What the Modern World Eats

A 30-year veteran of the U.S. Agency for International Development talks about how global trade affects local diets, why food equity is more of an education issue than one of accessibility, and why rural African diets haven’t changed as much as their urbanizing counterparts.

An urban farm in Bamako, Mali. Credit: Flickr user donkeycart

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In anticipation of the upcoming 2013 Feeding Cities conference in Philadelphia, Next City will run Q&A interviews with three of the event’s speakers about their work in food politics and food justice. Read the first two installments here and here.

With more than four decades of work on international development, agriculture and food issues under her belt, Emmy Simmons knows a bit about the way the world eats. A long career with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) culminated in serving three years as the Assistant Administrator for Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade, to which she had been appointed by former President George W. Bush. Prior to USAID, Simmons’ work took her to the government of Monrovia, Liberia and Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria, among other places. Today, she’s an independent consultant on international development issues.

Here, Simmons talks about how global trade affects local diets, why food equity is more of an education issue than one of accessibility, and why rural African diets haven’t changed as much as their urbanizing counterparts.

Next City: You spent almost 30 years with USAID. How did the food system around the world change in that time?

Simmons

Emmy Simmons: Both hugely and not enough. We have seen a lot more change in global food systems since the late ’90s than we saw in the prior 30 years. Most of my time with USAID I spent in Africa. When you look at how food systems have changed there, the rural systems are still very similar to what they were 30 or 40 years ago. But urban populations in Africa have actually experienced quite a lot of change, just because urban growth has been so high. And then, I think the leading edge of the new wave has been China, as incomes have risen and urbanization, particularly young urbanization, has happened so rapidly. That’s been kind of a bellwether for change in urban diets.

But urban diets, even going back 40 years, were always much more geared toward convenience. In many cases, that meant bread, which for many tropical countries is not a product that can be locally produced. There has always been in urban areas a very strong street food movement, in which people, again for convenience’s sake, [don’t do] their own cooking in their houses but eat on the streets. And now, we’ve got fast food and restaurant food. The spectrum of urban diets has broadened, and there’s a lot more diversity of consumers along that spectrum. So urban diets have changed a lot. Rural diets in India and China, I suspect, have changed pretty much. But in Africa rural diets have actually not changed as much as you might think. They’re still very staple food-oriented: Local production, local products, locally processed products. It’s a real mixed bag.

NC: What accounts for the fact that African rural diets haven’t changed, while rural diets in developing nations on other continents have?

Simmons: A lack of productivity growth and a lack of income growth. African rural areas have had productivity increases chasing demographics increases, and so far the demographic increases have won. Production per capita has just moved up ever so slightly. Even though total production has moved up — because there are more people living in rural areas, there’s more land under cultivation — nevertheless production per capita has not increased all that much. Therefore food purchasing power has not increased that much, either. Basically, you have rural people eating rural diets, again with lots of staples, local vegetables, a small amount of meat when they can get it. Urban diets, just because urban areas have more rapid growth rates, both demographically and economically, and there’s all the communication and internationalization and all that pressure, they have just changed a lot.

NC: Last week I interviewed another Feeding Cities speaker who noted that food systems around the world are becoming more Americanized in correlation with globalization. How do you think a worldwide shift toward more processed, consumer packaged goods will affect cities in the developing world?

Simmons: It goes both ways, right? With greater urbanization and greater internationalization happening at the same time, you see the convergence of these things. International trade has increased enormously since the late ’80s, early ’90s. Whether it’s urbanization driving the change in consumption, or whether it’s the possibility of a change in diet because there’s greater global trade… you can see these from either direction. I think the Westernization has come because global food trade systems have become much more internationally controlled by Western companies. What they have done is taken their model into many more urban areas globally. The combination of convenience, cheapness, difference, uniqueness, a new lifestyle has really attracted a lot of people to that diet.

People have made the argument that it’s just Western companies marketing this diet and addicting people in developing countries to salt and sugar and all that. You can make that argument, but it’s totally a two-way street: People have more money, they want more convenience, they want new tastes, they want to be modern. And that’s what’s available, so that’s what they buy. I think the empirical evidence [shows] that urban diets, particularly, have changed much more in a Western way. But I don’t think it’s because people consciously want to be western, which is sometimes the implication that underpins that observation.

NC: In your opinion, do you believe we can ever attain a global food system that feeds everybody but is also healthy and environmentally sustainable?

Simmons: I think it’s going to be a huge challenge, and that’s what I’m going to talk about next week. For that to happen, it’s not just a change in the food system. It’s a change in culture, it’s a change in habits, it’s a change in the way cities are designed and how people commute between their housing and their work, and how much time is available. There have been studies in Kenya, for example, that show that both women and men do not eat in the house a great deal of the time. Something like 30 percent of the time, meals are consumed outside the home. That’s partly because people live too far away from where they work to be able to cook at home.

I think you need sustainable cities, you need redesigned cities, you need different kinds of food systems, you need a lot more choices and you’re also going to need a lot more income. All of the fresh food value chains are more costly just because of the extra waste and loss that comes with fresh commodities. Never mind having refrigeration, but just the way a fresh tomato works, and how it deteriorates, it means there’s going to be more waste involved. To go back to your question, I don’t think there’s going to be an easy way to get there. People keep coming up with simple, bumper sticker-type things: “Reduce waste,” or “cook fresh,” or “local production.” Each of those things is somewhat important, but any one of them is not going to be the answer.

NC: Will this shift in eating habits start to weigh on the healthcare systems of these nations?

A convenience store in Bangladesh. Credit: CIMMYT

Simmons: It’s already weighing on them. The healthcare system, even in the poorest developing countries, reflects both the under-nutrition and the malnutrition in the rural areas and among poor populations in cities. At the same time it reflects the other kinds of costs of over-nutrition and obesity. So the healthcare system is always going to reflect inadequacies in diets, or the fact that diets are not geared toward good health.

NC: In what direction do you think we need to move so that healthy eating can become more equitable?

Simmons: I don’t think healthy eating is more inaccessible to lower-income populations now than it has been in prior years. I don’t agree with that. Low-income populations have always had difficulty procuring and consuming healthy diets. That’s always been the case. Low-income consumers in the United States, perhaps, are not consuming as healthy diets as they were back in the ’50s. But they were a completely different group of low-income consumers. In the 1950s, when I was growing up, low-income consumers were living in rural areas, producing food. Nowadays, low-income consumers are concentrated in urban areas, so their access to food is very different. That’s changed. But the options for having access to good diets are actually there. I don’t think the knowledge, I don’t think the will, I don’t think the habits that go with accessing healthy food are there.

To give you an example, I was with a group out in Kansas talking with a person who was helping low-income families have gardens and eat fresh foods. She said one of the huge, really difficult things with the 20-somethings and 30-somethings in that crowd — most of whom had children — was that they didn’t know how to cook. They could put things in the microwave, or they could go buy fast food. Those were their choices. Not because they didn’t have access to healthier food, but they didn’t have the education, skills or training. Access — if you think about it, [it] is an economics phenomenon or a physical phenomenon — wasn’t really the issue. It was other characteristics that limited their capacity and their interest to procure healthier diets.

NC: Speaking of growing food, [on Monday] I interviewed Marielle Dubbeling of the RUAF Foundation, who argues in favor of using urban agriculture as a tool for economic development and social inclusion. How do you view this practice as it relates to feeding and improving cities around the world?

Simmons: Urban agriculture for sure has a role in providing greater access to fresh commodities, and peri-urban agriculture — that is, agriculture in suburban areas or in riverine areas even within urban areas — again is important for production of fresh urban produce. I was just in Malaysia, and they have a big emphasis on having pots on balconies of big urban apartments with fresh food in them. It makes the point that a family can manage to eat fresh lettuce or onions or whatever off of its balcony pretty much year-round. But the management of an urban garden is really important, even in tropical areas. Because you have to take care of it, you have to protect it, there’s lots of thievery going on in peri-urban areas around African cities, for example.

Urban agriculture is one of those things that everyone really pushes. But in fact the experience is that it fills a certain niche, and it provides certain amount of stuff, but it isn’t the whole solution. You’ve got to watch out for pollution, because people grow vegetables right in the middle of double-lane highways. They grow vegetables and fruits in areas that are irrigated by highly contaminated waters. In order to manage the intensive cultivation, people put heavy, heavy loads of pesticides on the fruits and vegetables they’re producing in peri-urban markets. The downside risks of urban agriculture are also there. It’s an important and useful initiative to look at, but one needs to be aware of the risks.

Next City is a media partner for Feeding Cities 2013.

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Tags: economic developmentequityurban farmingindiachina

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