Practices... - Organic Food - Organic Concerns

Discussions of organic food focuses around a number of issues and concerns shared by growers and eventual consumers. Several of these are discussed below.

 
Cost

In almost all cases, organic food costs more than its non-organic counterpart. However, organic food reflects the true cost of production. For example, regular bananas from Costa Rica do not cost 29 cents a pound. You cannot even mail a letter to Costa Rica for 29 cents!

Unlike its mainstream counterpart, the organic food "collective" does not receive local/ national/ international government subsidies. This means no subsidies on purchasing seeds, paying labourers, acquiring land, or transporting or distributing food. Organic food production is not recognized as a true industry and thus is not considered a viable factor to GNP/GDP growth.

Ironically, organic food production contributes greatly to various social sectors, though the horizontally-integrated benefits are seen more as "externalities" than quantifiable vertically-integrated advantages. Benefits include long-term production with little or no soil exhaustion, little or no soil erosion, little or no water contamination, viable local employment, pesticide-free production makes for little or no health compensation costs, reduced health care costs due to healthier citizens, increasing public interest in and demand for chemical-free food makes for a viable long-term market investment, re-realization and re-establishment of connections between land-food-people...and the list goes on...

 
Availability

Organic produce is generally not widely available and many foods cannot be found year-round. A number of reasons exist for this situation.

For one, organic food production produces lower yields and will never match (and is not intended to match) the distribution and availability of mainstream produce. This is why links between local farmers and markets are growing more common.

In addition, mainstream corporations may not perceive a market for organic buyers and/or are reluctant to adapt to or adopt a new niche. Further, those that purchase organic produce may not always shop at mainstream stores.

Add to this the various existing political/ financial/ social arrangements that exist between international buyers, sellers, speculators, and various other interests, and you have a fascinatingly tangled web.

It is commonly believed that the market for organic produce will never incorporate itself into existing markets and their limitations. Instead, the market continues to grow by circumventing the mainstream and developing new relations between all interested parties.