As climate change continues to disrupt agriculture, another industry may be in trouble – supermarkets. Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com looks forward to the failure of supermarkets:
Supermarkets have got it all wrong. The model on which they operate, offering a vast selection of fresh fruits and vegetables imported from distant places year-round, is simply unsustainable. It depends on great quantities of fossil fuels to heat greenhouses and to fly or truck long distances, and precious resources like fresh water, often taken from places that don’t have much water to begin with.
The precariousness of this model became apparent earlier this winter, when the UK experienced shortages of lettuce, zucchini, spinach, and other green vegetables. Because of severe flooding in Spain, these foods were not available to import. Suddenly UK supermarkets were scrambling to fly produce across the Atlantic, all the way from California, at a tremendous financial loss to themselves. Why? To maintain the status quo, to stock shelves the ‘usual’ way, because shoppers have come to expect iceberg lettuce in January.
And given how migrant labor is important to the export of foodstuffs, Trump may be another nail in the coffin:
Closer to home, in America, it is difficult to imagine how the agricultural system will work without the assistance of the migrant workers that the new president is so eager to repatriate. It seems unlikely that a great number of Americans will want to take over those back-breaking, low-paying jobs.
A beekeeper-hobbyist friend of mine was recently telling me that the professionals send all their bees to California in the spring for a mass fertilization of the crops – and this results in the inadvertent transmission of bee-specific diseases all over the country when the bees are returned to their keepers. (As a hobbyist, he doesn’t participate, but suspects that soon hobbyists will be asked to send their bees as well.) I wonder if the collapse of the supermarket system – if it ever happened – would be beneficial to bees as well, since food growing might then devolve back to greater local control.
