first come, first served basis.
Wherever humanity has left the by-products of its plundering, such as ash, exhaust gases or radioactive residues, these have accumulated and degraded down the centuries. Nature does not judge polluters, just keeps their dirty little secrets on view for all to see. To avoid eternal shame, humanity actively needs to work in harmony with nature, instead of emptying the sweet jars in the planetary candy store.
There have been civilisations which have lived in harmony with the natural world, spanning millennia, sadly we have very limited knowledge of their cultures, or indeed the roots of their eventual demise. Managing soil fertility was doubtlessly a cornerstone of their endeavours, making a closer study of the Indore project a high priority. It is time for subscribers to unpack Sir Albert Howard’s legacy.
City life 2.0
Food production has to compete fiercely for space in any urban environment. In a bid to escape these constraints, some food producers have gone up in the world, literally. Welcome to the world of vertical farming, a high tech adaptation of hydroponics, in which plants are raised in row upon row of troughs, each level illuminated by a blend of artificial lights that add up to a passable semblance of continuous light. Vertical farming has the squeaky clean credentials of a rising star in the food industry, earning extra points for season-free crops of strawberries, salad leaves and baby spinach leaves.
Converts and supporters of vertical farming point to the careful use of environmentally friendly electricity, the green credentials of the indoor space management in commercial growing operations that can supply high grade salad crops to supermarkets in a continuous production cycle.
The BBC has visited a leading exponent a number of times. Here is what they reported in August 2022 (https://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-62491123). The Bristol-based Jones Food Company is preparing to launch the biggest vertical farm in the UK. There is a lot of high tech green know-how at work in the business. However, while its carbon footprint is doubtless beyond reproach, one is left wondering whether there is any role for nature in this high tech warehouse. After all, there is no commercial requirement for nature to be a part of any business plan.
The Jones Food Company website argues that its core business is farming sustainably, without some of the “hazardous substances” associated with field farming. By cleaning and reusing water up to 30 times, water intake is one tenth of what a conventional field crop would need. JFC also argues that in-house water hygiene allows the company to operate without toxic crop treatments, saving money and improving the flavour of crops.
This is an activity that sets out to be part of the solution, if not all of the solution, rather than any kind of problem. The basic assumption that what goes on in the wider world is either too distant or irrelevant does not hold water. There is a duty of care to the planet to give some thought to the whole ecosphere, when planning what goes into a growing space, however small.
Seen from that angle, the emphasis changes in a subtle shift towards a planetary view. To be sure, assuming that the vertical farmer is so close to her customers that food miles cease to be an issue, whereas procurement of fluorescent tubes probably requires a longer trip around a continent or two. It may be that the calculation of food miles needs to be done on the basis of inputs as well as outputs.
City life 1.0
The foundations of any society must needs be its harmony with, for want of a better term, nature. There is simply no way we can live outside nature, so we have to recognise that we are part of it and live accordingly. This is easier to say than to do, so my apologies for not having ready answers to the torrent of issues such a line of thought unleashes.
The inescapable paradox is that our cities are built to normalise anthropocentric lifestyles. Nobody is to blame for such a situation, it has just happened this way and would probably do the same again if we were to reinvent industrial society. In simple terms we lack the skill set needed to give the natural world a proper hearing and it is a moot point to suggest that we just need time to do so. We have had an incentive to learn for millennia and have spent that time dipping into finite planetary resources in the process.
The earliest settled cities devised elaborate systems for governing both city and hinterland, documenting their transactions with painstaking detail. Literacy was restricted to the ruling class, but every citizen had to be environmentally savvy if the metropolis was to survive, let alone prosper. History bears witness to the long term success of Sumerian cities such as Girsu or Ur, where archaeologists talk of habitation during millennia, an achievement that is unlikely to be matched by the modern industrial economy. Stumbling from environmental crisis to ecological impasse, the industrial economy has played fast and loose with nature, not to mention urban food chains, the subject of this blog.
More pressing than to understand the fate of early agrarian societies is to understand what they did correctly for centuries. There is good reason to suppose that they had sustainable sanitation of a sort that Sir Alfred Howard envisaged while working on the Indore project. A renewable, natural cycle producing humus within a month would go a long way to explaining the soil’s fertility in the world’s longest-surviving agrarian societies.
The Indore project
pic Wikimedia
Between the wars, Sir Alfred Howard was the director of the Institute of Plant Technology Indore. Later hailed as a guiding spirit of the organic movement, Howard’s vision of agriculture was one of interlocking sub systems that functioned as an integrated whole.
Between 1924 and 1931, Howard perfected the Indore process, naming it after the state in Central India where he had been working. The Indore process takes animal and/or human waste and combines it with vegetable waste to generate field-ready humus in just four weeks. The process runs at such a high temperature range that bacteria and insect larvae are literally cooked to death.
FairTrade week
Yes, this week is FairTrade week, when a growing number of ethically-traded products take centre stage in retail premises up and down the country. To be sure, the FairTrade movement works hard and has achieved a lot for growers all over the world.
Many of the core FairTrade range of products were first grown on plantations, the building blocks of forced labour. British-owned tea plantations in the 19th century responded to the abolition of slavery by ejecting former slaves and bringing in cheap, indentured labour from China and elsewhere in Asia. Slavery by another name, it can be argued.
The much-argued over compensation that was paid out in the years following slavery’s abolition went to the slave-owners, to compensate for their lost profits. At that time, nobody thought to compensate the former slaves or their families for the upheaval and loss caused by the wholesale removal of men and women with working lives ahead of them, who were taken halfway round the world to work on sugar plantations or the like.
The building of today’s FairTrade movement marks a welcome change in how the world views food producers. It would be easy to overlook the origins of so many products before the the widespread recognition of ethical trading as a commercial policy in its own right.
There are more than 10,000 small-scale banana growers around the world, for whom FairTrade premiums earned GBP 31.8 million in 2020. The large-scale plantations of Latin America and elsewhere can still make economies of scale that get them preferential terms for everything from growing costs to shipping and distribution. But their existence is not a direct threat to FairTrade growers on the scale they once were, during a time when the average asking price for bananas in UK supermarkets dropped from 18p to 11p apiece.
There are 1.9 million FairTrade food producers around the world, earning a living growing tea, coffee, cocoa and a wide range of other agricultural products. In 2020, 1,880 producer organisations earned GBP 169 million in FairTrade premiums. The visibility of FairTrade products make it a successful brand with a strong appeal to consumers.
What happened at Girsu?
It is rare for mainstream newspapers to get excited about prehistory, but the Guardian ran a whole page about Girsu the other week (find it here). We’ll take it from the top and explain that what used to be an administrative centre of the Sumerian world in the second and third millennia BCE started life as Girsu. Now called Tello, it is in southern Iraq.
One of the earliest cities known to humanity, Girsu was first excavated by teams of French archaeologists 140 years ago, but the site has experienced significant losses among its artefacts. Since the most persistent artefacts are administrative records, archaeologists have pieced together some first impressions of a civilisation that had a fiscal policy as just one part of an elaborate social structure. To inhabit a site for millennia, as the Sumerians obviously did, can only happen with a balanced and extensive environmental skill set. So no flushing toilets in Girsu, then, but something altogether better adapted to a densely-populated seat of power.
Weighty measures
To get a proper grip on the workings of the food industry, it is vital to understand the units that are used to organise and quantify production. Since this website sets out to cover historical aspects of food production, it is only fair to offer a brief outline of the systems in place during the formative years. We live in a metric world and should not imagine that any other set of measures is going to return to re-establish the status quo ante. But we need to have a clear idea of how we started.
The starting point for present purposes is the 1824 Weights and Measures Act, for reasons which will be made clear to subscribers in a fuller treatment of the topic. It will come with a basic tool kit for managing the practical aspects of modern metrology. For seekers of the arcane, visit Wikipedia’s excellent listing of the many post Sumerian systems and notations for weights, here. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Mesopotamian_units_of_measurement)
Seasonality
It might seem odd to a modern observer that 1925 the UK’s ministry of labour classed the following foods as seasonal: fish, milk, butter eggs and potatoes. The fact that prices and availability might change quite widely across the seasons is the argument advanced for ignoring such basic foods when calculating a retail price index, putting the cart before the horse.
Pricing experts?
Ask any economist and they will tell you that economics is a science, founded on mathematics and using none but the most reputable methodologies known to data science. The acid test of any scientific discipline is to be able to replicate previous experiments and repeat the results to within an acceptable margin.
To be sure, if you take the same data and crunch the numbers using the same calculations, you will get the same results as the previous economist. But economists are a diverse bunch, not to mention the smørgesbord of economic policy recommendations to be shared as the opportunity arises.
If this sounds less than serious in its tone or intent, it may be that it is not written by A Proper Economist (always spelt out in full, never abbreviated). A Proper Economist can be relied upon to analyse market data and forecast the likely price trends within a given sector. If, on the other hand, you wanted to know the retail price of a grocery line for the coming year, that would be a closely-guarded secret between a supermarket buyer and her (or his) supplier.
With the digitisation of the retail checkouts in the early 1990s came a tidal wave of sales data that probably paid for itself in months, if not weeks. For the first time in recorded history the multiples knew exactly how many units of which lines they were selling; where they had multiple suppliers of own-label products, the multiples could start to make direct comparisons between suppliers and the margins they were generating. Individual suppliers knew what volumes each was shipping to retail customers, but only the category managers had the whole picture.
The supermarket buyers’ secret weapon of choice in those days was a miniature tape recorder and microcassettes, to which verbal contracts worth millions of pounds were recorded. If any hard copies were ever made, these would have been kept in a safe. Supermarket buyers and category managers are overlapping roles. They were always instantly recognisable at trade fairs, leaving suppliers’ stands with their tape recorder pressed to their ear, playing back the small print as it was wrung out of the supplier. There was no question of suppliers passing on price increases arising from higher prices on the international markets: the standard response in those days was: “find cost savings in your business…”
Not that buyers ever applied that principle to their own dealings with suppliers. Food manufacturers presenting new ranges and products to multiple retailers would face requests for a listing fee and, often as not, a request for special offer stock. Listing fees were also referred to as hello money or shelf money, among other names. They used to start around £5000 per SKU for listings in an agreed number of outlets. Shelf money was never refunded if a product was delisted, but would be requested for years to come during the life of the listing.
Special offers were not what they might have appeared to be, either. The retailer charges the consumer for the special offer part of the price. But does the multiple give away the offer component of the price? Hell no! They recovered that from the suppliers, who systematically funded the offers, providing free stock directly or having the equivalent money withheld from invoices for other products. Either way, the retailer banked the full price on special offers. From the retailer’s point of view, it is having your cake and eating it. Even though the Grocery Code Adjudicator’s office has cleaned up the retailers’ act, the industry is still haunted by the ghosts of past sales targets.