With Dr. Kirsten Oleson, an ecological economist, we discuss the potential for a climate smart food label, alternative economic indicators, and the high cost of cheap food.
Dr. Kirsten Oleson, is an ecological economist at the University of Hawaii- Manoa, and head of the Oleson Lab. We discuss the valuation of ecosystem services, the potential for a climate smart food label, and the systemic changes needed in Hawaii's agricultural sector to fulfill a statewide vision of a sustainable food system
The conversation covers the complexity of quantifying nature's benefits, alternative indicators to the GDP for measuring wellbeing, and the idea of integrating true cost accounting into public policy approaches to food systems upgrades, which could bring into play - at around 30% - a holistic approach to food systems that prioritizes environmental and social values over industrial-scale efficiencies.
At the close, are excerpts from Robert F. Kennedy's famous 1968 speech regarding the GDP and, in his own words and voice, how it "measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."
For More Information:
The Oleson Ecological Economics Lab within the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
The Hawai’i Genuine Progress Indicator page at the Hawai’i Dept of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, which was developed based on a report by Kirsten Oleson and others
Climate actions centered on Indigenous knowledge can improve resilience (Press Release November 14, 2023 ), regarding a chapter in the Fifth National Climate Assessment to which Dr. Oleson contributed
Ocean Tipping Points, a collaborative research project for which Dr. Oleson is a case study lead
The full text of the speech that Robert F Kennedy Sr gave on March 18, 1968 at the University of Kansas, which included the famous paragraph regarding the GDP (at the JFK Library site)
And a link to an essay and audio recording of the GDP excerpt in the Robert F Kennedy Sr speech, at the site of the Center for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, a research organization core-funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and the Laudes Foundation
Credits:
Created, produced, and hosted by Paula Daniels
Sound engineer: Ben Lazarus
Theme music: Caryssa Shinozawa
Logo: Reiko Quitevis and Sue Woodard
Kirsten: the vision of the food system for my kids, right? Is that the industrial scale, you're so divorced from understanding what food is and what it can be. And the ethics of food and the beauty of growing food.
But yeah it looks cheaper, but the cost of that disconnect is so high that you're not getting the relationships, the connections, the environmental benefits of food systems interwoven in a sustainable way with your natural system and social system.
[ ocean sounds to music]
Paula: Kirsten Oleson is an ecological economist, which she describes as an amalgam of economics, ethics, sociology, environmental science, and other things. She started her career at the World Bank as an impact assessment specialist; [00:01:00] then, obtained a doctorate from Stanford in environment and resources. She founded an environmental ethics working group while at Stanford and later went off to Madagascar to work with the National Science Foundation on fisheries management, coastal ecosystem services, and climate adaptation which in turn led to her current position at the University of Hawaii Manoa as a professor and head of the Oleson lab.
In this interview we learn about her research work on a possible climate smart food label, how to evaluate the ecosystem services of farming, interacting with consumer preferences in designing for resilience in the food system, and the role of driving demand for more local food in changing the food system.
We also talk about Hawaii's Genuine Progress Indicator, which she helped develop, as an alternative set of indicators to the GDP. It all adds up to measuring what we value and why cheap food actually costs more than it seems. I'm your host Paula Daniels. This is The Thirty Percent Project podcast.
[Theme music]
Kirsten: [00:02:00] We are a large team of researchers who are working to rethink Hawaii's agricultural sector. The state went through enormous transitions over the past decades from plantation agriculture to a new generation of agriculture and with the recent investment by the federal government into the agricultural sector, The University of Hawaii and the PI of the project, Dr. Susan Crow, received a huge chunk of money to promote what we call “climate smart commodities” or what the USDA calls “climate smart commodities.”
Paula: What does that mean, a climate smart commodity? That term is used a lot in agriculture so let's unpack it a little bit. I think people assume they know what it means. [00:03:00] And I will just say I often think of it as meaning a highly scaled product that’s somewhat fungible, right? It's just, it's like widgets.
Kirsten:. Yeah yeah…that is a really good question. And what a climate smart commodity means is unclear all the way from the federal level down to the state level, which is really what's exciting about the project because we can define what climate smart means for the state of Hawaii and we can define what a commodity is, right? In the classic economic sense, a commodity is something bought and sold on a market.
But more and more, markets are being created for things that you and I might not think about being in the grocery store. So things like improving environmental quality or those sorts of things. We're really trying to think really broadly about what it is that we're creating with this project [00:04:00] beyond just the food or the agricultural products.
Paula: Yeah. And so for some of our listeners who might not be as dialed into what a commodity means, and I feel like if you're in the food system, you start thinking about that quite a bit because there's different sorts of grantsfor things that are called commodity crops. And then there's grants for specialty crops and specialty crops typically are produce- fruits, nuts, vegetables.
So commodities are actually traded on the stock exchange too, right? There's futures that are traded on the stock exchange in corn and rice and soy and wheat, am I right?
Kirsten: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I think it's a big word. It’s an all encompassing word that we're trying to create markets that will buy local products; that we're trying to create agricultural products for the local market that are good for people and the environment. That's how we see climate smart [00:05:00] commodity. Whether it ends up being part of this global trading system or those sorts of things, I think that's not necessarily our goal.
We're really aimed at good agriculture that serves local needs.
Paula: Okay, so what does that mean for Hawaii? What are you looking at? Do you know yet what type of crops?
Kirsten: These farmers are really excited about plugging into the good practices and getting potentially certified for these good practices that they're already doing, learning from each other about how to improve the environmental services of their farming practices and getting credit, as I said for things that they're already doing to do pono agriculture in the state. So they do good, good practices.
Paula: Yeah. “Pono” meaning “with integrity.”
Kirsten: Yeah. “With integrity, balance.” Exactly. Yeah.
Paula: [00:06:00] So there are what, about 7,500 farms in Hawaii and most of them are small farms.
Kirsten: So that's really the transition that we've seen as the sugar and pineapple plantations left the state, folded. There's a lot of agricultural land that is now fallow and that's a problem in and of itself that we could talk about but what's emerging are these smaller farms, and they are diversified. So they're growing a whole bunch of different crops on smaller plots of land and not these hundreds or thousands of acres that the plantations had under production. And so they're planting a whole bunch of different things altogether and then serving the local market.
Their community has fewer carbon miles or flight miles to get here and increases the resilience of the food [00:07:00] system for shocks that the islands may encounter when, heaven forbid, that our ports get closed or another pandemic comes or whatever.
But really understanding and unpacking that with consumers is the first step of this project, so studying their preferences and then translating that back to the farmers and back to the certification or whatever branding that we come up with, right? So that's from the demand side. From the supply side, we have a very diverse project team and a diverse group of stakeholder farmers participating in this.
And really understanding from their perspective what the values are that they're supporting with this project. Right? So carbon is the main one. So we know greenhouse gasses going into the atmosphere are warming the planet and causing [00:08:00] all sorts of devastating consequences for ecosystems and people.
And one of the major places that we can put carbon is into the soil, right? The main objective with the “climate smart” part is to farm in such a way that carbon stays in the soil or gets put back into the soil from the atmosphere. So a big portion of the project is developing the analytical tools to know whether farming practices are actually putting carbon back into the earth or keeping it in the earth.
In Hawaii, these small, small scale farmers do so much more than just farm the land. They involve community members. They implement practices based on indigenous wisdom. They bring kids in to learn about the earth, about ecosystems, about where their food comes from. So all of this kind [00:09:00] of holistic vision of what agriculture should be needs to be included in this branding. But it's not up to the scientists to decide what those value systems are that the farmers and the public want, right? We’re trying to do research that matches the two together. So understand the consumers and understand the farmers, and figure out how to create a system where consumers get more information about the local food they're buying and farmers get rewarded for farming in such a way that promotes these broader values.
Paula: That sounds pretty exciting. I like this idea of consumers getting more information. So does that, when you talk about branding, does that mean a label?
Kirsten: Yeah. [00:10:00] Yeah we've come up with some early ideas and this is very early in the process, but the idea is yes, some labels we have, that's the other part of the work that we're going to be doing more research on is, there's a lot of people who have looked into labels, use labels.
So in addition to understanding what this certification indicator might be, what the components of it are, and how we would measure it because that's a huge scientific question, right? How do you measure carbon? How do you measure educational benefit? How do you measure health benefit? How do you measure any other social benefit? How do you measure the economic benefit?
That's a massive amount of the research that's going to be happening over the coming years. Yeah. And then the other side is the behavioral side. Once, if you have consumers and you're trying to provide them with better information, how do you do that in such a way that you actually change behavior, [00:11:00] right? That's not easy. Changing people's behavior is not easy. We know a lot from behavioral science that just giving people more information is usually not effective, right? That you need to really make it easy for them to make choices. And some of it will be information and some of it may be much more creative.
Paula: Let's talk about labels, because I think it's a really fascinating tool.The US had the Organic Food Production Act in the 1990s. Its main purpose at that time was to reduce pesticide use and to reward those farmers that were not farming with as much pesticides or were farming with different methods. So it's been decades, that we've now had the organic label and at first it was somewhat niche. I'll confess, the minute it was available, I started buying those products and they were more expensive and they were different quality, but now that label exists on so many products.
And the [00:12:00] market share for organic products is huge. It's growing all the time. So it seems to convey a lot to consumers, right?
Kirsten: Yeah, I agree. And it takes time for a label to take hold and for people to trust it, I think. So the idea of just creating a label and slapping it on Hawaii products… There's going to need to be a concerted effort to demonstrate the validity of the label that it is actually meaningful, that is backed by science. And so the science is what the vast majority of the project, at least the research part of the project, right?
Paula: That you'll be involved in.
Kirsten: Yeah. Yeah. The project is research, on the one hand, which is a quarter of the budget. And then 75 percent of the budget is going to farmers and farming groups, to get them [00:13:00] participating and producing and measuring in order to really test out the scheme underneath, the evaluation scheme to figure out, are we actually having the impacts? How do we measure that? How do we make sure they're real and different than business as usual?
Paula: Yeah. Who knows, you may come up with different labels. One for carbon and one for other things or different scales of things.
Kirsten: They would certainly have probably different scales and maybe color coding or where you get some version of like a pie that shows you or, some diagram shows you like, oh, you get a lot of carbon in the ground and you get a really high educational credit or score from this farm. And then, you can choose based on your own personal value system.
If we can get interest from the Department of Education, from hospital systems, from the prison [00:14:00] system, large consumers of food - and even set it up in policy that says where there is local food, it should be a certain percentage of your purchases
And this is already in policy. We just haven't made it yet with the Department of Education. My own daughter goes to the local school and they try really hard, but the food doesn't necessarily, for her lunches, all come from local farms yet. And I think part of it is that the system isn't set up yet to facilitate that. So I think that's a really important part of thinking about this and getting more local food, not just produced, but consumed here.
Paula: Which is beyond the reach of the grant you were talking about, but definitely an important issue that many folks are working on. A lot of it has to do with procurement processes, certainly an area that I've worked in with [00:15:00] my organization, the Center for Good Food Purchasing, where we do see that in places around the country, some school districts are willing to carve out some special effort to support the smaller farms.
And one of the things they do is they support forward commitments. They'll support working with the food hubs, the aggregators, but also they'll make commitments to purchase in advance. Or not purchase in advance, but to say, “This is what we need. If you grow it, we'll pay for it. We will commit to buying it from you.”
So then that allows the farmer to create a certain level of scale.
Kirsten: Yeah, yeah. I work in Palau as well. And that was the same case with fishers trying to get the market for local fisheries as opposed to these big industrial vessels dumping fish in the market, right?
So yeah, it's a whole system change.
Paula: Yeah. How does it show up in Palau? Who made the commitments to them in Palau to the fisheries?
Kirsten: At the time it was the president. He [00:16:00] was, he made it mandatory that the government events which often have food, big, massive banquets of food, would serve only locally caught fish. So that was how they did it there.
Paula: That's interesting. And how, what were the outcomes of that order? Did it work?
Kirsten: Yeah, certainly. Personally, I experienced it when we would have local fish, right?
Paula: Did it support the fisheries though, enough to…
Kirsten: Yeah. Yeah, so Palau's an interesting story because they closed 80 percent of their marine environment, like their open ocean environment, to offshore fishing as a conservation measure, by the previous president.
And so all of the industrial vessels that were in port who used to dump their less valuable fish on the local market left, right? Which caused a bit of a problem because especially the [00:17:00] tourists would eat the ahi, the tuna, and the swordfish they were being dumped up.
Paula: These fish, this fish comes from everywhere in the world.
Kirsten: Yeah, yeah. And they were all fishing around Palau. And so then all of a sudden there was none of this supply. And the worry was that the tourists would all eat reef fish, which is really important for local consumption.
Luckily, unluckily, COVID hit, and there were no tourists, and in that interim time, the government managed to get up… I should say, the entrepreneurship of fisher people sprung, sprung into action, and quickly filled the gap of the need and cut their teeth with a smaller tourism and local market and then have grown since to fill the demand.
Paula: I find that interesting because it does all tie together. As you said, it's a system, which means that there's a number of interdependent aspects to it.
So what we were talking about in the [00:18:00] Palau example was the government really supporting the demand side of the equation and insisting that their purchases support local economies. And that's what we were talking about here, which is what could be a goal. Once you're able to convey the value of these local farming practices and all the dimensions that you mentioned, it may be more expensive, but is it a value proposition that the larger institutions can support?
And I'm going to add a little more to this in that I have been part of doing studies on true cost accounting in food systems. There was one done by the Rockefeller Foundation which showed the negative externalities of the food system. Just looking at the U. S. economy, and then we can take that proportion down to every local economy because it plays out proportionally. The whole U.S. food economy is 1. 1 trillion dollars. And then the negative externalities which are the mirror image of what you talked about as the positive attributes of the small farms in Hawaii. The [00:19:00] negative externalities were three times that.
So “the negative,” meaning the impacts on public health, chronic disease, obesity… there was about a trillion dollars worth spent on that. And then the costs of repressed wages and child labor, a lot of negative externalities there. And there were an equal amount of public health problems in terms of negative impacts to the environment.
So that cost is being borne by society anyway. So if you're going to pay more, are you really paying more? Are you paying accurately?
Kirsten: Yeah, yeah. So this idea of an externality is basically that when you're buying your food, or buying anything for that matter, you're not paying the full cost for it, right?
The way we produce food now pollutes the local environment, pollutes the global environment, uses water unsustainably. You can list off all of the environmental and [00:20:00] social impacts. Yeah, as you mentioned, labor, of course, labor, right? Repressed labor markets and human working conditions, even human rights abuses.
And you're not paying for that when you're buying consumer products, including food. And we see those impacts here in Hawaii, the legacy of fertilizers and pesticides on the landscape that still flow into our nearshore environment and poison our coral reef ecosystems, right? Or poor land management practices where sediments are sheared off the landscape and plugs up streams and smothers the coral reef and creates brown water days.
Still, those are all what happens decades after agriculture picks up and moves off. It [00:21:00] continues, right? It doesn't stop. So that's the other aspect of what we're trying to promote is practices that mitigate those negative impacts, right? So that keeps soil on the landscape, so that you're not ruining your coral reefs and your swimming waters; the use of pesticides and herbicides and chemicals are done in a way that is appropriate for the environment, in a sustainable manner. Yeah. There's what we call ecosystem services too, right? So the sediment retention on the landscape or farming in such a way that you use as little water as possible and the water that isn't transpired by the plants, has a chance to soak back into the land and into the water table, so water [00:22:00] infiltrates. Yeah, those are kinds of the values that we're trying to understand where we can quantify those and use them to add value to the food that's being produced.
Paula: And convey that to any range of purchasers.
Kirsten: Yeah. And convey that in a manner that is scientifically based.
Paula: Okay. So how is it that you're involved in this?
Kirsten: Yeah, yeah. Good question. So I'm an ecological economist. So my field is really interested in that intersection of ecosystems and people. So my work initially is focusing on understanding how consumers are… consumer perceptions and attitudes.
So really understanding what they are willing to pay for, for these different categories, and maybe figuring out the best way to convey information to them. Do they have [00:23:00] labeling preferences? There's so many things that we could do testing with consumers, right? So we're still just in the design stages there, of figuring out what questions we're going to ask the potential consumers of these products. And then on the flip side of it, of creating the science, so I do a lot of estimates, like quantification of the benefits of land management or water management and those sorts of things. Technically, it's called environmental valuation, so it's putting a dollar sign on natural processes. So this idea that the way you plant your crops could reduce the amount of sediment flowing to the near shore environment, and that then results in more fish, healthier coral, and/or a more attractive, aesthetically pleasing beach to recreate on, right? [00:24:00] And so then you can trace that out and you can think about it a bit and then you can design a study that would help you say how much benefit people got from that improved environment. That's the science that then backs up that score that they'd get, that say one of the scores is environmental practices, right?
What does that mean? Unpacking that and developing rigorous methods for quantifying what that environmental benefit is, is the part of the project that I'm working on.
Paula: That's great. Is there any controversy about quantifying nature services?
Kirsten: Oh, always. Yes. My feeling on quantifying and monetizing nature services is it depends on the decision you're trying to inform.
Sometimes it's the thing that's needed, and sometimes it's the thing that absolutely should not be done, [00:25:00] right? I would never try to put a dollar value on the benefit of a farm that is predominantly focused on bringing Native Hawaiians into farm taro, to grow taro, right?
Because there is no way I would be able to articulate in a way that matches, with kind of economic-thinking, the depth and intensity and breadth of what people are getting out of growing a crop that is fundamental to identity.
Paula: In some ways, it's priceless, right?
Kirsten: Yeah, and economists hate saying something like that, like “priceless,” but it's almost like the value systems are so orthogonal, right?
They're just so hard to align. And it's like, why do it, right? [00:26:00] If assigning a dollar value to nature or to these flows of ecosystem services that we're getting from nature, if it can help increase awareness about the importance of nature for our economy or for people's well being… I think it's great to do, but it doesn't need to be comprehensive of everything that nature gives us, right? Sometimes, sometimes even assigning a dollar value to nature services can crowd out other reasons. Why people should care for the environment, right? And treasure nature. And again, it just really depends on the context and what you're trying to inform, right?
Some policymakers may be like, I need a dollar value of the benefit of this project. And I'll be like, okay, I'll do the best I can with the understanding that can only really scratch the surface here and there's some things that [00:27:00] we're just not going to be able to put a value, a dollar value on. But, putting a value on something doesn't necessarily have to be a dollar either. The power of that is that you make apples and apples comparison. But sometimes decisions can be made comparing apples and oranges too, right? People are complex, decisions are complex and they can assign their own value to how important the apples are or the oranges, right?
Paula: Values are complex and what it might do at least is bring visibility to the issue area, right? Where have you found it working best?
Kirsten: Yeah, a lot of times in trying to think about whether investments in conservation, for instance, are worth it. The problem with nature conservation is that a lot of what we get from environmental management, a lot of the benefits don't transact on a market, right?
You're not buying [00:28:00] environmental quality every day, right? And so it's really hard for government agencies like the Division of Aquatic Resources or Forestry and Wildlife to justify getting money from the legislature, right? These, they seem like these massive amounts of money, right? And in reality, they're a tiny fraction of the state budget.
But having some estimates of the value of management of the trail system right here in Hawaii. We have a project right now looking at the value of the trail system or of our beaches and amenities of our beaches, clean beaches, or of our campsites, right? It helps justify budgets, right?
So I think that's one area just strategically having some numbers to show, right? You're not getting nothing for the [00:29:00] cost or the budget you're giving us.
Paula: It helps inform policy decisions.
Kirsten: It informs policy decisions. Exactly. Budgeting decisions, etc.
And I think that numbers about the value of nature are thrown around as well. Just conceptually of being like, it's not free, right? You can't, you're getting these services from nature that we all rely on. And if you had to pay for it, it would cost you this much, right?
Or if you had to recreate it, it would cost you this much. And then people are like, oh, wow, nature is really valuable. I knew that. I know ethically or morally, but yeah.
Paula: Now they have a basis of comparison. It's a familiar language. So how did you get into this field to begin with?
Kirsten: Yeah, so I actually studied environmental engineering early on and I worked on constructed wetlands to filter stormwater and sewage water and I went into the environmental engineering field internationally and worked in international development and I found…
Paula: You worked in the World Bank, [00:30:00] right? Is that right?
Kirsten: Yeah, at the World Bank. Yeah. Yeah. I worked in Latin America and the Caribbean. But yeah, so I worked in international development and I was the environmental specialist for large infrastructure projects, mainly for side projects that we're doing urban transport, a slum upgrading, landfills right across Latin America. And whenever you have a project that has environmental impacts, you have to do an environmental impact statement and environmental management plan, and then budget that out as part of the grant or loan that the bank was giving to the countries. And inevitably supervision of those environmental management plans, the budget would get whittled down and whittled down. And the effort to mitigate environmental impacts was always the last thing anybody wanted to do with the money that they were borrowing.
I knew I wasn't able to speak in [00:31:00] the same language as the economists who would like, pencil out the cost benefit analysis. And the benefit of environmental management was always zero.
Paula: Yeah, they were just looking at in terms of profitability, typical profitability.
Kirsten: Yeah, and just looking at it from the GDP, gross domestic product, market transaction side of the equation, whereas I knew that environmental protection could return dollars on the penny, right? You got to do that. You can't undermine the environment and the social for that matter, social structures in the name of growth. So I went on leave from the World Bank and went to go get my PhD in an interdisciplinary program where I could really explore the economics of nature and understand the language that economists were using and be a more powerful advocate [00:32:00] because I could pick apart the theory with them now, right?
And economics is a really powerful field because it's a model of how the world works that explains an incredible amount, not everything, but an incredible amount. But the field of ecological economists or ecological economics, which I identify with, sets up some layers that economists don't have, right? So first is that we live in a finite planet and we have to operate within a finite planet. That's a non-negotiable, right? Because we’ve seen what operating as if the planet wasn't a finite planet, where we've come, right, with climate change and all other environmental issues.
And then the second layer that the ecological economists espouse is that people matter and distribution of resources matters. And we can't continue on a pathway that is both ecologically unsustainable and socially [00:33:00] unsustainable. We can't have inequalities as we have now. It's just unjust.
So there's a social justice aspect of it. And then economics comes in, right? Then it's: okay, the market mechanism is a really powerful way to allocate resources, these transactions between individuals based on their preferences…everybody maximizes their well-being that way. But when people maximize… when you let the market go without recognizing externalities, for instance, in social injustices, you get some really bad outcomes. So you have to have the checks in place that recognize the environmental and social before you embrace the market mechanism.
Paula: Yeah, really interesting to think about it in those terms. And I think a [00:34:00] lot of people when they think about economics, it is market mechanisms, but a lot of people think of dollars. But we're also talking about just resources in general, right? It's about resource sharing. Does that seem fair? I'm not an economist.
Kirsten: I think a lot of people conflate when they hear economics, they conflate that with finance. So it's all about dollars. Economics is about well-being, about happiness, right? However you want to call it.
And so the idea that you're trying to, people are just trying to be as happy as they can be, right? And society, on aggregate, is trying to be as happy as they can be. And so, you know, you could have, instead of little dollar signs, you could have little happy faces. You're trying to get as many of those happy face signs. And as few sad face signs, right? That's basically the premise of welfare economics.
Paula: You're making me think of the famous speech by Robert F. [00:35:00] Kennedy Senior in 1968, where he has his critique of the GDP. It's about that most societies measure wealth by and wealth is seen in economic, sorry, financial terms and marketing prowess more typically, from the mid-century.
But then you have the evolution toward Bhutan and the Gross Happiness Index.
Kirsten: Yeah. I always put the Kennedy quote in my slides paraphrasing, it's like GDP measures everything except what matters.
Paula: Everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Kirsten: Yeah. “Everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” Exactly.
Paula: It doesn't measure “the strength of our relationships, the beauty of our poetry.” It's just a fantastic speech.
Kirsten: Yeah. And there's a whole world of alternative indicators out there, right? That try to acknowledge the potency of GDP, Gross Domestic Product, [00:36:00] right? Which is a metric of the output of an economy.
And arguably, it is highly correlated with the standard of living of countries, right? But it doesn't capture inequality, right? It doesn't capture any of the environmental aspects. As a matter of fact, cleanup of environmental accidents increases GDP, right? Incarcerating people increases GDP, right? So there are a lot of perverse things in GDP and it was never ever meant by its founders to be a metric of well-being or of sustainability.
Paula: It's important to hear you say that, “founders,” in terms of GDP, because it's one of those things that's become such an article of faith, if you will. It's just the way we do things and measure things. Seems like it's been there forever, but when you say it had founders, I think, “Oh, maybe it hasn't been.” [00:37:00]
Kirsten: Yeah, no, it has not been. It was created post World War II, by a man named Simon Kuznets, to basically pull the US out of the Depression era, to get us through some really hard economic times, right? And yeah, it was created out of whole cloth, right? They're like.. And even how it's counted, what's counted, what's not counted was hugely controversial at the time and done by a handful of white men in a room.
Paula: It's another one of those post World War II artifacts of the 20th, mid 20th century, like suburbs and big freeways and a lot of other things.
Kirsten: Yeah, and it served its purpose at the time because it’s really what the government policy had to do, was to pump up production to get out of an economic slump.
But it's staying [00:38:00] power is really unfathomable to me, given all we know now and kudos to Hawaii, the DBEDT, our Statistical and Economic Agency has recently…
Paula: The Department of Economic Development, Business and Tourism.
Kirsten: Yeah, exactly. Business, Economic Development, Tourism. Yeah. So they’re the state economic policy arm.
They've started producing the Genuine Progress Indicator alongside the GDP, or the state GDP. As a kind of counterpoint to show like, all right, there are environmental and social costs to economic growth. And we're one of the first states, there are a handful of them, that have started issuing alternative indicators like that and the genuine progress indicator in particular.
Paula: That's good to know. I didn't know that.
Kirsten: Yeah, it's exciting. You can see it.
Paula: Okay. Did you have a hand in that?
Kirsten: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Paula: I had a [00:39:00] feeling, I had a hunch. So do tell.
Kirsten: A colleague at White Pacific University, Regina Ostergard Clem, and I, right when I got to Hawaii in 2012 she and I started working with a government official, Scott Glenn, on creating the first pilot Genuine Progress Indicator for the state, looking what data were there in order to do this. And we issued a report at that point, and we gave a talk at the Hawaii Economic Association, and then it fizzles out, no money, other things on your agenda, no policy uptake or anything. And then 10 years later, somebody who was at that Hawaii Economic Association luncheon is now the head of the research arm at the business economic development and tourism agency and was like, “Okay, let's do it!” And yeah, now it's on their website. So..
Paula: That's great! Does it include food systems?
Kirsten: No, it does not. I think there's a lot of room for improvement and [00:40:00] tailoring to Hawaii's environmental goals. So that, that could be a whole new research program.
Paula: Sounds like it could come out of your project here. There's a goal in Hawaii to get to 30% local in its food systems. And I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about that and about Hawaii's ability to reach that goal.
Kirsten: Yeah. I think aspirational goals like that are really important. So it resonates, to have the 30 [percent] by [20]30, right? Whether you're talking about food or conservation or whatnot. It’s going to be a struggle. Right now, Hawaii imports the vast majority of its food, even its fish, despite being surrounded by our ocean. And so I think we've got a long road ahead of us to help small-scale farmers be there for the long term, right? [00:41:00] We're still transitioning from a system completely set up for plantation agriculture, and export. So the food system needs to be recreated from the ground up, literally. And so 2030 is looming very soon.
Paula: In six years.
Kirsten: Six years, although I've seen such innovation just in the last five years, prompted in some part by COVID and the shock that brought to our imports where suddenly there's so many more opportunities to access local food, so I think we can get pretty far.
I haven't done the analytics to know whether we can make it to 2030 but, local food is more expensive right now. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Input costs are more expensive in Hawaii. Land is incredibly [00:42:00] expensive. Labor, the land tenure system for agricultural land is difficult to navigate for farmers so that they know they're going to have long term leases and can invest in their lands and irrigation systems and things like that.
And consumers are picky, right? And they go to Costco, and cost of living is so high, right? You can't afford.. It's very hard to afford to live in Hawaii.
Paula: The cost of living is high and the wages are not that high. The wages aren't commensurate.
Kirsten: Yeah, they are not commensurate, right?
We already have a real problem with local people not being able to stay in Hawaii. So we also need to think about this goal of having 30% locally produced can't mean that it drives more people from being able to stay in Hawaii who are from Hawaii, right? There's always unintended consequences of [00:43:00] policies too.
Paula: It's a bit more expensive in other words, but this is, wouldn't this be where government support would come into play? As a subsidy for local food.
Kirsten: Yes, but the money for subsidy comes from somewhere, right? Yeah. The tax bill, but yeah, there's obviously got to be, and it makes sense to subsidize local food because there's a public, it's a public good, right?
So the fact that local food could have health benefits, has social benefits, increases our resilience as a society to economic or natural disaster shocks, right? No individual has the incentive to pay extra for local food for that kind of broader social benefits. So it's a good reason why the government could step in and say, Hey, these are benefits to society and it deserves support.
Paula: And maybe that's a federal government benefit that [00:44:00] passes through to the state. There could be a number of ways that could be developed. So you mentioned that you came to Hawaii in 2012, you came from living in different parts of the world. Is that right?
Kirsten: I did, yeah. Before here, my husband and I lived in Madagascar.
Paula: Oh, wow. That's the exact opposite, on the globe, of Hawaii.
Kirsten: I know. Yeah.
Paula: Back when we had globes, we used to play - we used to look at a world globe and spin it around and go, “What's opposite of Hawaii?” And it was Madagascar.
Kirsten: Yeah. Funny thing about Madagascar is that it is an Austronesian society and the language is connected to Hawaiian. So they, you can go to the Bishop Museum and see the language traces.
Paula: That means that we the Hawaiians sailed to Madagascar probably a long time ago?
Kirsten: Yeah. Nobody actually knows how, whether it was some overland or some voyaging.
But yeah so when I moved to Hawaii in 2012 from Madagascar I was not aware of the Austronesian language connection. And when people started [00:45:00] saying Hawaiian words, I was like, that's so weird. Honu means turtle in Hawaiian, right? And it's Fanu in Malagasy, right? Sea turtle. Oh, and it's just like one after the other.
And suddenly a little light bulb went off in my head and I was like, Oh. I think actually, the language must have the same roots.” And sure enough.
Paula: That's so interesting.
Kirsten: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, we came from Madagascar where I was doing research with small-scale fisheries. So very artisanal fisheries, very remote.
It was a women's fishery of octopus, which was their major cash crop. So studying that and then yeah, I applied for the professorship position and moved here in 2012.
Paula: Do you plan on staying? Do you feel like it's your home now?
Kirsten: I do. I can't imagine living anywhere else, honestly, and like raising our kids here [00:46:00] is magical. We actually have a daughter who is part-Hawaiian. So I would never take her away from this place. Working with young people who still have so much passion and drive. So I can't imagine doing anything else, honestly.
Paula: What sort of food system future do you wish for them in Hawaii?
Kirsten: I have my own garden in my backyard, right? I have, this was my Christmas present from my husband. He built me raised beds and I've been gardening with my kids. We eat out of our garden regularly. So I want them to understand from that really intimate level, what food is. And I want them to have access to healthy choices, right? Like my kids, of course, they'll be like, “Let's go get junk food!” And I'm like, “We can get it, but it's not food,” right?
Paula: Let's call it [00:47:00] what it is. It's packaged calories.
Kirsten: Yeah. It's fine, once in a while, that's fine. I hope that the broader foods, like from the local, that they have access to things they grew, and they know how to do it, to know their farmer network and having relationships with those people and understanding how their practices are improving the environment and society, right?
And that, more broadly, that there's broader reforms in the food system that don't bring in cheap food that has such high cost in reality. I think we need policy reform where the true cost of food is incorporated in its prices. In such a way that food is still [00:48:00] affordable but, it may, the food landscape may look quite different than what it does now.
And it can be small changes from packaging to big changes, like certain foods just aren't available off season because they shouldn't be, because that's not what the earth does.
Paula: Yeah. The loko i’a vision that you described is a beautiful vision. And I see it as being part of a future food system for Hawaii. And one thing that I think is, for me, that we might take from these conversations about building up these smaller scale systems is that when we talk about scale, I think the goal, in terms of growth, is to be at community scale versus the industrial scale that we're seeing in other places.
Kirsten: Yeah, I agree. And I think that goes back, that's a really nice way of saying it, like the vision of the food system for my kids, right? Is that the industrial scale, you're [00:49:00] so divorced from understanding what food is and what it can be and the ethics of food and the beauty of growing food.
Yeah it looks cheaper, but the cost of that disconnect is so high that you're not getting the relationships, the connections, the environmental benefits of food systems interwoven in a sustainable way with your natural system and social system.
Paula: Community-level scale. Thank you so much, Kirsten. I really appreciate the conversation today.
Kirsten: Yeah, me too. Thank you so much for having me.
[ocean sounds]
Paula: We have more info in the program notes on Kirsten's work, as well as a link to Robert Kennedy Senior's famous 1968 speech on the GDP. I'm going to close by reading an excerpt of some of my favorite lines from that [00:50:00] speech.
“Our Gross National Product now is over $800 billion a year, but that Gross National Product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the Redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.
“Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages. The intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom, [00:51:00] nor our learning. Neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country…
Robert F. Kennedy Sr.: “And measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
[ Ocean sounds for about 4-5 sec....to theme music]
Paula: With thanks to sound engineer, Ben Lazarus, I'm Paula Daniels and this is The Thirty Percent Project podcast.