EcoHearth: Come Home to the Earth

In the 1970s, the alternative agriculture movement was limited to a small group of idealogues among the more affluent members of society. Over the past three decades, it has slowly moved into the mainstream, and by 2002—the year the federal guidelines for organic production and certification were created—a set of universal norms was established that greatly facilitated the mass marketing of organic goods to an already thriving market.

The variety and quantity of organically certified food available in the marketplace began to grow almost exponentially. Such supply increases allowed retail sales in the organics market to expand rapidly, increasing by nearly 20% annually for the past 15 years. Rapid market growth and the premiums being paid for organic products caught the attention of the largest growers and retailers, who early on saw an opportunity to expand into this lucrative emerging market.

Consolidation of Organic Producers
The result of such interest was a consolidation of organic producers and food processors starting in the early 1990s. Many once-independent organic operations have been bought out by larger food conglomerates such as Kraft, Heinz, Cargill, ConAgra, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kellogg, General Mills, Tyson, Dole, Unilever and Nestlé. Major retailers, like Safeway, Wal-Mart, Costco, Kroger and Target, have begun to carry their own lines of organic products as well.

While such interest and investment in organics has resulted in an increase of total acreage under organic production, though still only 4% of total US cropland, this expansion has been predominantly driven by market forces. As a result, we have seen the industrialization of organic agriculture, in which efficiency, profitability and economies of scale inform production practices and market structure.

While all USDA-certified organic food is guaranteed to be produced without synthetic chemicals, corporate production is still rooted in monoculture, mechanization and the use of expensive (although organic) fertilizers and pesticides. These practices all rely upon the exploitation of a largely immigrant agricultural labor force, as well as exhaustible natural resources such as petroleum and phosphate rock.

Inquiring Minds of Consumers
While this process of consolidation and industrialization of organic production, processing and marketing has gradually accelerated over the past 20 years, the recent introduction of multinational-corporate products like Heinz Organic Ketchup and Kraft Organic Macaroni and Cheese—and their subsequent marketing at monolithic stores like Wal-Mart and Safeway—has led many people to re-evaluate what “organic” means to them and what other expectations they have from their food purchases.

Research conducted in 2005 revealed that people truly were interested in knowing more about how their food was produced. While organic production methods were important, those surveyed wanted to know more about the treatment of animals, environmental degradation, labor conditions, corporate ownership and food transportation. We can evaluate some of these attributes in relation to current USDA organic standards.

Ignoring Animal Welfare
To certify organic dairy and meat only requires that animals be fed organically produced feedstock and reared without hormones or antibiotics. This means nothing for their living conditions. Many industrial organic meat/dairy operations still profit by the confinement of as many animals per square foot as possible.

Degrading the Environment
Consolidation has led much of organic production to follow the dominant industrial model of production. Organic producers still utilize fertilizer and pesticides, albeit organic. Overuse of such inputs still results in putrification of water sources (caused by fertilizer runoff) and pest resistance from repeated applications of organic pesticides. Tillage practices are somewhat improved under USDA organic standards, but highly mechanized tillage still results in dependence on fossil fuels and large CO₂ emissions (not only from tractors, but the soil itself) and causes soil compaction and erosion.

Exploiting Labor
Many organic producers still depend upon underpaid immigrant labor, in some cases even more so than conventional operations thanks to the greater manual labor demanded by certain organic production practices. Such super-exploitation of labor in production and processing is considered a necessity in both large industrial and smaller familial organic operations. Why is it that products like fair trade coffee from Central America are in vogue while fair trade strawberries from California’s Central Coast remain almost unheard of?

Squeezing Out Small Farmers
For some, buying organic was a way to support small family farmers and fight a corporate takeover of the food industry, yet the idyllic “small farm at sunset” on a tub of Earth Balance is a far cry from the vast monoculture of organic soy that produces a majority of the “butter” inside. Consolidation of organic production has allowed larger producers to benefit from economies of scale. Many smaller operations are no longer able to compete and are forced to either scale up or sell out. This situation further drives the necessity to industrialize production practices.

Consuming Oil and Spewing CO₂
While organic production may reduce some negative environmental impacts by improving soil care and eliminating synthetic inputs from production, many larger producers are still heavily reliant upon fossil fuels to run the tractors and other machinery necessary to produce on a large scale. Furthermore, the long-distance transport of organic products away from the farm (and organic fertilizers and pesticides toward the farm) is still a major source of carbon pollution. The packaging and processing required to transport organic food increases this pollution and petroleum dependence as well.

Sustainable, Not Just Organic
Organic products must adequately address social and environmental issues in addition to production practices might have the ability to help consumers better support their local/regional economy, small family farmers, fair labor practices and more thorough environmental stewardship. In other words, we need stricter rules for organics that will help us achieve many of the ideals present in the original alternative agriculture movement, which was geared toward the creation of not simply organic, but sustainable agriculture.

Looking Beyond the Label
But even if labels were to denote more progressive product traits, we must not allow ourselves to simply continue as passive label-based consumers. We must not allow ourselves to equate more conscious consumption with participation in an alternative agriculture movement.

Judging from the effectiveness of organic labeling so far, even if made more progressive, it will likely further the consolidation already occurring in agriculture. Why? Because labels attempt to assign quantifiable value to social and environmental problems in order to allow them to be solved by market mechanisms instead of by human beings. Labeling only gets producers to change their practices or treat their laborers with dignity because of a financial reward, not because of any sort of solidarity or actual human empathy between employers and their workers.

More thorough labeling does not necessarily allow consumers to better communicate with producers either, which in theory is the key to market-based problem solving. The concept of voting with dollars (signaling consumer desires to producers via the purchases we make) is flawed. Theoretically this market process drives producers to adopt (in this case) better production practices as they read an increase in consumer demand for such changes in the market. The problem is that while lower-income families may support better pay for agricultural labor, many can never tell producers that with their dollars. Their “vote” is still for Monsanto, Kraft and Cargill when they can afford to buy only the cheap processed foods for which these companies are famous, rather than the pricey fresh produce at farmers markets.

This is disempowering to most humans, especially those without enough scratch to get by, since we are taught to feel that the only action we can take toward creating a better world is through consumption—exactly what got us into this mess to begin with! This situation has larger implications. For instance, the penetration of consumer passivity into our political lives has resulted in an almost total disconnect between us citizens and the actions of our government.

By accepting colored stickers as the best we can do, we allow that passivity to continue unabated. Instead, we should employ a systemic perspective with which to critically reflect upon the world and inform what actions we take to address those issues that most concern us as individuals and—when we actually get around to talking to each other—as a society.

Additional resources:
What Do People Want to Know About Their Food?

[This piece was written by Anya Kamenskaya and Houston Wilson and provided courtesy of the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology. - Ed.]

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