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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Not Just for White People Anymore - How the organic movement can regain its relevance
  • Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:51:34 -0600


"As our globe lurches into a period of ecological and economic crises -- not
least, the food crisis -- what we need is less ignorance about food and more
people with their hands in the dirt producing it. "

Not Just for White People Anymore
How the organic movement can regain its relevance
By Tom Philpott
27 Jun 2008
http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2008/06/27/index.html
Buying organic makes you feel good ... but does it make you think?

On June 25, I spoke at the Organic Summit in Boulder, Colo., to an audience
consisting largely of people who work in the organic food industry. This
column is an adapted version of my talk.

In his wildly popular satirical blog Stuff White People Like, the Canadian
writer Christian Lander recently made some tart observations about the place
of organic food in North American culture.

"White people need organic food to survive," he declared. "Where they
purchase this food is as important as what they purchase. In modern white
person culture, Whole Foods has replaced churches and cathedrals as the most
important and relevant buildings in the community."

Later in this remarkable post, Lander returned to the religious theme: "Many
white people consider shopping at Whole Foods to be a religious experience,
allowing them to feel good about their consumption."

I bring up this clearly over-the-top piece of writing because I think it
actually raises an important question about the place of organics in our
culture today. To what extent do organics merely "allow people to feel good
about their consumption," as Lander says, and to what extent do they inspire
people to think about their consumption, to consider their place in the
consumption-production process?

I would argue that today, amid all of our ecological crises -- the climate
crisis, the water crisis, the energy crisis, the crisis of the oceans, all of
which implicate agriculture and food production -- organics aren't inspiring
people to think very much at all. And the responsibility for that failure
lies most heavily with the people in organics who have the power to
communicate with the public: the corporate marketers.

We're So Sorry, Uncle Albert

If we look at the history of organic agriculture from its origins in the work
of botanist and agricultural maverick Sir Albert Howard in the 1930s and
1940s, we can make a case that organics have been a stunning success. For
years, they've been the only real growth area in the entire food industry,
which here in the United States is characterized by stagnant demand. While
overall food consumption rises with population -- something like 1 percent
per year -- demand for organics rises by a steady 15 to 20 percent per year.

However, from a different direction, the success of organics looks
considerably more modest. Sir Albert published The Soil and Health in 1947 --
just at the point when industrial-scale agriculture was taking off,
supercharged by synthetic and mined fertilizers as well as a slew of poisons
from the rising petrochemical industry. Sir Albert never saw organics as an
"alternative" or "niche" form of farming. He saw the two visions of
agriculture in direct competition -- and foresaw all manner of grave
consequences if industrial ag won out.

Sir Albert insisted on what he called the Law of Return, which can be summed
up like this: Every time we harvest something from the soil -- every time we
consume food or drink -- we're taking away nutrients and organic matter that
need to be replaced. The whole trick of agriculture, from the first wheat
fields of the Fertile Crescent to a modern 10,000-acre Iowa corn farm to my
own little patch of land in North Carolina, has always been how to replace
those nutrients, how to maintain soil fertility.

Now, according to Sir Albert, when you deal with soil fertility by resorting
to synthetic and mined fertilizers, you're undermining soil's long-term
ability to produce crops. You're leeching out key micronutrients without
replacing them. You're sterilizing the soil of microorganisms needed for
truly healthy plants. Producers who farm this way, he said, are "bandits"
stealing true soil fertility from future generations.

Something tells me Sir Albert would be pretty alarmed by what's happening
today, despite the steady growth of organic food. Globally, demand for
synthetic and mined fertilizer is exploding. Amid a bleak economy and a
dismal stock market, one of the few seemingly sure ways to make money is to
invest in fertilizer companies. The globe's two largest fertilizer companies
-- Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan and Mosaic, which is two-thirds owned by
Cargill -- are practically printing money. In the last year alone, Mosaic's
shares have quadrupled and Potash's have tripled, while the overall stock
market has lost 10 percent. Meanwhile, Monsanto, the globe's dominant
purveyor of genetically modified seeds, has seen its share price double.

Just this week, the Wall Street Journal declared that the "salad days of
organic agriculture are wilting in favor of high-tech tomatoes." Almost
triumphantly, the Journal published a chart comparing Monsanto's surging
share price to that of Whole Foods, which has plunged by a third over the
last year.

Even as organics gain popularity and make people feel good about what they
consume, industrial agriculture is consolidating its grip over the U.S.
heartland, where it's burning through one of the greatest stores of soil
fertility on the globe, and it's expanding rapidly into the savanna and even
the rainforest of Brazil, the globe's emerging industrial-agriculture
powerhouse.

I don't mean to discount the work that's been done by the organic movement.
Today, we have about 1.7 million acres in organic crop production in the
United States. That's a remarkable achievement, representing decades of hard
work. No one can deny the value of protecting that much land from a steady
stream of chemicals that poison workers, the soil, and water alike. But total
U.S. cropland stands at about 435 million acres. That means less than 1
percent* of U.S. cropland is managed organically. With conventional grain
prices at all-time highs, that number may be stagnating, not growing. We have
lots more work to do.

Appetite for Instruction

One of the things the organic industry has to do is educate, inform, and
provoke. In this country, fewer than 1 percent of us farm. That's the lowest
rate in the world -- and surely the lowest rate in the history of
agricultural society. Food really does seem to arrive on our plates by magic
-- it appears, or seems to appear, by the grace of corporate marketers, not
through the hard work of people interacting with the soil, animals, and the
climate.

And I believe this ignorance -- this beautiful, blissful state of unknowing
that would be the envy of nearly any society that came before us -- has
mostly been maintained by the organic movement. Surely it's maintained by
"organic" milk processors that buy from feedlot dairy operations, and then
decorate their cartons with happy cows munching grass. Surely it's maintained
by "certified organic" supermarket chains that decorate their produce
sections with images of prosperous farmers, and then stock their shelves with
produce grown under God knows what conditions in Chile. It's maintained by
large organic farms that quietly rely on exploited immigrant labor to eke out
profits. And it's even maintained at the farmers market, by the farmer who's
too embarrassed to tell his customers that he's barely scraping by, that his
back is killing him, and that he can't afford health insurance.

If we're going to move beyond 0.4 percent organic cropland and really
challenge industrial agriculture, we also have to move beyond this acceptance
of mass ignorance. One concrete thing we can do is start talking honestly and
seriously about soil fertility -- Albert Howard's Law of Return. We all know
our food system generates tremendous amounts of waste. Very little of it gets
cycled back into soil. Instead, it ends up rotting in landfills.

I know from hard experience that for new organic farms, the No. 1 challenge
is coming up with a fertility strategy. Creating the kind of closed-loop,
mixed-farming system celebrated by Albert Howard and embodied by Joel Salatin
in Virginia takes years. One of our dirty secrets is that a lot of organic
farmers rely on manure from confined-animal feedlot operations to fertilize
their land. By doing so, we're depositing all manner of pharmaceuticals and
toxins into our best farmland -- the very stuff people try to avoid when they
buy organic. An alternative farming system that relies on CAFO waste for
fertility is a kind of parasite on a sick animal.

Why not champion a national composting policy, one that compels
municipalities to transform food waste into high-quality, crop-grade compost?
And why not then give it away to farmers -- the ones who grow food for their
nearby communities? That's an agricultural subsidy that makes all kinds of
sense.

While we're at it, let's reinvest in the infrastructure that makes
small-scale, pasture-based meat and dairy production viable. The best and
most successful organic farms are the ones that mix diversified crop
production with livestock production; they build their soil with their own
animals' composted manure. But as the Tysons, Smithfields, and Cargills of
the world gained control of the meat and dairy industries, they shut down
processing plants and concentrated production geographically. Who wants to
raise chickens if you have to haul them 70 miles to a USDA-approved
slaughterhouse, and 70 miles back?

Rather than continue a trend of corporate control and consolidation of
organics, the decision makers in this industry should be cajoling the federal
government to enforce antitrust laws and break up the monopolies that control
the food system. You should conceive of yourselves as the anti-Tysons and
anti-Smithfields by investing in appropriate-scale processing plants all
across the land.

As our globe lurches into a period of ecological and economic crises -- not
least, the food crisis -- what we need is less ignorance about food and more
people with their hands in the dirt producing it. If we can't achieve that,
than the Tysons, Cargills, and Monsantos will retain their grip over food
production, and organics really will amount to some "stuff white people like"
-- a soothing room within a sinking ship.






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