Reprinted with permission from the May 2010 issue of the Ester Republic.

A question came up at a lecture I was giving with two of my colleagues recently, regarding whether or not agriculture in Alaska could meet the food needs of the entire state. The issue was raised as something of an indirect critique of local / alternative food movements; our talk was reporting on some research that we have been engaged in with participants and producers of local CSAs. The answer, suggested by the same audience member who introduced the topic was no, that Alaska could not feed itself, at least not in an affordable or sustainable manner. I must admit that I was caught off guard by the suggestion, and I chose not to confront it, in order to not spoil the mood of the evening by ending it on a tone of debate. And, after some thought on the issue and a couple of (local) beers, I am glad that I refrained. Because, while it seems an interesting question, it is in fact the most classic example of a red herring, a critique that I believe is responsible for perpetuating the comfortable-but-tired debate between local and industrial paradigms of food production.

The appropriate answer to the question of whether or not local agriculture can in fact feed all Alaskans, or all New Yorkers, or all Somalians, is: who ever said that it needed to? It may indeed be the goal of the industrial model to standardize and corporatize the entirety of food production, but progress toward such a goal is hardly a legitimate yardstick for evaluating a system that has never purported such ends. Local food movements are primarily about returning control to communities—control over food safety, quality, and the ethics of production—not necessarily the production itself. Feeding everyone in Alaska is not the goal of Calypso, or Rosie Creek, or Dogwood Farm; the proprietors of these each have their own unique reasons for doing what they do. Judging them by their ability to achieve this goal that was never theirs to begin with is ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst.

The contemporary American debate regarding where our food should come from has quite unfortunately become reduced to these caricatures and name-calling, and this obsession with us-versus-them has eclipsed the most important value that the progenitors of the movement, Bill Mollison, Wendell Berry, and Jack Kloppenburg, for instance, founded their philosophy upon: diversity. Mollison, in his books Permaculture I and II (still the most important read for people thinking about changing food systems) repeatedly emphasized the importance of understanding and emphasizing the strengths of your environment, of not expecting too much but cultivating what comes naturally. Likewise, Kloppenburg and his colleagues, in the seminal piece “Coming Into the Foodshed,” spoke not of localizing every aspect of a community food system, but of regaining power as a consumer, whether as a neighbor and customer to local farmers or as an empowered buyer of fair trade coffee imported from half-way across the world.

Something like 95% of Alaska’s food needs are met by producers outside the state. In 20, 50, or even 100 years, in-state agriculture may not be able to replace these agricultural inputs; that does not mean, however, that it is not important to try to reduce that number to 75%, 50%, even 25%. Food is hardly limited to agriculture, and agriculture is hardly limited to crops. The waters of the Bering Sea currently provide 50% of the seafood consumed in the United States. 98% of the wild fish and game harvested in Alaskan territory are consumed elsewhere. Our state is quite literally haemorrhaging food. If food security for Alaska is the priority, polices regarding these resources should be addressed. Too, there is tremendous untapped potential for reindeer production. Currently the commercial development of reindeer ranching is limited, whether by policy, infrastructure, or expertise is unclear; the Alaska Reindeer Act limits the commercial use of reindeer to Alaska Natives, but I personally do not understand why more native corporations have not moved into the business. Similarly, projects have long been on the table to reintroduce and restore wood bison populations to Interior Alaska, which, once viable, could provide a bountiful source of local meat for many, whether managed as livestock or as wild game.

Alaska has an opportunity to set the tone for reform in regional food systems nationally and globally. If the vast and productive landscapes and seascapes of Alaska cannot provide even a simple majority of food for its citizens, then local food movements are indeed irrelevant. It only takes a very simple math, however, to calculate that Alaskans can, in fact, feed themselves, given the proper environment of support from policy-makers and other people of influence in the agricultural community. I named this column after a 1967 article by an agricultural geographer, who noted that agriculture in Alaska was not, and could not be like the agricultural systems state-side. It is about time that we stop trying to design or evaluate food production here by the terms of this imported, and frankly irrelevant ideology, and build upon our uniquely-Alaskan character to innovate a new model of food system for the world.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 6th, 2010 at 10:23 am by Philip Loring and is filed under Feature Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.