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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Organic Tomatoes in January: Sucking Mexico Dry
  • Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:00:07 -0700


Organic Tomatoes in January: Sucking Mexico Dry
—By Tom Philpott | Mon Jan. 2, 2012 1:18 PM PST
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/01/organic-tomatoes-january-sucking-mexico-dry

Walk into a fancy grocery store today and you'll see them: stacks of
pristine, glistening organic tomatoes. But what does it take to generate a
bounty of organic tomatoes in January?

According to a great New York Times story by Elizabeth Rosenthal, the bulk of
organic tomatoes now gracing the produce aisles of US supermarkets hail from
Mexico's Baja Peninsula—a desert. Rosenthal reports that Baja's production of
US-bound organic tomatoes has expanded dramatically in recent years. And
growing large moncrops in a desert, organic or not, requires lots and lots of
water. Here's Rosenthal:

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes
here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells
have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow
crops.

That's a pretty brutal tradeoff: a luxury product for export—fresh winter
tomatoes—squeezes out people who are trying to feed themselves from their own
land. And lest anyone argue that the arrangement is somehow building wealth
and pulling people out of poverty in this part of Mexico, Rosenthal notes
that the going wage for working in these mercilessly hot fields is $10 per
day—twice the local minimum wage, but not enough to pull anyone out of
poverty and certainly not sufficient compensation for drawing down the water
table and snuffing out other forms of agriculture.

In other words, the profits from our booming market in organic winter
tomatoes are not being distributed very widely in the place where they're
being grown. They're going to our supermarkets, to distributors, and to a few
landholders in Baja—many of whom are American, Rosenthal reports. Farm
workers get scraps. Meanwhile, the cost of the arrangement—aquifers that are
depleted far more rapidly than they can be replenished, generating a
long-term water crisis—falls squarely on the backs of Baja residents.

In addition to lacking water, desert land is also deficient in organic
matter: decayed plant material that gives soil tilth and the ability to hold
nutrients. Just how stark is the landscape on which these tomatoes are being
grown? According to Rosenthal, growers in Baja "describe their toil amid the
cactuses as 'planting the beach.'”

In other words, these crops are literally being grown in sand. That reminds
me of another region famous for winter tomatoes and dirt-cheap labor costs:
Immokalee, Florida, source of a huge percentage of non-organic winter
tomatoes consumed in the US. I've been to Immokalee, and when I was there I
plunged my hand into the ground between rows of tomato plants. What I found
was pure sand. As Barry Estabrook puts it in his excellent Tomatoland,
central Florida's “sandy soil makes for great beaches,” but it's “devoid of
plant nutrients." As a result, farmers there "pump the soil full of chemical
fertilizers."

Of course, organic code forbids synthetic fertilizers. Rosenthal doesn't
touch on how Baja's organic farmers add sufficient fertility to grow huge
tomato crops; I'd be interested to find out.

All of this, of course, raises serious questions about what organic
agriculture has come to. There's no reason to doubt that Baja's thriving
tomato growers are following the letter of organic code, i.e., forgoing
synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. But as conceived by its founders, like
the great British agriculturalist Sir Albert Howard, organic agriculture is
about working within ecological niches to create a bounty of food while
sustaining those niches.

What's going on in Baja seems more about generating a premium-priced product
while systematically degrading a landscape. Want organic tomatoes in the cold
months? Buy them in a can.





  • [Livingontheland] Organic Tomatoes in January: Sucking Mexico Dry, Tradingpost, 01/04/2012

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