This Saturday, the Lane County Winter Market will be on the streets of downtown Eugene, bringing together vendors of locally grown produce and making locally grown food available to weekend grocery shoppers.
Organic food enthusiasts and supporters of the Lane County Farmers Market, whose regular Saturday appearances resume April 3, espouse the reasons why locally grown food is superior to large-scale agriculture operations with a reliance on transportation. One commonly cited reason is food security.
Jean-Paul Cunningham, an organizer for the farmers market here in Lane County, asserts the production of food at the community level guarantees surer access to food in case of an interruption in the usual supply of transported food.
“I’d like to see (the farmers market) grow,” Cunningham said, “I mean, you go down to Wal-Mart and buy some vegetables that have been transported a thousand miles to get here — it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
Cunningham thinks the food demand trend in Oregon is toward locally grown food and away from dependency on the national apparatus for food distribution.
“Right now, about 3 percent of food in Lane County is grown locally. In the event of peak oil, something that might disrupt the distribution of food, transported food would become more expensive,” he said. “Lucky for us, Willamette Valley is a great place to grow food.”
In addition to peak oil concerns, which are relevant because international crops today rely heavily upon fossil fuels for production and transportation, another hazard those concerned with food security in Oregon consider is the state’s earthquake risk.
According to a widely distributed March 2 Associated Press article, cities along the Pacific coast face a precarious situation because of their position on a currently dormant, but
historically active, fault line.
According to the article, faults like the one off the Oregon coast where one tectonic plate is being driven under another, also referred to as subduction zones, produce the largest earthquakes on the planet, and there’s “an 80 percent chance the portion of the fault off southern Oregon and Northern California would break in the next 50 years and produce a megaquake.”
University geology professor Gene Humphreys said a major earthquake will hit Oregon relatively soon in historical and geological terms.
“The big subduction zone earthquake last happened (in Oregon) about 300 years ago, and the average time of recurrence is 400 years, (but) very variable, not very predictable,” he said.
The most recent large earthquake along the Cascadia fault line ruptured the entire subduction zone, from Northern California to Vancouver, B.C., Humphreys said. He said the transportation infrastructure network, which industrial society relies upon heavily, would suffer from the disaster, as it did in Chile.
“If something like that were to happen, it would cause serious problems in Portland and Seattle, as well. So aid would have to come from quite a ways away,” he said. “It would disrupt transportation for awhile, and I expect broken freeways and rail lines — even if broken just here and there — would stop things.”
But Humphreys predicts the Northwest will be better prepared to deal with the aftermath of such a disaster than places like Chile and Haiti were.
“I suspect if a large magnitude earthquake hit here, one like the one that hit in Chile, well, we’d be further from the subduction zone, and we have a country with the ability to come to our aid,” he said.
Humphreys also said he looked forward to the return of the 31-year-old farmers market and that he expected to frequent the market this summer.
“I love the farmers market,” he said, “I make it down there whenever I can.”
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