Food pg: Apples and globalization

Published in The Post-Star (D1)
7/13/06

New Zealand, Chile, China -- There's quite an international crop of stickers on the apples in most American grocery stores these days.

Consumers may benefit from the fruits of globalization, but what does it mean for farmers?

"The food we eat every day primarily originates on farms, but we neglect to think about the circumstances of the farmer," said Tracy Frisch, a freelance writer who founded the Regional Farm and Food Project to promote local agriculture in the Hudson-Mohawk Valley.

Todd DeGarmo, director of the Folklife Center at Crandall Library, recently called on Frisch to brainstorm ways to combine the center's current exhibit of agricultural photos with a public discussion of broader issues related to farming.

The result is this month's two-part film series, which kicks off Thursday with a screening of "Broken Limbs," a documentary about the impact of globalization on the apple industry.

"This will be a chance to learn about the food system ... and what's going on with farmers," Frisch said. "The fact that we're losing farms, and more of more of our food is being produced in other nations, should be a real wake-up call about our own food security."

The film is set mostly in Washington state, and shows how the "apple capital of the world" is feeling the pressures of globalization. Apple buyers are migrating eastward to places like China, lured by cheaper labor and weaker regulations, leaving many U.S. orchards with few choices but to close down or expand into large corporations.

"That has a big impact, especially on small farms that can't afford to take advantage of the economies of scale," said Dan Wilson, a second-generation apple farmer who owns Hicks Orchard in Granville.

Wilson said he sees strong parallels between the dairy and apple industries, and one of the main problems with both is that farmers don't typically handle their own distribution.

"That puts farmers in the least favorable position in terms of getting a return on their investment, while they're taking the highest level of risk," he said.

Farming is an unpredictable profession, with weird weather and market forces often wreaking havoc on even the best-tended seeds of profit, so farmers tend to be slow to panic. But there's an uncommon urgency in Wilson's words.

"Our region is beginning to experience a very basic change in the nature of our communities...Farmers are the main landowners, and development pressures are really mounting, so there needs to be a really concerted effort on a county level to address some of these issues before the bulk of farming disappears in our area," he said. "I'm just reading the writing on the wall."

Wilson will lead a discussion after the film screening on Thursday night.