IN A COLOSSAL COLD STORAGE WAREHOUSEin Ghana's port city of Tema, a boyish- faced 27-year-old named Bilal Saffieddine had something to show me. He pointed into the dark."All that is poultry leg quarters," he said. Outside, the temperature blistered. Inside, thin mendressed in wool scarves and heavy coats climbed over house-sized stacks of boxed dark chicken meat. Their breath formed white puffs of condensed air. Saffieddine is a manager and financial controller for Silver Platter Ltd., the largest importer of U.S. poultry products into Ghana."Ghana is a leg quarter country, not a whole chicken country," he told me.

Like the mass of frozen chicken he imports, Saffieddine is the product of the globalized market. Born in Lebanon, he left for South Africa to import canned goods after graduating from university. But he found it too dangerous. His first day on the job, one of his truck drivers was shot in the head by thugs. He moved to Ghana, where he drives his Mercedes SUV without fear of highwaymen and where the market for imported meat is booming. When Saffieddine considers the continent, everything is big and brightthe profits, the ships, the quantities."Look at how much Tyson takes to Russia!" he said. "In Africa the numbers are still small but they'll go up. Guaranteed!" Indeed, more than 35.5 million pounds of frozen chicken arrived inGhana's ports in 2007, nearly 70 times what Ghana imported in 1999.

Silver Platter Ltd., Saffieddine's employer, is a subsidiary of import giant the Tajideen Group, amaze of limited-liability corporations based in Beirut and operating throughout Africa. In Ghana, Tajideen employs over 1,000 people and has an exclusive import partnership with Tyson Foods.Once a month, a cargo ship arrives in Tema's port from New Orleans carrying up to 4.4 millionpounds of frozen chicken. In normal weather conditions the trip takes between 12 and 15 days.At port, it takes Saffieddine's swarm of employees between five and seven days just to unloadthe boxes of leg quarters from the ship.

In the global poultry market, a nation is a dark meat country or a light meat country, a leg quartercountry or a whole chicken country. A country's place on the meat color spectrum is determinedin large part by economic preferences, but taste matters, too. Most Ghanaians I spoke with said they liked the flavor and texture of dark meat better than white meat. Africa has seen a surge in poultry imports over the last several years since the U.S. poultry industry took notice of thecontinent. "There are a lot of hungry mouths to feed in Africa," Toby Moore, of the industry trade group Poultry & Egg Export Council, told me. "And we've got a lot of low-cost protein toship."

Globalization and the rising demand for animal protein have turned the chicken into the world'smost mobile and abundant migratory bird. This modern migration isn't one of whole birds, butrather of dismembered partswings in one direction, breasts in another.

** *

The hue of a chicken's meat depends on the type of movement the muscle makes during the bird's lifetime. Repeated, constant muscle motion requires more oxygen, which is stored in a dark-colored protein called myoglobin. Since chickens live much of their lives standing, their leg muscles are full of myoglobin and thick with veins. A confined bird is flightless, resulting inbreast and wing meat lighter in color, more uniform in texture, and lower in fat and calories. It's easier to eat white meat and forget that what's being masticated was once an animal.

Americans and western Europeans, on the whole, tend to favor white meat. So what happens to all those leftover chicken legs, wings, hearts, livers, feet, and gizzards?

They go to places like Cuba, Iraq, Maldova, and Ghana. In 2007, the United States exported $2.7 billion in mostly dark meat poultry to countries across the globe. Huge international corporations like Tyson Foods have created a global food chain wherein nearly every part of a slaughtered chicken finds a market, often many thousands of miles from where it originally hatched from its egg. In 2007, for example, the majority of chicken feet were shipped to China, while offal known in layperson's parlance as guts went to China, Mexico, and Jamaica. Russia got thelion's share of leg quarters, followed by Lithuania, Ukraine, and Angola. In thisglobalizedmarket, a woman eating a salad at a Wendy's in Maine could be ingesting the breast of the samechicken whose gizzard flavors a chicken stew in Togo and whose thigh is served with borscht in Moscow and whose excess fat will soon go to a ConocoPhillips refinery in Texas to make synthetic diesel fuel.

** *

In Ghana, it is cheaper to buy frozen Tyson chicken parts shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in temperature-controlled cargo containers than it is to buy a freshly slaughtered chicken from the neighbor down the street. I located Ghana's meat shops by their awnings, decorated with hand- drawn pictures of bright pink chicken parts. Inside these shops, Tyson leg quarters, per pound, sell for approximately one-sixth the price of Ghana-grown chicken. "With Tyson we don't have to advertise," importer Saffieddine told me cheerily. "The price promotes the product."

But that low-cost, foreign chicken makes many African poultry producers angry. Even in a "leg quarter country," chickens hatch from eggs as whole birds and must be raised and slaughtered as such.

** *

William Awuku Ahiadormey is 42, with a broad face and a rare but bright smile. He is the farm manager at Sydals Limited, one of the largest poultry producers in Ghana. The farm sits on a stretch of red ground surrounded by scraggly shrubs in a tiny town called Adjie Kojo, outside Tema. Armed men patrol the dusty road to protect the cows, sheep, and more than 100,000 chickens from thieves.

"Trade policy here kicks Ghanaian people out of the market,"Ahiadormey told me in his tiny office, decorated with posters featuring chicken breeds, chicken feed, and chicken eggs."Everybody in Ghana who should be benefiting from the poultry industry is going out of

business." Ahiadormey has a master's degree in agricultural economics from the University of Ghana. His thesis attempted to decipher how Ghanaian poultry producers might become competitive with foreign imports. Given his line of work, the topic seemed as much a plea as an academic inquiry. Ahiadormey showed me reams of data and endless PowerPoint slideschronicling everything from high interest rates on business loans to exorbitant feed costs. "In America, poultry farmers get corn and soybeans for below the cost of production," he told me. "Here, humans are competing with chickens for corn. How can Ghana possibly compete?"

Economic trade theory suggests that when it comes to poultry, Ghanaians probably shouldn't even try. "The way Ghana competes is to keep its domestic markets flexible," said Larry Karp, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley. "So Ghana can move into the sectors where it is more efficient." That means that if poultry farmers can't be efficient enough to compete on the global free market,they should either adjust wages and cut costs or move into another economic sectorsay, cacao productionwhere they can be competitive.

But Ahiadormey is a chicken farmer, not a cacao farmer. Strolling though the red dust fields between the barns, Ahiadormey relaxed a little. He swung open the gate to a huge barn brimmingwith young chicks, and cocked his head sideways in paternal fondness. "These are local chicks from a local producer," he said and then stood quietly, listening to the persistent peeping, seemingly oblivious to the reek of chicken manure.

** *

As inevitable as the global trade in chicken parts seems, it is actually remarkably tenuousparticularly when factors like disease, rising grain prices, the cost of oil, war, and climate change are thrown into the mix. Last year it took just a single event to reveal the fragility of the free market chicken trade.

In May 2007, the deadly avian bird virus H5N1 broke out in Ghana, just as it had in 2006 in other countries in West Africa and Southeast Asia. Chickens from infected farms wereincinerated. Saffieddine's frozen inventory remained in the warehouses. Chicken sales dropped.People everywhere were afraid to eat poultry regardless of its origin.

In response to bird flu fears, the USA Poultry & Egg Export Council launched an ongoing marketing campaign to assuage health concerns and tout the inexpensive tastiness of the U.S. poultry flooding the African market. The first campaign sent a man in a brightly colored chicken costume to dance in the streets of Accra, giving out free prizes and chicken coupons topassersby. The promotional push was run by one of Africa's largest marketing agencies, Exp (whose tag line is "Activating Demand"). Exp continues to pass out DVDs of the chickengyrating in the sweltering heat, wearing its USA POULTRY apron. Inexplicably, the video's soundtrack features the song "Barbie Girl" by Scandinavian pop group Aqua, whose less-than-appetizing lyrics include, "I'm a Barbie girl, in the Barbie world! Life in plastic, it's fantastic!"

Inside Exp's austere office in Accra's suburbs, the air conditioning blew at temperatures almost as cold as Saffieddine's freezer warehouse. I asked Abdul-Aziz Amankwa, Exp's young and

impeccably dressed director, how the dancing-chicken costume went over with Ghanaians. He laughed, and said the company has moved on to more targeted campaigns. The new USA poultrymarketing campaign, Amankwa explained, focuses on women and mothers, tapping into Ghana's highly organized women's groups, which have long established themselves around churches,businesses, and community centers. "The woman plays a critical role in the consumption of chicken," he explained. "Mothers get their communities and families to eat USA chicken. They become the advocates." Exp staff organized cook-offs and recipe competitions where women win boxes of frozen USA chicken as prizes.

In a country where more than 30 percent of the population lives in poverty, cheap protein is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it provides affordable nutrition. On the other, it eliminates livelihoods. Ghanaians I spoke with disagree about how much foreign chicken shouldbe allowed into their country. But they tend to agree that frozen dark meat chicken doesn't tasteas good as fresh. Manyrefer to it as "mortuary chicken" for the malodorous smell commonduring defrosting. In Ghana, power outages are a daily ritual, and it is difficult to keep products from partially defrosting during transport or blackouts. One effective method for masking the smell is to fry the chicken, a culinary trick used by the multitude of street food vendors.

On my last day in Ghana I'd skipped dinner. I was hungry. Leaving the fan whirring in my hotelroom, I walked out into the night, careful to avoid the raw sewage running in a ditch along the curbside. I found 25-year-old Nicholas Brenyah standing under a bare lightbulb frying chicken.He told me he was the "boss" of Christ Castle Fast Food, a plywood and corrugated metal shackon the side of a busy road. Though it was midnight, a line of taxi drivers and graveyard shifters waited impatiently for their food.Brenyah's type of business is known in Ghana ascheck checka nocturnal, makeshift stand selling fried chicken and rice. I placed my order and watched the oil spit and pop in the wok. I asked Brenyah what cut of chicken he cooked, and hesmiled, "Leg quarter!"

And from what company?"Tyson!" Why? "It's cheap!"

He bundled my chicken and rice in newsprint and tied it with twine. I carried the little poultry packet toward the next check check stand and asked the question again. The answer was thesame, "Tyson!"

"Tyson!" "Tyson!" All the way down the road.

second reading

The Locavore's Dilemma" By Christophe Pelletier http://hfgfoodfuturist.com/2010/12/01/the-locavore%E2%80%99s-dilemma/

There is a growing trend, or at least a growing noise in favour of eating locally produced food.The "locavores" as they are called,claim that 100-mile food is the way to a more sustainable agriculture and consumption. Is this approach realistic and could it be the model for the future?

This movement is rather popular here in Vancouver, British Columbia. The laid-back residents who support the local food paradigm certainly love their cup of coffee and their beer. Wait a minute! There is no coffee plantation anywhere around here. There is not much barley produced around Vancouver, either. Life should be possible without these two beverages, should not it? The disappearance of coffee-and tea- from our households will make the lack of sugar beets less painful. This is good because sugar beets are not produced in the region. At least, there is no shortage of water.

But this is not all. There is no cocoa plantation around here, and believe me, there are many people who are addicted to chocolate. British Columbia does not produce citrus or other warm climate fruit. If we are to become locavores, we must say goodbye to orange juice, to lemons, to bananas. Even the so popular sushi must disappear because of the lack of rice. There

are no rice fields in this area, and neither are there wheat fields. The Asian population certainly would have a hard time eliminating rice from their diet. The lack of wheat means no flour; and no flour means no bread, no pastries, and no cookies. The carbohydrate supply is going to be tough. If we must consume local, our lifestyle is going to change dramatically. Potatoes and cabbage is the way of the future. But before going all local food, the local locavores must realize that British Columbia produces only 48% of all the food its inhabitants consume. One out of two locavores would have to starve. Going exclusively local would also affect deeply the source of animal protein. Most of the animal feed is made of ingredients that come for much farther than100 miles. The chickens and eggs would become less available. Farmed salmon, BC's largestagricultural export could not use the type of feed they currently use, as fishmeal and fish oil come from Peru and vegetal oil comes from farms located far away. There would go many jobs with very little alternatives. If we look beyond food, other agricultural products such as cotton and wool would not be an option anymore. Cars would disappear, because the main component of tires, rubber, is not produced under this climate. The 100-mile rule will solve traffic problems. If local consumption is the rule for food, should not it be the rule for everything as well? China would probably have different views about this. Not only would their manufacturing collapse, but also if they have to produce food within 100 miles of the consumer, they would have to give up importing agricultural commodities. For them, a true locavore system would mean famine.

The same would be true here in British Columbia. When people are hungry, they are not so picky about the distance from the producing farm.

The problem with concepts such as local consumption is that the basic idea has some value, but the idea quickly evolves into an ideology, and ideologies tend to make their followers stop thinking pragmatically. Today, the idea of eating locally in a place like Vancouver is possible because supply easily meets demand, thanks to the 3,000-mile foods. This is ironical. If the distance to market has to be within 100 miles, farmers in low population density areas, such as many regions of North America, South America and Central Europe, would have a different type of problem. They would produce an abundance of food, but because there are not enough people to consume it locally, the law of supply and demand tells us that the price of agricultural commodities would plummet, food would stay in storage and farmers would go out of business, while people in China, and in British Columbia, would suffer hunger. Clearly, the 100-mile diet needs some amendments.

Intuitively, it sounds logical that locally produced food has a lower carbon footprint than food that comes from 2,000 to 10,000 miles away. However, this is only partly true. The mean of transportation affects the carbon footprint. The environmental impact of transport is much higher for road transport than it is for rail transport, which is also higher than water transport. The type of transport also depends on the type of commodity brought to market. Perishables need to reach consumers as quickly as possible for shelf life reasons, while dry goods, such as for instance grains and oilseeds do not face the same kind of deadline. The quality of the logistics is also crucial to reduce the carbon footprint. A fully loaded truck is much more efficient than a local truck dropping small quantities in many places, thus driving around most of the time with empty space in the trailer.

The emphasis should not be so much on local as it should be about the search for efficient and low environmental impact. More than the distance from the farm to the consumer, it would be more useful to provide consumers with information about the actual carbon footprint of the products they buy. They would have the possibility to make the right choices. Retailers, too, would be able to make decisions about their sourcing strategies. Clean products and clean producers need to be rewarded for doing a good job. Here in Vancouver, local food products are more expensive than similar offerings from California, Mexico, Ecuador or Chile. How do you convince families with a tight budget to spend more for local products that look pretty much the same? This problem needs to be addressed. Currently, farmers markets are much about marketing. They sell the experience as much as their production methods. Only a wealthy minority can afford to buy on these markets. The prices are not based on production costs plus farmers income. They are as high as possible, because the farmers can ask these prices. The wealthy city dwellers are willing to pay a substantial premium above what they can buy from the local supermarket. In this relation farmer-consumer, the price bargaining does not take place. If these farmers were to try to sell to a grocery retail chain, they would never get the prices they get from the consumers who will not haggle about the price. This is why more farmers try to sell directly to consumers: they make more money that way. However, this might change in the future. A number of retailers are working towards offering "farmers market" products into theirstore. This already makes market farmers nervous.

Is local production for local markets the way of the future? My answer is that it partly will be and it partly will not. I do expect a shift of the location of production for perishables. Consumer habits will change, too. In the West, consumers have been spoiled. They can eat anything from anywhere at any time of the year. This luxury probably will not be affordable for long anymore. The superfluous will naturally be eliminated.

As the economics of energy, and therefore of food, will change, producers will increasingly locate their operations closer to cities; and even inside cities. Urban farming is a growing activity. Although it started mostly in poor neighborhoods as a way of having a small patch of land for personal consumption, more sophisticated and efficient systems are being developed. My expectation is that production, and consumption, of vegetables and fragile fruit (for instance strawberries) will gradually become more integrated in the urban landscape than they are now. I also think that we will see animal productions, such as fresh dairy, poultry meat and eggs relocate closer to consumer markets. An interesting development is aquaponics, the combination of greenhouse produce with fish production in tanks. The production of non-perishables will not relocate. It does not have to. What will probably change is the transportation infrastructure in many areas where these commodities are produced. This is good news for coffee drinkers and chocolate addicts. After all, transport of commodities over long distance is not just the result of cheap oil. The Silk Road and the spice trade by the Dutch took place before mankind even knew about oil. Trade has always been a force of progress for humanity. It helps an increasing number of people to have access to goods that make their lives better. The rules of trade may not always be fair, but like all human activities, it is a work in progress. Limiting our food supply to 100 miles would be a regression. Subsistence agriculture has not demonstrated that it could feed the world. Most of the people suffering of hunger live in subsistence agriculture areas.

The Food Distribution Discussion Forum

Question one

In the articles "Migration, on Ice: How Globalization Kills Chickens for Their Parts" by Malia Wollan and "The Locavore's Dilemma" by Christophe Pelletier, the authors discuss how economics and geography influence the distribution, sale, and consumption of food.

Reflect upon your own habits as purchasers and consumers of different types of food. What are the primary reasons that motivate you to buy food? Also, after reading the two articles, do you feel that you will modify these practices in light of what the authors have written? Why? Why not? Your response should be at least 6-8 sentences in length and include one relevant quote from each article.

Pls read the link Question is small