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A Director's
Chair
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| Some weeks ago I wrote a
letter to the editor of Metroland.
Having received no response from them, I’d like to pass it along to
Coop Scoop readers. Many of you already understand these matters better
than the average Metroland reader,
but you might find it interesting anyway. The letter follows. |
by Jim Monsonis
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To the editor of Metroland:
In your August 28—September 3, issue your columnist Jo Page issued a
lament about the high cost of organic food. She stated that she wanted
to provide healthy food for her family but “still can’t believe how
much everything [healthy] costs” and often gave in and bought the
cheaper, mass market items. It’s a familiar complaint. Organic food
does seem to be more expensive, item for item, when compared to what’s
available at the local branch of the chain supermarket. But comparing
cash register costs is misleading, because much of what we pay for
chain supermarket goods are hidden costs not exacted at the store
itself. The real picture is much more complex.
Let me first note something which doesn’t directly address this issue
but is nevertheless true and relevant. Americans spend a smaller
portion of their incomes on food than any developed country. All
food—organic or not—is cheap here, compared to what Europeans or even
our Canadian friends pay. Europeans compensate by rewarding quality,
not quantity, and eating less; they do not judge restaurants by how big
the portions are as we do here, and serve fully adequate but far
smaller portions at home. Much of our food is wasted.
In a larger sense, though, our food is not cheap. The price at the cash
register is misleading, for at least the following five reasons:
1. Agribusiness gets tremendous subsidies from the federal government.
For many items one must add 20–25% to the sticker price because of the
subsidy alone. This is especially true for any item which contains corn
products, one of the most highly subsidized agricultural industries;
and this includes all meat and all dairy unless specifically labeled
otherwise, almost anything with sweetener—overwhelmingly these days the
sweetener is high fructose corn syrup—and, increasingly, even the
packaging itself. We pay for those subsidies via our taxes. Large
agribusiness receives them; with very few exceptions (there is some
organic agribusiness) organic farming does not.
2. In addition to subsidies, large scale agribusiness consumes very
large amounts of fossil fuels, both in running farm machinery and in
petroleum- based pesticides and fertilizers (neither of which,
remember, are used by organic farmers). Depending on how one calculates
it, 17–20% of our petroleum imports are used by agribusiness. Think
what would happen to the price of gas if demand for imported oil
dropped by this percentage. One way of thinking of it, an
oversimplification but not inaccurate, is that a half buck or so of
what we pay for every gallon of gas is there because of our “cheap”
food. But, you may say, we have to pay the taxes and buy the gas
anyway, whether we buy organic or not. True.
So: (1) Demand an end to subsidies for large agribusiness (if we must
have subsidies they should go to the small, often organic, farmer); and
(2) Lessen the demand for the goods of these producers by buying
alternatives. Let the market (that darling of capitalist ideology)
respond accordingly.
3. There are further costs. Most agribusiness products in the U.S. are
grown in California or in the feedlots and factory farms of the
Midwest, which is great for their economies but not so great for us.
Organic farming tends to be localized, supplying their local market
wherever they are. This reduces their carbon footprint (and we all
benefit from this because we will all pay—heavily—for global warming if
we don’t reduce its spread); usually reduces their dependence on
exploited legal or undocumented migrant workers (think about
immigration policy here, friends); and, most importantly, the cash we
spend buying their products stays in the local market, being spent and
re-spent by the local farmer and his/her workers. The “multiplier
effect” (as economists would call it) is very high for locally
produced, usually organic, goods. No imported pesticides, no oil-based
fertilizers, no across-the-continent trucking. A more robust local
economy, money staying locally, means local tax rates can go down or we
can expect better services: either way, we benefi t. We might even know
the farmer, if we buy at a farmer’s market—a benefit which is not
quantifiable but certainly enriches our sense of community.
4. Another indirect cost is that agribusiness is environmentally
destructive and we must pay for its remediation directly, through
programs to rescue our water or air supply, or indirectly, because of
global warming. We all know of topsoil loss (the famous dust storms of
the ’30s are still here in another form), of algae blooms due to
fertilizer in the water, of fish die-off, etc. These costs are hard to
quantify, but they are very real and every time we buy from the mass
supermarket we support the destruction of our environment.
5. When chain supermarket buyers do go beyond the United States—for
example, for coffee—they buy the cheapest available, not the
fair-traded goods which guarantee the local producer a fair wage. The
result is impoverishment of that country’s agricultural sector,
requiring national governments to “stabilize” the situation—provided
that they are paid by the U.S. government to do so. Or local farmers,
unable to live in competition with U.S. agricultural demands, turn to
other lucrative but illegal crops, such as drugs. How much of our
“foreign aid” and “war on drugs” expenditure is due to the mass market
food industry? Who knows? I’m sure that the chain grocery store buyers
don’t see the connection—they are just buying what is cheapest; but
that doesn’t mean the connection is not there.
Can we add all this together? What are the real costs, monetary and
otherwise, of supermarket food, and how do they really compare with
organic, especially local organic? In the long run, it may even be more
expensive to buy “cheap” food, but it’s hard to say this with certainty
because we just don’t have the information. (A famous economist once
said, speaking of economic data, that “ignorance is seldom random,”
meaning that often we don’t know something because someone doesn’t want
us to know; comparative food costs is one of these areas.) But if the
price differential is really ambiguous and unclear, then there is
really only one question: Which is better for us and our children? Jo
Page understands that eating organically is better, but she poses it as
an “either better food or cheaper food” choice, which I think is a
false dichotomy. Eat less, of better quality, mostly organic or at
least locally produced. We’ll all be better off.
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