It’s hard out there for an organic farmer, even while more people’re turning to organic food —
Right now, California’s organic farms are struggling with a labor shortage. Why? According to the AP, “increased patrolling along the border with Mexico, and easier, higher-paying jobs in the city have made farmworkers scarce.” Organic farms’re especially hard hit, since those require more manual labor than conventional farms.
And organic farms’ll prolly have an even harder time, with companies like Walmart trying to make organic cheaper. Grist’s Tom Philpott writes: “while organic vegetables typically fetch prices 20 to 30 percent higher than conventionally grown fare, Wal-Mart has already announced plans to squeeze that premium to 10 percent.” And “Wal-Mart can perform this feat simply by playing large-scale U.S. organic farmers against their counterparts in Mexico and even China.”
Sez Jason Freeman of the organic farming co-operative Farmer Direct: “Wal-Mart is getting into organics and they’ve announced that the organic food is only going to cost 10 per cent more than the conventional food. Well, that’s not economically sustainable for the local farmer.”
Mexico, in the meantime, has an overabundance of farm workers, displaced due to the effects of NAFTA. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “An estimated 1.5 million agricultural jobs have been lost since NAFTA went into effect in 1994″ because, as UC Berkeley’s Shaiken points out, “There’s no way peasant farmers in Oaxaca are going to be competitive with highly subsidized, very productive farms in Iowa.”
Which is why “American corn exports to Mexico — now one-fifth of the corn consumed there — have more than tripled in NAFTA’s first 10 years, and the USDA predicts they will double again in the coming decade.”
So we may start importing organic produce from Mexico while dumping our conventional, subsidized corn on the same country, burning lots and lots of fossil fuels in the process –
On a happier note — Efforts to develop Domestic Fair Trade programs are underway. And maybe “consumers who buy organic products are especially keen to know where their food was grown,” as Rachel Swenson at Farmer Direct says…
Eat local! :)
Update, 8/25/06: Wanna go local and organic? Here’s a post to help you get there –
August 24th, 2006 at 6:16 am
Eat organic! ;-)
If your local farmer isn’t organic, where’s the point?
Never understood the confrontation organic vs. local - it’s just wrong!
It’s organic vs. conventional,
and local vs. global.
To benefit from locally grown food, it should be grown no farther away than 10 - 20 miles. Who can get all his stuff within such a tight range?
And if you widen the range to, say 100 miles, there is lots of fossile fuels being burned in “local”.
August 24th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Siel…sorry about that cbc link. Sent it before I finished reading your post. My mind gets ahead of me sometimes…the overexcited info networker syndrome…LOL
August 24th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
Maybe I shoulda specified further — Eat local and organic whenever possible!
Where are you getting this 10-20 mile figure? No need to unnecessarily discourage would-be locavores — I contend that even a 100 mile diet’s like 15 times less fuel-laden than the average 1,500 mile diet…
August 24th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
On the note of price decreases hurting Organic farmers…
I once ate lunch at the same table as the founder/CEO/whatever of Organic Valley. He told me about the company’s experience with Wal-Mart. The giant kept demanding lower and lower prices. It got SO LOW that Organic Valley could no longer pay their farmers fair, living wages. So the dropped Wal-Mart. It wasn’t worth it to them.
August 24th, 2006 at 5:30 pm
Let me be more specific too - it’s great to eat local!
There is just this awkward question I hear far too often - “local or organic?”
Would you prefer the question “organic or fairtrade?”
I think we all want to find ways to live more sustainable and reducing the problem to just “local” will not turn out as the ultimate answer.
But I don’t want to discourage anyone or discuss the pros and cons of “local” (btw -> where I get the figures), it’s just that I do not like, that it’s being mixed up with “organic”!
August 24th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
If indeed globally sourced food produces more air pollution per pound mile shipped, then the levy of a shipment tax might result in more localized markets evolving on their own. I’m skeptical this is nonlinear, though. That is, shipping a pound of produce a thousand miles won’t result in more than a hundred times more pollution than shipping it a short ten miles. Both scenarios cry out for a carbon tax.
I’d suggest that without immigration from Mexico (whether illegal or not), little to no organic produce would be grown in the United States. This fact would turn on how capital-intensive organic agriculture is relative to other sectors that employ similar workers. Without so many unskilled workers, organic farms would have a strong incentive to mechanize production toward the average farm. What is it about organic food that attracts labor, relative to synthetic food, or other industries? Is there a technical aspect of production that prevents mechanization? That is, either a) hire lots of unskilled workers or b) don’t produce organic.
On N.A.F.T.A., remember, though, that there are two sides to every transaction. If subsidized corn is sold in Mexico at below its shadow price (its price were it not subsidized), producers are hurt but consumers may gain more, thus raising overall welfare. Also, 1.5 million jobs lost over a decade is a tiny fraction of all jobs lost in an economy as large as Mexico’s.
August 25th, 2006 at 2:07 am
Sorry, there has been an error:
-> in my previous post, instead of “organic or fairtrade” it should have been “local or fairtrade” .
August 25th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Fletch, definitely, our economy depends upon immigrants from Mexico. And yes, organic is more labor intensive, it takes more time, skill, and care to grow crops without relying upon pesticides. We need them, illegal or not.
And Mexican consumers who “rationally” chose to consume cheaper corn have now “freed” up Mexican farmers to abandon their farms to move to Mexico’s already overburdened cities, but not to America (because NAFTA made free trade of capital possible, and ignored the need for free movement of people).
Regardless, elf-sufficient, local economies are a good thing. And buying local and organic foods help us communicate that skilled farm work is valuable and worth the extra costs–
As opposed to environmentally damaging, unskilled, industrial ways of farming–
It’s sad that knowing how to care for crops without using pesticides is considered unskilled, while driving various mortaged Caterpillar tractors across a field year after year, growing the same crop again and again, losing more and more topsoil, is considered skilled.
August 25th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Are you not talking about exploiting illegal immergrants?
August 25th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Hey Nate,
You and I share something, which I’ll keep a secret :-)
I think you’re right on about peasants moving on to the cities, with little in the way of prospects. Typically, trade models assume away the possibility of even short-term unemployment. And, indeed, international labor flows are much more restrictive than goods and especially capital. Honestly, though, I don’t believe N.A.F.T.A. has much to do with this.
I should have defined my use of “skills.” Typically, economists look to formal educational creds in this definition. Immigrants are far disproportionately high school dropouts, though they are also over-represented somewhat among those with advanced degrees. If this work is being performed by this cohort, then we would likely label them “unskilled.”
I’m still curious, though, why is so much labor needed to produce organic food? Mechanization doesn’t necessarily imply synthetic produce, or am I missing something here?