The University of Minnesota reports that globalization is making surprisingly little change to what people eat, and grow, around the world.
“Walk through the produce aisle in a grocery store nearly anywhere in North America and you are likely to find fruits and vegetables imported from abroad,” the announcement begins.
But despite such variety, a closer look at the general patterns of what farmers have been growing, and people eating, since 1992 finds far less change than economics would predict — especially if one focuses, as this work did, on the gaps in wealth, consumption and food production that divide the world’s temperate zones from its tropics.
This is another trade-based analysis, focused on measurements of the effects of “comparative advantage”: the simple-sounding and sensible notion that “countries open to trade will be able to consume more — in terms of volume and diversity — if they concentrate production on commodities that they can most cost-effectively produce, while importing goods that are expensive to produce, relative to other countries.”
In other words, the ability to buy and sell food freely in a global marketplace ought to narrow the range of agriculture products flowing out of a country, and broaden the range of goods flowing in. But compared to such sectors as manufacturing, finance and technology, the changes have been small.
“The diversity of the food we eat hasn’t changed as much as we expected it would with globalization,” said Jeannine Cavender-Bares of the university’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior and also its Institute on Environment (IonE), a leader of the research team.
“We still tend to eat based on the biodiversity around us, even though we could eat anything.”
What makes this somewhat more remarkable is the significant gap between the temperate latitudes and the tropics, says Erik Nelson, formerly a graduate student, who now teaches at Bowdoin College, and lead author of the team’s paper, published last week in the journal PLOS ONE.
They are separated not only by relative wealth but also by what Nelson’s paper calls “one of the most striking biological patterns on Earth” — “the latitudinal gradient in biodiversity, where the tropics produce more species and evolutionary lineages than the temperate zone.”
But to the extent producers in the temperate zones work to expand their output, bringing to bear the technological and economic advantages of their greater wealth, the efforts tend to be “largely determined by local evolutionary legacies of plant diversification.”
That is, they may develop many new varieties of apples or wine grapes but seldom take up an entirely new fruit from far away. A bit more lyrically:
Because tropical countries harbor a greater diversity of lineages across the tree of life than temperate countries, tropical countries produce and consume a greater diversity of plant products than do temperate countries.
In contrast, the richer and more economically advanced temperate countries have the capacity to produce and consume more plant species than the generally poorer tropical countries, yet this collection of plant species is drawn from fewer branches on the tree of life.'
