Locavore—or not

Locovore

lo·ca·vore noun.

1. A person who primarily eats locally grown food.

I was never impressed by the idea of buying food grown locally. I have no objection to local food, but some things cannot be grown in the local climate, and if something could be grown halfway around the world and still be cheaper than a local option I was happy to buy it. And I had heard that the cost per item of transporting large quantities of food may be similar to a farmer bringing in produce to the market.

But it turns out the cost of transport is only a minor component of the energy used producing food anyway.

In the real world, not everything is equal. Some places have more water or better pasture land. It makes more sense to grow a tomato in an unheated greenhouse and truck it then to heat a local greenhouse. A U.S. study showed that about 4 per cent of food energy signature was from long-distance transportation and 83 per cent from production.

Fresh food may sometimes taste nicer: mangos in season in Australia or Asia certainly beat our imported ones from Mexico; I buy canned here. But buy what you like at an acceptable price and ignore the distance it took to get to your plate.

Are we moving toward a global currency?

There seems to have been a recent spate of articles discussing advocates of a global currency. This concept has been discussed for decades, if not longer.

The president of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev recently outlined a proposal for a world currency. His "acme-capital" has been endorsed by Robert Mundell who was behind the euro. There may be some sense to this if the acmetal is actually backed by, or better, made with, a precious metal.

A United Nations advisory committee has recommended international monetary reserves be changed to a system not dependant on US dollars. China had previously made a similar request as has Russia. The proposal is to use something similar to the previous

European currency unit [Ecu], that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.

...The SDR [Special Drawing Right] and the old Ecu are essentially combinations of currencies, weighted to a constituent's economic clout, which can be valued against other currencies and indeed against those inside the basket.

Russia suggests that at least part of the weighting be gold.

Granted, all these articles are somewhat related to the UN report. There may be some real concerns about the US dollar, though it is likely the UN will use any excuse to internationalise and seek increased control over national sovereignty. This may be especially true if control over money transfer allows opportunities for the UN to increase the size of its own coffers.

Personally I think any commodity should be traded in any currency by agreement on the 2 parties.

I wonder whether there would be less complaints that

the current system contributes to global instability, it contributes to the insufficiency of global aggregate demand

if the reserves were held in commodities rather than promissory notes from people with inadequate integrity.