LIFECYCLE ANALYSIS: Tomato production.

Part I:  Tomatoes as produced by a multinational corporation.

• Cheap inputs in Mexico.  Low wages, no benefits.  The tomatoes are sprayed to control weeds and sprayed to control insects.  The soil is fed NPK to boost yields.  The varieties chosen are ones that yield well, are a uniform size, all look nice, ripen all at the same time for easy harvest, and have thick skins which don’t bruise easily and prevent the fruits from drying out.  They are picked green in order to last longer and ship better.  Flavor is not very good, but they take a long time to spoil, so you can sell the over a longer period and lose fewer of them. 
• Tomatoes are sorted and boxed and stored in a large warehouse.  These workers likely aren’t paid well either.
• Trucks pick up the tomatoes and move them along.  The trucks burn fossil fuels contributing to climate change.  It takes energy to produce the fuel, and then to move the fuel to the place the trucks get it, and then, of course, burning the fuel uses up the energy stored in it.  Any energy use that results in burning of fossil fuels contributes to the greenhouse effect.  This is an environmental impact, especially for people in places like Saskatchewan or New York or Tokyo.  The wear and tear on the trucks and the roads will require raw materials for new parts and road repairs.  These are environmental costs.  Moving the product costs money too.  To pay the truckers and the fuel bills.  The big corporations own their own oil companies, so they make (or save) money on that part of it, but there is still a cost involved which is passed on to the consumer.  They own their own transport companies so they make (or save) money on that part of it.  This is called vertical integration.  Own your own factories, trucking, fuel, and retail companies and the profits from each part of the operation come to the Matrix.
• Ship tomatoes from Mexico to Canada and USA.  Multinationals want through GATT to make it illegal to put the place of origin on labels.  Not that they want it to be legal not to, they want it to be illegal to put anything on the product that would help you to know which one is local, or from your country and to prefer it.  The big corporations have their own retail stores, but they will also sell to brokers who sell to smaller stores.  Thus the corporation makes money on sales in their own store, and less when selling to a smaller store.  But that smaller store has to pay the trucking cost to the broker from the packing plant.  They have to pay the broker’s mark up.  The broker will sell to a bunch of wholesale companies (ship it there and pay transport) who will then sell to retailers all over (ship it there and pay transport).  By the time the broker (might be two) get their mark up, and the transport companies get paid full rate (small people don’t have their own trucking companies) and the wholesaler takes a mark up, the cost of the product is double what the corporation’s costs on the same product are.
• The same kind of pattern applies to processed goods.  In this case the multinational will transport the tomatoes (and onions and herbs) to a canning plant in a free trade zone of Mexico where labor is cheap and there is no taxation.  Maybe to a plant in the USA if they already had it built and the union isn’t too uppity.  The cost of production and distribution is much smaller for the multinational than their smaller competitors.  It makes them very competitive and that is where most people go to shop all over North America.  So all that money flies to the Matrix.
• Look at the products you buy and see how many come from China, Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia, and so on.  These are all countries that have low wages, tax free zones and enough infrastructures (electrical, roads, etc) to allow the multinationals to do their work.

Part II: TOMATOES PRODUCED IN A BIOREGIONAL,

ORGANIC,

FAIR TRADE SYSTEM

In a regionally based, fair trade type system, the transport costs (environmental and financial) are dramatically reduced, the wages paid to the workers are increased dramatically, and without all the transport costs and middlemen we can be competitive price wise with multinationals. 

The superior quality of organic foods, due to the selection of more delicious tomatoes rather than long keepers, and due to soil fertility managed with green manure and crop rotation (which is much superior in terms of soil and plant health) produces a much more flavorful product.  The immediate distribution, from garden to market in a matter of hours rather than days, gives freshness benefits that show up as superior nutritional quality and flavor.   A local organic grower will allow their fruits to ripen on the vine before picking them.  This allows the tomato to complete it’s process, and put as many nutrients as possible into its fruit.  The result again, is a better tasting and more nutritious product.  This is a competitive advantage of the local economy.  Better taste and nutrition. 

Environmentally, as you can see, the thousands of kilometers of distribution networks that need to be maintained to get the tomatoes to us becomes an average of 50 kilometers per trip.  The fuel required to drive 50 km to market and back is much less than that required to make it here from Mexico and drive back.  The wear and tear on the truck is reduced as well.  The environmental benefits are paralleled by cost savings.  A local distribution system doesn’t cost as much as a global or continental one.  And just wait until oil prices REALLY go up!  Then we will be very competitive.  Then we kick their butts!

By creating local economies, all that trucking cost, and all the mark ups at brokers and wholesalers is eliminated.  The only costs are the price paid to the producer and the price paid to the retailer.  If you buy direct from the producer at a farmers market or at their farm, the retail mark up is eliminated and the producer gets all the money. 

If that producer then buys all their stuff from multinational corporations, it doesn’t do the local economy a whole lot of good.  But if that producer buys local products, and those local people buy other local products, the money keeps circulating in our economy, and at every cycle it makes, the environment benefits from the elimination of the long trucking distances.  This is the basis of Buy Local Campaigns.  To try to cause the multinationals to shrink, and the local economy to grow.  It is an economic strategy known as import substitution.  For any product we can grow well here, you “plug the hole” in the economy and support local industries.  The less money flows out, the more prosperity stays home.

Of course, we can’t very well grow bananas here, or oranges or pineapples.  I intend to prove that we can grow rice.  So you import what you can’t produce, export what you can produce at a competitive advantage, and produce for the local market the things that will only be competitive on a local scale.  This is a bioregional economy.  It doesn’t mean we give up bananas or seafood, but it does suggest we only buy local stuff where available, try to prefer steelhead trout to BC salmon (Steelhead is better anyway, and MUCH cheaper) and then import what you want besides.  The fewer wants we have in proportion to the size of the overall economy, the better for our prosperity balance sheet.  Any economy where more money is coming in than is leaving will prosper.  The size of the surplus determines how prosperous your area will be.

This is true of local economies, such as that based around a small town, as well as it is for bioregions.  Money spent locally, repeatedly, makes a strong economic basis for a local trading area.  Money spent into the City is lost to the local economy, and money spent in big boxes is lost to the bioregional economy.

Where multinationals grow organic food, they tend to mine the soil (continuous crop with application of allowable fertilizers) and choose better keeping varieties.  It isn’t the same as local.  Still, it is not loaded with chemicals, so that is preferable.

Organic processes do not use herbicides, insecticides or chemical fertilizers.  Therefore the environmental costs of producing them, and the even bigger environmental costs that come after they are used, are eliminated.  In addition, you do not eat them in your food, and in the long term, our health will benefit from this as a lower cancer rate, with fewer cases of MS, fewer allergies, and a better reproductive vigor in our sperm cells.

Which world do you want?  Viable local economies with better nutrition and flavor and better long term health impacts, or one based on exploiting people in poor nations before using crazy amounts of fossil fuels to bring things to big boxes for us to buy cheaply (at a large profit), chemicals and all?  You could buy Big Box organic products and then you are still exploiting people in poor nations, using huge amounts of fossil fuel and starving the local economy, but at least you don’t have to eat the chemicals.