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Commerce · VII.05 · MMXXVI · daylight
ASSESSMENT · Chapter VII.05 — Bioregional Economics
Three instruments: a ten-point quiz, eight reflection questions, five essay prompts. The quiz checks comprehension rather than recall. The reflections are private and first-person. The essays are arguable from more than one side.
THE QUIZ — ten points
Four on recall.
1. Ecoregions nest. Give the counts published for North America at Levels I, II and III, and the global count at the ecoregion grain.
15 at Level I, 50 at Level II, 182 at Level III over North America (Commission for Environmental Cooperation / US EPA); 846 terrestrial ecoregions globally (Dinerstein et al. 2017). One mark for the counts, one for saying why they matter: the boundary is a resolution setting, and the level chosen decides whether a place reads as food-secure or food-dependent.
2. State the density ceiling for food self-sufficiency and both of its headline figures.
density ≤ 100 × f / 1.08persons per km², wherefis the farmable fraction of the region's land and 1.08 ha/person/yr is the land requirement of the current American diet. Atf = 1the ceiling is 92.6 persons per km²; at the global agricultural share off = 0.38it is 35.2. Credit an answer that notes the diet term has a factor of eight in it — 1.08 down to 0.13 across the published scenarios — and is therefore the lever with the most travel.
3. How does the average US household's food greenhouse-gas footprint divide between production, all transport, and final delivery?
83 percent production, 11 percent all transport, 4 percent final delivery from producer to retail, on a household footprint of 8.1 tonnes CO₂e a year (Weber and Matthews, 2008). The consequence is the mark: 11 percent is the ceiling on what perfect localisation could ever save.
4. Name the four categories a commodity balance sorts lines into, with the test for each.
Regional by nature — freight above roughly a tenth of delivered value. Regional in season — local production needs no supplementary energy inside a stated window. Traded by nature — freight a small share of value and the distant producer's advantage exceeds the freight penalty. Strategically held — traded by nature, but supply concentrated and substitution slow. The fourth is the one most programmes miss: it is a hedging problem, not a localisation problem.
Four on application.
5. A colleague reports that the organisation cut its food miles by 60 percent and concludes it cut its food carbon by 60 percent. Diagnose the error and give the correct upper bound.
Transport is 11 percent of the footprint, so a 60 percent cut in transport is at most a 6.6 percent cut in the total — and only if production emissions did not rise. The deeper error is treating distance as the variable: mode decides it, and truck is 12.9× container ship per tonne-kilometre while air is 48.6×. Sixty percent fewer miles moved from ship to truck is an increase. Full marks require both halves: the ceiling and the mode.
6. A regional development body reports 41 percent food self-sufficiency and proposes a localisation programme. What do you ask for before acting on it, and why?
The commodity table underneath the 41 percent, and the level of the boundary at which it was computed. An aggregate averages a large surplus against a structural zero; New York State runs 255 percent in milking cows and zero in rice in the same balance. Four different actions hide inside one number, and the programme will otherwise localise the line where it has no advantage. Credit any answer that also asks whether the figure is capacity or behaviour.
7. A box scheme delivering by van claims lower emissions than the supermarket. Which single measurement settles it, and what is the published comparator?
Load factor, measured on the regional route — not distance. Coley, Howard and Winter found the crossover at a customer round trip of 6.7 km: beyond that, driving to the farm shop emits more than the whole cold-store, hub and doorstep chain of a large box scheme. The strongest answers note that the same logic condemns the van if it runs half empty, and that the scheme should therefore be asked for its tonne-kilometres, not its kilometres.
8. Why does the bioregional offtake pay the regional premium only above a measured load-factor threshold, rather than simply requiring full vehicles?
A requirement is a compliance clause that somebody polices and everybody argues about. A price condition makes the cluster's consolidation problem into the cluster's revenue problem, which is the one place it can be solved — and it puts the buyer's money behind the variable that actually decides the carbon. Credit any answer noting that below the threshold the price reverts to the incumbent's landed cost, so the buyer is never paying a premium for a worse outcome.
Two that require the arithmetic to be done.
9. A metropolitan region of 3,400,000 people sits inside an ecoregion holding 6,000,000 acres of land in farms. At the current American diet, what share of its food can the ecoregion supply — and what per-capita land requirement would it need in order to reach 100 percent? Show your working.
Requirement: 3,400,000 × 1.08 = 3,672,000 ha, which is 9,073,710 acres. Available: 6,000,000 acres ÷ 2.4710538 = 2,428,114 ha. Coverage = 2,428,114 / 3,672,000 = 66 percent. To reach 100 percent the diet would have to fall to 2,428,114 / 3,400,000 = 0.71 ha per person, which sits between the 100 percent and 80 percent healthy-omnivorous scenarios in Peters et al. (2016). The mark is for producing a diet, not a boundary, as the answer — the land is fixed and the composition is not.
10. A regional supplier's delivered premium is £42 per tonne. The incumbent arrives by container ship over 11,000 km; the regional route is 140 km by truck. The firm's internal carbon price is £80 per tonne CO₂e. Does the carbon term alone justify the premium? If not, what annual probability of interruption would close the gap, on a loss of £400 per tonne?
Incumbent freight: 11,000 × 14 g/t-km = 154,000 g = 0.154 t CO₂e per tonne. Regional: 140 × 180 = 25,200 g = 0.0252 t. Difference 0.1288 t, worth 0.1288 × £80 = £10.30 per tonne — 24.5 percent of the premium. The carbon term does not carry it. The residual £31.70 needs
p × 400 ≥ 31.70, sop ≥7.9 percent a year. The strongest answers observe that the sea leg, despite being seventy-nine times longer, contributes only six times the emissions of the road leg — and that this is the whole finding of the chapter in one line.
REFLECTION — eight questions, for one person and a pen
These are not for a room. Write the answers by hand if you can; the slowness is the point.
- Name the bioregion you live in, at whatever level you can. If you cannot, write down what you would have to look up — and notice how long you have lived somewhere without knowing its shape.
- Which three things grow, run or get made unusually well where you are? Write them without checking. Then check, and notice which way you were wrong.
- What have you bought locally, at a premium, for a reason you would not have written down? Was the reason good? Answer honestly before deciding whether it was defensible.
- Where in your own consumption does the last mile look like the whole journey? Count one week of car trips for food and multiply by 990.
- Think of a time you argued for something on environmental grounds and later found the arithmetic did not support it. What did you do? What would you like to have done?
- If a localisation premium in your organisation landed on the households with the least room for it, who would have told you, and would you have listened the first time?
- What do you import that you could not replace within a year if it stopped? Name it. Then ask what the option to replace it would cost, and whether you have ever priced it.
- Where have you been asking is this local of a situation that would answer a different question more usefully? Write the better question now.
ESSAY PROMPTS — five
Each is arguable from more than one side. Each requires at least one source the chapter cites and at least one it does not.
1. The level problem. The chapter argues the bioregional boundary is a resolution setting rather than a discovery, and that programmes should declare a level and stop arguing. Argue either that this is the right engineering compromise, or that it concedes the substantive claim of bioregionalism — that some boundaries are real and others are administrative fictions. Use Omernik and Griffith on the hierarchical framework, and one source in political ecology or Indigenous geography that the chapter does not cite.
2. Is the food mile recoverable? Weber and Matthews put transport at 11 percent and final delivery at 4 percent, and Coley, Howard and Winter put the consumer's crossover at 6.7 km. Argue either that the food mile should be retired as a public metric, or that it survives as a proxy worth keeping because of what it correlates with — seasonality, mode, processing depth and supply-chain length. Engage both papers directly, and at least one published defence of local food systems that the chapter does not cite.
3. Who pays for resilience? The chapter treats the regressive incidence of a localisation premium as an honest negative to be offset through institutional rather than household procurement. Argue whether that offset is sufficient or evasive. Use Fajgelbaum and Khandelwal on the distribution of the gains from trade, and one source on public procurement or community wealth building — the Preston programme is a reasonable place to start — that the chapter does not cite.
4. Comparative advantage and the adjustment that never came. Autor, Dorn and Hanson find that import competition explains a quarter of the 1990–2007 decline in US manufacturing employment, with transfer payments rising sharply in exposed local labour markets. Take a position: is the textbook answer — trade raises aggregate income, compensate the losers — a workable policy that was never implemented, or a theoretical device that could never have been implemented at the required scale and speed? Use Autor, Dorn and Hanson and Ricardo directly, and one source on trade adjustment assistance or regional policy that the chapter does not cite.
5. The zeros. New York State's foodshed is at zero in rice, cane sugar and peanuts, and its entire citrus sector is one farm growing lemons with the acreage withheld. Kinnunen and colleagues find that 26 to 64 percent of the world's population needs more than 1,000 km to meet demand for a given crop. Argue either that a bioregional economics is strengthened by naming its structural zeros plainly, or that a framework whose answer to a quarter of the diet is import it has conceded too much to be called bioregional at all. Use Kinnunen et al. and Peters et al. (2012), and one source on food sovereignty or trade dependency that the chapter does not cite.