True costs

As an agroecologist, I got excited about the concept of true cost accounting in food systems. If the prices of ultraprocessed food had to cover all the damages their production, consumption and disposal caused… they’d be way too expensive for anyone to buy. No need for moral arguments, no need to mention Mother Earth, no need for difficult brainwashing in the supermarket: UPF would simply be too expensive, end of story.

And those subsidies could be redirected to sustainable, tasty, healthy food, making it affordable.

So the movement for true-cost accounting in food systems is pretty exciting. The FAO (the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation) considers it so important it devoted not one but two annual reports to TCA. It comes down to debates about subsidies, statistics and complex calculations.

But there’s also scope for my kind of work in TCA: participatory action research with small-scale actors in the solidarity economy, the Mexican countryside, agroecological markets, farmers’ markets, people who want it to be possible to run a small farm in the EU. I’ve developed a training course for us folks, based on learning communities I’ve been running over the past ten years.