The Problem with Organic Food

If you ask people why they don't buy organic, much of the time, they will tell you that it costs too much money. And they're right. It does. But not for the reasons they think. If, on the other hand, you ask people who buy organic food if they think it costs too much money, they will probably agree. Sometimes they also argue that as more people buy it, the costs will come down. They're wrong. Oh, it will come down a little, but not enough to make it economically competitive with conventional foods as they are currently priced.

Organic food costs too much money because its purchasers pay the price of food production twice. They pay it once directly at the grocery till, with raised food prices which factor in the costs of organic production. They pay it again indirectly, in their taxes (local and non-local) and in the societal costs of conventional agribusiness food production; the taxes which go to police and clean up the environmental degradation of industrial farming, the seas of shit that flow downstream from hog farms and contaminate drinking water (a big deal here in Ontario post-Walkerton), the pesticides and herbicides sprayed onto fields and the toxic effects of those, the health effects and the impacts of those health effects on mortality and productivity and so on. If you buy conventional food, you pay these costs once--in the indirect and nearly invisible subsidies that allow conventional farming to be so productive and look so "cheap."

But if you buy organic, you pay twice. So yes. It costs too much.

A real solution will never see the costs of organic food go down by more than a token amount. The real solution would be to factor the subsidies directly into the costs of the food at the checkout counter. Believe me, if you saw directly on your grocery bill the environmental and social costs of conventional food production, the choice between a bag of cheetos and an organic apple, or even between an inorganic apple and an organic apple, would never look the same again. Purchasers of conventional foods would bear the full costs of their choices. Purchasers of organic foods would too, but would no longer have to bear the full costs of other people's choices.

Wouldn't this result in a terrible increase in food costs, borne disproportionately by low-income folks? No, I don't think so. The fact is that the indirect costs are already monstrous, we're already paying for them, and they are already being borne disproportionately by low-income and marginalized folks due to a little-known problem called "environmental racism" (whereby practices and industries with unbearable environmental and human health impacts nearly always locate in poor areas and areas populated by visible minorities). It would simply be a transfer of those costs from indirect, invisible areas to direct, highly visible ones. This transfer might actually lower the cost substantially because people would be able to choose, for the first time, what costs of food they would rather pay for: the increased costs of socially and environmentally responsible food production, or the increased costs of cleaning up socially and environmentally irresponsible food production? The former is almost always cheaper than the latter.

Such a change would of course require some sort of government intervention. All of the subsidies to conventional farming start with legislation and policies that are either blind to or supportive of the effects of agribusiness. Switching the indirect costs to direct costs will never be done voluntarily. Mr. Christie is not going to go after his customers to make them pay the full price of his cookies. Government would need to eliminate any tax-funded programs for cleaning up the problems of agribusiness, and create legislation enforcing the businesses themselves to do so: the businesses would then increase the cost of the food to compensate (but, again, the tax-funded programs would be gone so overall the costs should be equal); they would also need to determine somehow the proportion of social ills caused by irresponsible food production and the free environmental benefits destroyed by irresponsible food production, and charge those back to the companies as fees (presumably this could be done if government intended to use the money directly on those social ills and destroyed benefits).

Without such a change, consumer preferences will have remarkably little opportunity to express themselves. A few lucky people who can afford it and who also have strong consciences will continue to pay twice for food production by buying organic. Everyone else will continue to buy conventional foods because they either can't or won't pay twice.

Michael Pollan, of The Omnivore's Dilemma fame, had an interesting article recently in the New York Times on the entry of Wal-Mart into the organic groceries market. He took a negative tack on it, arguing that Wal-Mart will industrialize organic farming, thus re-creating most of the substantial environmental problems of conventional agriculture in a practice that was designed to solve them. This is true; it's also another way of making the same point I have here, which is that food prices ought to reflect the full social and environmental costs of their production. Industrializing organic farming would merely create a whole new realm of public subsidies for private damages.

The problem isn't that organic food costs too much, which is what Wal-Mart will argue. It isn't that conventional food costs too little. It's that the substantial costs of conventional food production are borne by everyone, regardless of what they themselves eat. If this were solved, conventional foods would cost a lot more than they do (again--you'd pay less through taxes/health care costs/etc., so your overall expenses would not change significantly), which would change people's grocery habits, potentially, radically.

Posted by Andrea at June 8, 2006 7:19 AM under The Green Family

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