Organic Farming

Over the past few weeks, there has been some excitement among groups supportive of organic farming over a bill on food safety that is currently in the house. When I got an email telling me to take action to “Stop the Outlawing of Organic Farming”, the first thing I did was to look up the bill to read it for myself to see if I could figure out what it was about.

If you don’t have legal training, understanding the implications of these things can be hard. Even if you can figure out what they are saying, projecting the possible scenarios that could be a result of the policy is often a stretch, even for well-educated people. After reading the bill along with some interpretations by a few sources that have a record of presenting balanced information (such as the Organic Consumers Association website), my take on this bill is that it is troublesome - not because it might put organic farmers out of business, but because it attempts to address symptoms (food safety problems caused by industrial farming) rather than causes (industrial farming). But how do you fix industrial farming? Industrial farms are typically large corporations; corporations are required by law to make decisions that will profit shareholders. So despite the common perception that global corporations comprise some sort of evil empire, they are only acting as they were meant to do.

But this is an easy fix you say. All we need to do is make a law that forces corporations to consider other things besides profit! If you’ve heard of the triple bottom line - people, planet, profit – you probably understand this as an attempt to do just that. But how do you legislate “people” and “planet”? In our current system, the way to do it is through putting a price on these things so that it becomes unprofitable to exploit people or the environment. This is what cap and trade systems, EPA fines, and other policy-driven approaches have been attempting to do since the 70’s. Unfortunately, a look any any graph that describes the progress of deforestation, depleted fisheries, species extinction, atmospheric carbon, etc. over the last 40 years will tell you that these approaches have not been as effective as we would like them to be.

So the big burning question becomes: why do things keep getting worse when we all really want them to get better? (I’m assuming that for the most part, even the CEO’s of big corporations don’t really want to destroy the planet)

I think its because, as a culture, we’ve delegated our moral and ethical responsibilities to a system that is unable to consider these things in its decision-making processes. Though there may have been good reasons for separating church and state, it may also be that we’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater by creating a system that separates the valuing of life and community from the profit-making motive. In some ways, it seems to me that the “sustainability movement” is, in effect a new religion that is attempting to instill a collective consciousness that bypasses the legal system and makes it unprofitable for any corporation to disregard the effects of its profit-making on the people and the planet.

Some ways people are doing this are by:

Refusing to buy goods from companies that disregard human rights and cause pollution

Deciding that happiness does not come from purchasing consumer goods but, instead comes from becoming part of and contributing to a thriving and vibrant local community

Becoming less dependant on large corporations by taking personal responsibility for providing ourselves with at least some of the things we need such as by growing our own food or making our own clothes.

So even though the the science and the graphs are terrifying in their implications, I am encouraged by these signs of change and hopeful that the time will soon come when we won’t need to worry about what those corporations are doing because it will be in their best interests to consider the impacts of their decisions on both the people and the planet in order to be profitable.