Ethical consumerism is not a viable climate solution

The enormity of climate breakdown will not be solved by a further reliance on apolitical consumerism—no matter how "ethical".

A recent article published on Medium entitled “Yes, buying local is a climate solution” did the rounds a bit on Twitter amongst those engaged with food and farming. He is right when he highlights how the corporate food regime is not in the business of producing food, but capital accumulation with food as a by-product. But what I want to focus on is the article’s conclusion.

The gist of the article’s conclusion, after a brief critique of the corporate food regime, is that buying from more ethical local businesses can be a viable climate solution, because it means you’re not buying from big corporations. It focuses not on the carbon emissions associated with those purchases but on the relationships developed with local producers and retailers. It calls them acts of “secession and disruption that moves us toward an entirely new system.” The usual arguments are given around the ability of this transaction to re-establish connection with producers, allowing more control over the food system, and generally reverse processes of alienation. To a limited extent there is some truth to this. Building an alternative to capitalism will require rebuilding social relations so that they are no longer mediated by the money form. It will require building a world beyond the economic power of capital, and capital’s corresponding mechanisms of violence through police, courts, prisons and borders, which shapes and constrains our decision making.

But I think localism, as an embodied set of ideas and practices, has some blindspots. Firstly, that the consumer generally has a very limited relationship with the producer even with the kinds of supposedly more ethical businesses mentioned by the author or more generally imagined by proponents of localism. It is still mediated by a money exchange in the marketplace. Very often the customer has an abstract idea of what they’re buying based on their own fantasy — I know this as a producer because customers often project this fantasy onto us! I see a lot of people talk about their local farm shop or local butchers in highly idealised ways, when in reality they probably have very little concrete idea how the food is produced, to what standards, by whom and so on. The customer might feel more connected, but does that add up to a substantive or significant shift in connection between consumer and producer? And does that feeling represent reality? I’m making a generalised statement and there will be exceptions but I think it holds up. For example, whilst it’s good that farms do farm tours, it is very much a curated picture that the customer receives. There are few genuinely transparent farms — in part often because customers rarely want to know the full truth — and I think CSAs tend to be the ones that best achieve this level of openness, that I think is really valuable. But in general the purported virtue of shopping locally tends to obscure as much as it reveals.

Secondly, localism can mask the inequalities within a locality. Who owns land and who works land. Who can afford to shop at a farmers’ market and who can’t. Who is able to live in that area and who isn’t. These are all factors of the capitalist society we live in as well as the inequality generated by a classed, raced and gendered society. The fact your local farmer is friendly and produces good food tells us little about the social relations within which that food is produced and the consequences of that. Why do I have a right to farm and others not? How does localism really address that? I don’t think it ever has — at best it is a defense of some small farms. And on the flipside of that consumer-producer divide it often masks the reality of people working very long hours, with lots of stress, often for not enough money — things you can’t put on Instagram too often because it can scare away customers who seem to want to feel like they’re buying from a place that’s successful. It confirms their own fantasies of the power of localism and what they want that farm or business to represent. And all parties collude in this fantasy. A dose of realism now and then can in a way further instill the narrative that all parties want to perpetuate.

Thirdly, the answer to the world’s ills, to a small business owner, will of course be found in supporting small businesses. It’s a problem though that so much of food sovereignty is invested in the mythical power of local without a critical appraisal of its limitations. I’m not saying don’t shop local — I think in this wretched world of capitalist society, having nice, independent businesses is generally more pleasant — but I am questioning whether any meaningful social change can stem from localism — or at least an uncritical localism as panacea. I think aspects of localisation is necessary and desirable but it’s not the panacea many of its proponents seem to advocate. (And in a future post I’ll try to return to the collapse fantasies that often accompany a belief in the power of local.)

The Medium article exaggerates how buying from local businesses can build new relationships, more trust and more agency in the food system. The closing line of the article says that this closer connection between consumer and producer, established via local businesses can “entirely transform[]” the relationship between food and carbon emissions. This claim has been made for decades. Surely decades worth of action in this direction should have yielded better results by now? Even ‘localities’ are in decline in most places. I think we’re justified in calling for new directions.

Finally, there is a need to complicate the idea of the local. For example, are your sausages local if the pig feed is imported from degraded Amazonian land? What about the other inputs such as the raw materials to make our technologies, or to build our buildings, or power our vehicles and so on? The idea of the local often masks the already globalised and interconnected nature of capitalist society and in the process masks the realities of super-exploitation of land and labour, of usually racialised people.

Again to reiterate I’m not saying don’t buy from a local farmers’ market if you can afford that — that’s not the point. I would rather get a coffee at an independent café and I would rather buy food from local agroecological farms. I want to live in a nicer locality. My point is this idea of ethical consumerism, that enlightened consumers can lead a transition to a better society is rooted in bog-standard, apolitical, capitalist consumerism. It allows those who have more money to feel like they’re making meaningful change, whilst continuing to avoid the essential political questions that will determine the course of the coming decades. It’s steeped in an individualism that says our individual choices, added up, is what drives change. Just like those claims that if we all eg. buy an electric car, it will help avert further climate breakdown. This averts the need for us to build collective political power and is often accompanied by a pessimism of that potential along with a certain form of misanthropy found in white, middle and upper class society. History shows us quite clearly that people coming together to wield collective power, which is far greater than the sum of its parts, is how positive change occurs. From the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to winning the vote.

Julie Guthman, who wrote a fantastic critique of some of this ‘commodity fetishism’ in her book, Agrarian Dreams, first published twenty years ago:

Yet, transformation requires not only scrutiny—as with a “right to know”—but also a willingness to transform the institutions and structures that underlie the fetishism of commodities.

The requirement is that we affect those institutions (or build new ones) and structures as directly and substantially as possible — ethical consumerism has failed to achieve this for entirely predictable reasons. Reasons laid out by Guthman, specifically in relation to organic farming and localism in the context of California, that are just as relevant today. For this reason, her book is equally cathartic and frustrating to read!

But it’s essential if we wish to establish food sovereignty and agroecological transition at the scale necessitated by the demands of the 21st century. The fetishisation of the local will not bring into being the world we need. The much promised “rural renaissance”—which goes back 30 years at least, has not materialised in Western countries. At best buying locally can make life a bit nicer for generally more affluent people and provide a (small) income for a small slice of producers. Shortening supply chains, democratising food production and land management, and improving the areas we live do not rely upon the set of ideas and practices encapsulated by localism. They rely on simultaneously dismantling this world and building a new, better one, beyond the commodity relation, which is no small feat, and I highlighted some potential directions this might take in my previous post.