These are difficult numbers to work out exactly, but it's not difficult to see that they have to be in a pretty thigh range for your local-premium to actually, on the net, drain resources from the community, compared to you just eating cheaper meals a bit more frequently. The main type of input that most obviously support the local community is labor, and most modern products, particularly agriculturally, are rather light on labor, so you might end up supporting one job at the farm in favor of three jobs at the diner. Especially if the farm-job is held by a "highly educated, ex-urban, first-time farmer" and the diner-jobs by single moms, it's getting morally quite dubious.
But to wrap this up, local to non-local is rarely apples to apples. Just as with organic, there's probably a very substantial overlap with meeting a demand for products that are simply better (and thus more expensive), with the nominal quality (local, organic) actually being secondary.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but I think you're leaving out some details.
We know that other non-local products can be made cheaper because they are in localities that are lax on labor laws and environmental protection.
So the notion that it's simply about efficiency is in my opinion a bit reductionistic. As an example, to make my point... I would use a different word than "efficiency" to describe someone who uses slave-labor to push costs down.
So when buying local, at least you know which standards the producers are held to. It's the same with Bio/Organic/Free-trade products.
That can be a factor, but simply making things in bulk is a huge efficiency gain even with the exact same worker/environment protection.
And on top of that you have transportation efficiency to take into account. A remote farm can send full trailers of product to a distribution center, which then sends full trailers carrying multiple products to stores. A local farm can't send a full trailer of apples to a local store, it has to do much less efficient things.
Evolution is perhaps the best example of how being inefficient can be hugely beneficial in the long term.
By comparison, "just-in-time" shipping is an example where the efficiency removes those margins. But that's orthogonal to how far the food ships. You can have similar-sized buffers either way.
I suppose that it's true about the large numbers of trucks, but wouldn't those only be reallocated to the detriment of providing other goods? And what happens to all our excess flexibility if severe oil shortages come to pass? Looking closer to the origin,the centralized model leaves us more susceptible to local droughts and floods (because everyone's produce comes from Salinas and watsonville), infectious diseases in livestock herds, and fungus that can cripple the entire crop of a particular fruit (because we've reduced the number of varieties by nine tenths or ninety nine hundredths.)
I agree, but certain types of dependencies are much riskier than others.
> I suppose that it's true about the large numbers of trucks, but wouldn't those only be reallocated to the detriment of providing other goods?
Yes, but what's the detriment of emergency-increasing local shipping? Probably at least as bad.
> And what happens to all our excess flexibility if severe oil shortages come to pass?
Local shipping takes more oil in many cases.
> Looking closer to the origin,the centralized model leaves us more susceptible to local droughts and floods (because everyone's produce comes from Salinas and watsonville), infectious diseases in livestock herds
Instead of a major shortage leading to deaths in one area, while everyone else is fine, it turns into a slight supply reduction over the entire country.
> fungus that can cripple the entire crop of a particular fruit (because we've reduced the number of varieties by nine tenths or ninety nine hundredths.)
That is definitely a major problem, but is also unrelated to how far you ship. Megafarms could plant 50 kinds of tomato efficiently, if they wanted to.
http://getmoreeducation.org/Content/Modules/Module1/1_Coley_... https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/07/25/organic-vs-con...
I am unaware of such studies for small farms versus large farms.
The kind of buying local that you need campaigns to encourage people to do, is generally either more expensive or poorer quality than the non-local alternative.
Susan Steed, one of the co-founders of the Brixton Pound explains a bit more in this TEDx video [1]
For example, assume Facebook replaces a local competitor. Now instead of the profit going to owners, which spend it locally, on philanthropic projects, or just high quality goods, instead it goes to Mark Zuckerberg, who spends it in the US, on US brands, and to fund US charities, in best case.
If you currently live outside the US, outside SV and NYC, you’d very likely gain an advantage if everyone would buy local. The skyscrapers of NYC, and the philanthropic projects in these regions of the US, are funded with money that was extracted all over the globe, but will probably never leave the US again.
Of course, nobody is getting rich from this, but there are many of us making a very decent living.
If for any reason, you truly value your neighbourhood chicken farmer Bob's livelihood though, there's no better means of buying Bob's well-being than giving money straight to Bob.
You would have to reimagine the idea of "a high standard of living" to include the comfort of knowing that Bob's well-being is sustained.
Of course it would be at the cost of excluding the welfare of people outside of your monkeysphere.
Anti-local: a perfectly functioning market doesn't have those problems
It's basically protectionism with all the same arguments for and against. Less economically optimal, but protects you from market malfunction and bad actors.
I understand the sentiment and intuitive reasoning behind this argument (I find myself thinking it every week when I go to the local farmers' market!), but is there evidence that "buying local" actually increases the local standard of living?
And a followup: if it does increase the local standard of living, would this behavior, if duplicated in all communities in the world, increase the average standard of living in the world?
Some conflicting (and probably all wrong) intuitions I have for different sides of these questions:
Pro local:
The notion of keeping money circulating locally makes sense. If money is a sort of proxy for productivity, then money leaving the community is productivity leaving the community.
Anti local:
If I pay more for Local Larry's eggs and Down-the-road Dave's cabbage (etc.), then to maintain my standard of living at a constant level, I have to charge more for whatever service I provide the community. And recursively, everyone else has to as well. It seems like, at best, we just wind up at the same standard of living we started at (and at worst, lower).
Pro local:
If money is a proxy for productivity, and buying non-local means trading productivity to some large corporation in exchange for some good or service, and that corporation will disproportionately funnel that money to the already-wealthy who can afford to save that money (productivity) for a rainy day, then we have effectively contributed to removing productivity from the economy.