This is a response to a posting on leBlanc's site about organic farming. Her comment engine only allows 1250 characters and my response was too damn long-winded to fit. So I posted it here. You are free to read it if you care about such things.
As you say, it's complicated. On the one hand, small upscale "boutique" businesses marketing organic products to an affluent, ecologically-minded niche will never make the kind of impact on agriculture in general that advocates for organics seem to want. In order for a market-driven move towards organic farming to happen, prices need to come down from the Whole Foods (nickname: Whole Paycheck) range, and this will require economies of scale. It would take an awful lot of twenty-acre organic farms to provide enough produce to meet the level of demand needed to displace traditional non-organic agribusiness.
But inevitably as big agribusiness moves into the market there will be attempts to loosen the definition of organic to bring down production costs (while still keeping retail costs as close to their inflated boutique pricing as the market will bear, naturally.) There have already been numerous attempts to do this, including attempts by Monsanto and others to lobby for an organic classification for GMO crops. Also, there are ongoing efforts to allow this classification to apply to produce grown in overseas markets (notably China) where artificially low labor costs allow for them to be grown at costs that local American farmers could not hope to compete with. Assuming the trend continues, these pressures seem destined to drive the smaller local organic farmers out of business just as their predecessors in traditional agriculture were driven out of business in the latter half of the twentieth century.
It's also true that large organic farms can be damaging to the environment just as large traditional farms are. Runoff from tons of manure has a negative impact just as does runoff from chemical fertilizers and pesticides. And while many cities (even Northern cities) have farmers’ markets, there will never be enough to meet the level of demand needed to make a real impact. At some point large-scale distribution networks will be necessary, with all the downsides that entails.
If organics advocates in places like Seattle and San Francisco really want to see the movement towards more sustainable farming gain broader acceptance, they will have to make some tough decisions about what they are willing to live with.
Remember our conversation about voting with your dollars? I can think of no better example than this of how that can work. Consumers, through their insistence on an organic option, have created this market niche. The fact that there is money to be made selling organic produce has done more to get the attention of the major food growers and distributors than all the public protests in the world could ever do. In order for this to continue to work, I think the single most important thing is that information about where and how food is produced is available and transparent. Then consumers can continue to vote with their dollars.
thanks much for your thoughts - you definitely put what i was trying to say into much clearer terms. i upped my character limit if you'd like to repost i there instead of here. thank you for taking the time to do that.
Posted by: amy.leblanc at June 10, 2005 04:26 PM