Closing the Metabolic Rift: Shifting Consumer Behavior Towards the Local

By: Emma Wiseman

Abstract

The widening gap between consumers and their food sources has led to a loss of environmental knowledge and consciousness that has detrimental effects on the environment. Working with Karl Marx’s theory of the metabolic rift, which laid the theoretical groundwork for studies concerning consumer-producer networks and their connections to environmental sustainability, this paper seeks to understand how the consumer trend of “shopping local” has impacted the relationship between consumers and the environment on which their livelihoods depend. This question is explored using several case studies that examine the definition of “local food”, the consumer motivations that sustain the trend, and the impacts that shopping locally has on individual consumers in a variety of dimensions. The study finds that although the motivations behind shopping locally often correlate with concerns for the environment, the limitations placed on consumers operating within the capitalist system means that individual needs and conceptualizations of the “local” are too varied to have a direct correlation to increased environmental sustainability. It concludes that institutional and market-wide changes are required to close the metabolic rift, and provides an example of how this can begin to occur through the case of the La Vıa Campesina movement in Brazil.

Introduction

The development of a global agri-foodsystem has resulted in a growing disconnect between consumers and producers. Urban citizens may live their whole lives without encountering the farms that they depend on, and rural citizens are becoming more disconnected from the food market as large-scale farm corporations replace small farms. This divide between consumers and production systems is an essential part of Marx’s “metabolic rift”; a socio-ecological theory which states that the relationship between humans and nature is integral to protecting the environment, and capitalist modes of production create rifts in this relationship to the detriment of environmental sustainability. 1 This paper will begin by exploring the modern theoretical groundwork for the metabolic rift, followed by an analysis of case studies that evaluate the impacts of the “shopping local” trend on closing the metabolic rift. The results of this analysis will show that while shopping locally may suggest an opportunity for consumers to close the rift, they are unable to do so due to several constraints. However, movements happening on the producer-level such as La Vıa Campesina suggest more success.

The Theoretical Basis of the Modern Metabolic Rift Theory

The basis of the metabolic rift theory as it applies to this paper is that the overexploitation of land due to a market-oriented system creates a variety of environmental issues such as soil depletion, nutrient loss, pollution and land scarcity. 2 Additionally, the spatial and temporal separation between farms and consumers prevents individuals from recognizing the consequences of their consumption and creates a loss of local environmental knowledge that could be used to prevent harm to or restore the land. 3 Axinn, Barber and Biddlecom also argue that the transition from direct consumption (i.e. hunting and gathering) to indirect consumption (i.e. purchasing food from a store) has resulted in a loss of local resource management skills and an increase in resource consumption. 4 This aligns with Marx’s theory that a lack of knowledge about local environments due to a consumer-producer rift would consequently lead to environmental degradation. The following section will analyze several case studies about local food consumption in order to investigate the impact that the “shopping local” trend has had on consumer environmental knowledge and sustainability, and to discern if change in consumer behavior is an effective strategy for closing the Marxian metabolic rift..

Shopping Local: An Ineffective Method for Closing the Gap

There is an emerging literature that attempts to reconcile the large-scale mechanisms of the metabolic rift with the shifting norms in consumer behavior that are oriented towards localized consumption. Some theorists have asserted that a greater connection to local forms of production would help prevent large-scale resource exploitation and restore damaged farmlands. 5 In the case of the management of common-pool resources, Ostrom found empirical evidence to support the fact that a greater understanding of local and regional micro-environments is an important tool for sustainable resource management. 6 Ostrom’s study demonstrated cases in which overexploitation and mismanagement of resources have been circumvented through local and regional self-organization and the use of local knowledge rather than macro-regimes of resource use.

The central question posed by this paper is whether the local environmental knowledge described by theorists like Ostrum can be regained by consumers through the “shopping local” trend, in which consumers consciously choose to purchase locally-sourced food, and whether this trend manages to help close the rift between consumers and systems of production.

Consumer decision-making is often influenced by individual motivations and external social norms. 8 This is especially true in the case of the “shopping local” trend, as consumers make purchases based on internal needs, like food safety, and external factors, such as prices and norms. In order to analyze whether consumers are able to close the metabolic rift by building relationships with local food production, the authors outlined below investigated what consumers meant by “local”, why they chose to shop locally, and what they gained from the experience. Overall, these cases demonstrate that although alternative food systems are growing, consumers are largely motivated by factors other than environmental sustainability. In this sense, one’s ability to close the metabolic rift through localized consumption trends is, in fact, relatively weak given that individuals lack the power to make largescale changes within the broader capitalist system.

The main goals of connecting consumers to local systems of food production are the acquisition of local ecological knowledge, increased reliance on local ecosystems, and a more sensitive reaction to local environmental damage. 9 Åsa and Carlsson-Kanyama investigated whether shopping locally at farmers’ markets increased consumers’ ecological awareness, and found that any knowledge that they gained about their local environment was indirect, such as a greater awareness of food seasonality. 10 As “local food” is mainly promoted as a means to access better quality food, the opportunity to learn about local environments is not presented as an avenue for consumers, even if they are buying food that has been produced closer to home. 11 Thus, shopping locally at farmers’ markets is not inherently connected to any significant increase in ecological knowledge, which is an integral aspect of closing the metabolic rift.

In addition to this lack of ecological learning, social norms are largely subjective, and establishing systemic change through consumer behavior is fairly ineffective when there is no cohesive concept of “local food”. This is explored by Blake, Mellor and Crane, who found that generally, people associate “local” food with food that is of higher quality, and that this notion has given supermarket chains the ability to commodify the “local” through special labeling without actually sourcing from local farms. 12 In addition, they found that “local food” may also be associated with local stores rather than local production. Therefore, as local production is not always required in order for food to be considered part of the “shop local” trend, consumer understandings of “the local” do not always align with truly local food, which is an obstacle when attempting to reconstruct the relationship between consumers and producers. 13

Consumers have also been found to rarely describe environmental sustainability as a primary motivation for shopping locally, and their wide array of motivations makes it difficult to correlate environmentally beneficial behavior with environmentally motivated decisions. This is explored by Åsa and Carlsson-Kanyama, who found that consumers mostly attended farmers’ markets out of concern for food quality rather than a concern with “localness”. 14 In another study conducted about consumers buying “organic” or “green” food, Lockie et al. found that while most consumers have environmental concerns and value sustainable goods, they placed other concerns, such as price and safety, above them. 15 These studies show that due to the diversity of consumer behavior and motivations, placing the responsibility on consumers to make environmentally-conscious choices is an ineffective way of supporting localized production.

The case studies explored above demonstrate that changes in consumer behavior towards local food consumption fail to increase local environmental knowledge and close the gap between consumers and producers on a scale that would have an overall positive effect on environmental sustainability. The ability for the consumers described in the case studies to make environmentally conscious decisions was hindered by their individual needs and the fluctuating meanings of “local” as they are constructed by capitalist systems of production. Additionally, when they did succeed in making local purchases, there was an overall lack of environmental knowledge passed onto them, failing to increase their understanding of their local environ- ments. These combined effects point to an overall lack of effectiveness that shopping locally has on allowing consumers to gain an awareness about their local environments in order for the metabolic rift to be closed. It therefore may be more effective to enact changes from the production side, regulated by institutions, in order to encourage sustainable, local food networks to become the norm within which consumers operate, rather than rely on individual consumers to make these behavioral changes on their own. 16

Food Sovereignty and La Via Campesina: A Potential Solution

A socio-ecological movement that takes on the efforts of closing the divide between food production and consumers and enhances environmental knowledge is La Vıa Campesina (LVC), an international organization that promotes local and sustainable agriculture, and places responsibility on institutions and producers to make these changes rather than the consumers themselves. 17 La Vıa Campesina joins together organizations from across the world to create a space where local knowledge can be shared, and helps small-scale farms prosper using sustainable technologies. 18 For example, they support the exchange of diverse regional seed stock as an alternative to the seeds used by agribusinesses, which in turn restructures “local ecological systems” towards a more sovereign form of seed use and agricultural production. 19 What makes La Vıa Campesina important to this paper is that it uses the globalized world system to its advantage in order to reduce the internationally monopolized nature of agriculture, thus acknowledging the issue of scale when it comes to making changes to production systems. La Vıa Campesina allows organizations from over sixty countries to exchange agro-ecological knowledge that might have been lost to neoliberal constructions of agriculture, and supports collective action towards rebuilding local relationships with the land. 20 For example, the organization facilitated visits to the Zero Budget Natural Farming movement in Southern India, which developed agro-ecological practices that relied on local farm resources rather than costly and environmentally harmful Green-revolution style production. 21 These exchanges of knowledge ultimately resulted in an “international peasant agroecology training school” in South Asia based on the shared information, which in turn promoted local farming methodology. 22 Supporting the emergence of resilient local food regimes, specifically by nurturing local environmental knowledge, in the face of the immense land degradation resulting from industrial farming is a step towards creating a food system where consumers do not have to necessarily choose to shop locally in order to promote changes in the production system, since the relationship between humans and the environment starts to mend at the production level itself. 23

Conclusion

This paper sought to understand how consumer behavior and the trend of “shopping local” may relate to closing the metabolic rift, which Marx theorized as the growing gap between consumers and systems of production within capitalism, and the resulting loss of environmental knowledge and ability to recognize one’s environmental impacts. A series of case studies investigating what it means for consumers to “shop local” found that the extent to which shopping local closes the metabolic rift is extremely limited. Not only are consumers constrained by individual interests such as their concerns with food quality and price over environmental impact, but consumer trends can also be co-opted by the very system they are trying to offset, as seen in the tendency for supermarkets to market quality food through the idea of “localness” rather than marketing actual locally-produced food. 24 Additionally, when consumers do succeed in purchasing local food, the consumer-producer gap is maintained thanks to the lack of ecological knowledge they gain through their interactions with local producers. 25 The minimal impact of the “shopping local” trend can thus suggest that changes to systems of exchange that necessarily depend on consumer behavior are ultimately ineffective.

What may therefore be more valuable to the endeavor of closing the metabolic rift is nurturing local production systems and knowledge in order for the producer-side of agriculture to be able to competitively change for consumers, rather than the other way around. An example of how this may be done is La Vıa Campesina, an international movement that joins together organizations who aim to facilitate and expand local ecological knowledge and support the growth of local food systems. This movement demonstrates that norms that we might assume exist on the consumer level such as concern for local food consumption and environmental sustainability can exist within the sphere of production and thus closer to producing meaningful systemic change. If systems of production can genuinely bring the “local” to consumers and create circumstances in which building local environmental knowledge is prioritized, then the limitations of the “shopping local” trend may be circumvented. Consumers would not have to sacrifice their personal interests in food safety and quality when purchasing local food while also gaining a closer relationship with their environment in the process. Movements like La Vıa Campesina, which aims to change systems of production in these ways, prove that this is not an impossibility for the future.

Endnotes

1. Foster, John, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (1999): 366-405. doi:10.1086/210315 2. Gunderson, Ryan, “The Metabolic Rifts of Livestock Agribusiness.” Organization & Environment 24, no. 4 (2011):408-414; Wittman, Hannah, “Reworking the metabolic rift: La Via Campesina, agrarian citizenship, and food sovereignty.” Journal of Peasant Studies 36, no. 4 (2010):806-808. doi:10.1080/0306615090335399. 3. Åsa, Svenfelt, Rebecka Milestad, and AnnMari Jansson, “On the Importance of Tightening Feedback Loops for Sustainable Development of Food Systems.” Food Policy 30, no. 2 (2005):224–39. 4. Axinn, William G., Jennifer S. Barber, Ann E. Biddlecom. “Social organization and the transition from direct to indirect consumption.” Social Science Research 39, no. 3 (2010): 358. https://doi-org. proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.01.001 5. Ibid., 357–368; Gunderson, Ryan, “The Metabolic Rifts of Livestock Agribusiness.” 806-808. 6. Ostrom, Elinor, Joanna Burger, Christopher B. Field, Richard B. Norgaard, and David Policansky, “Revisiting the Commons: Local Lessons, Global Challenges.” Science 284 (1999):278-282. 7. Ibid., 298. 8. Lockie, Stewart, Kristen Lyons, Geoffrey Lawrence, Kerry Mummery, “Eating ‘Green’: Motivations behind organic food consumption in Australia.” Sociologia Ruralis 42, no. 1 (2002): 37. https:// doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1111/1467-9523.00200 9. Åsa, Svenfelt, Rebecka Milestad, and AnnMari Jansson, 224-239. 10. Åsa, Svenfelt and Annika Carlsson-Kanyama, “Farmers’ Markets - Linking Food Consumption and the Ecology of Food Production?” Local Environment 15, no. 5 (2010):461. 11. Ibid., 463. 12. Blake, Megan, Jody Mellor, Lucy Crane, “Buying Local Food: Shopping Practices, Place, and Consumption Networks in Defining Food as ‘Local.’” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 100, no. 2 (2010): 418-422. https://doi-org.proxy3.library. mcgill.ca/10.1080/00045601003595545 13. Ibid., 422. 14. Åsa, Svenfelt and Annika Carlsson-Kanyama, 456. 15. Lockie, Stewart, Kristen Lyons, Geoffrey Lawrence, Kerry Mummery, 33. 16. Åsa, Svenfelt, Rebecka Milestad, and AnnMari Jansson, 233-235. 17. Wittman, Hannah, 805-826. 18. Martínez-Torres María Elena, and Peter M Rosset. “Diálogo De Saberes in La Vía Campesina: Food Sovereignty and Agroecology.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 6 (2014): 979-997. https://doi. org/10.1080/03066150.2013.872632. 19. Wittman, Hannah, 817. 20. Martínez-Torres María Elena and Peter M Rosset, 994. 21. Ibid., 991. 22. Ibid., 992. 23. Ibid., 993. 24. Blake, Megan, Jody Mellor, Lucy Crane, 418-419. 25. Åsa, Svenfelt and Annika Carlsson-Kanyama, 461.