Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[EJ <emj@uvic.ca>]

Some people would argue that policy is more important than individual consumers:

It's the policy, stupid
Why eaters alone can’t transform the food system

by Tom Philpott

In the cover piece of the newest American Prospect, Heather Rogers skillfully makes a point I've been flogging for years: that public policy, not consumer choice, is the villain propping up the industrial food system and constraining the growth of organic farming.

Rogers, author of the new book Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution, opens with the example of a New York State farmer named Morse Pitts. He sells the bounty of his 15-acre Windfall Farm in the Hudson Valley at Manhattan's famed Union Square market, where his eggs command a steep $14 per dozen and "some of his greens go for more than $40 per pound." Yet even though his weekly market stand teems with consumers eager to "vote with their forks" (to speak nothing of their checking accounts), he nets just $7 per hour for his labor and plans to shut down his operation soon.

The problem, Rogers makes clear, is a widespread lack of infrastructure for supporting small-scale, ecologically minded farmers. The public resources that might do just that are siphoned off by the industrial food system, in the form of commodity subsidies and largesse to the corn ethanol industry. Farmers like Pitts have to pass on the costs of their ecological stewardship directly to their customers in the form of eye-popping prices, which still don't add up to a decent salary, while industrial-scale farms can generally trash the environment with impunity, letting society as a whole, or distant communities, pick up the bill. See, for example, the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone.

More: http://www.grist.org/article/food-why-eaters-alone-cant-transform-the-food-system/

Dieter Brand wrote:

287910.32637.qm@web63401.mail.re1.yahoo.com" type="cite">

We live in a consumer society.  This means that the consumer decides the future shape of farming by the choices she makes in the shop.  Neither the government nor the corporations have the power to change the status quo.  They do have the power to influence public opinion, but in the end, they are just as powerless to change things as we are.