Local food as contested ground

How important is the potential conflict between increased attention in America to locally produced food and efforts to shift small-hold farmers from subsistence-based to export-based practices? 

Courtesy of Emeka Okafor at Africa Unchained:

From Lindiwe Majele Sibanda in the Guardian:

Farming First calls on world leaders to take action by developing a locally sustainable value chain for global agriculture. It emphasizes the need for knowledge networks and policies centred on helping subsistence farmers to become small-scale entrepreneurs, and it proposes six interlinked imperatives forsustainable agriculture: safeguarding natural resources, sharing knowledge, building local access, protecting harvests, enabling access to markets and prioritising research imperatives. 

 

 

Meanwhile, on farms in America, there's now the option of producing "local food" for processing by Frito-Lay: 

 

 

 

On Tuesday, five potato farmers rang the bell of theNew York Stock Exchange, kicking off a marketing campaign that is trying to position the nation’s best-selling brand of potato chips as local food. Five different ads will highlight farmers who grow some of the two billion pounds of starchy chipping potatoes the Frito-Lay company uses each year. One is Steve Singleton, who tends 800 acres in Hastings, Fla.

“We grow potatoes in Florida, and Lays makes potato chips in Florida,” he says in the ad. “It’s a pretty good fit.”

The crux of the potential conflict, of course, is that the market or at least the marketers are expanding the paying public's concept of the local to include mass-processed food--which can be grown throughout a wide locality, about the size of, say, a region. But which can't be grown just anywhere.  No more Mexican tomatoes, no more Chilean grapes. 

(Fortunately, at least from Farming First's production, more reasoned arguments against more reasonably defined local food are starting to be made.)