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xssve -> RE: Organic can feed the world (12/25/2011 12:04:56 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Iamsemisweet
Because agribusiness is so heavily subsidized. The true costs are externalized. Everything from free or very cheap irrigation water, to outright cash payments. Small, organic farms don't get the same benefits.
quote:
ORIGINAL: thishereboi
quote:
ORIGINAL: Iamsemisweet
If that is true, then why is the organic food more expensive?
The real economic situation here is that organic is more labor intensive, and that adds variable costs, i.e., labor - if you can get around those costs then your margins will be larger, but the cost is the cost, nothing is free so ideally, if you can pass those costs on to someone else, then your margins will be even bigger - the Navy for example, mostly exists to protect seagoing trade routes, by which most of our oil, for example, gets here - there's a cost associated with that, and we more or less agree to share the cost of doing that, it's a public investment that keeps the market relatively stable, i.e., we can do business with a greater degree of uncertainty.
As an aside, traders obviously play on whatever uncertainties there may be, there are always some, and uncertainty is more or less a quality of supply and demand, i.e., uncertianty tends to drive prices up as it constitutes a threat to supply, so perceived or engineered shortages that bottleneck supply and drive prices up are always a probability, if you have people with that much swing in a given market - another pitfall that self interest in competition is designed to moderate.
It's true that the industrial economy thrives on cheap labor, and organized labor creates new uncertainties, so historically - and this should be germane to the audience - historically a lot of the worlds great economies were slave economies, feudalism, but we achieved more in One century than any of them did in Ten, with a sort of rough free market, the sort of market that evolves when people are dealing with sustenance issues, rather than an abstract measurement of value, money.
Either way, organic farming is inherently labor intensive, and it ain't nine to five - every farm in this country was essentially an organic farm up until the introduction of mass produced fertilizers, mostly around and after WWII, so it's kinda funny to hear people describe their forbears as a bunch of hippie liberals.
But the family farm provides its own labor, the family, who work for their keep essentially, with possibly some hired and seasonal help - and it doesn't follow the business cycle, it follows the seasonal cycle - which adds an element of uncertainty - and that what the corporate value system sells you; certainty - question is: is it steak or is it sizzle?
And semisweet is right, there are heavy subsidies involved, starting with market manipulation in favor of agribusiness - the strong dollar killed exports in the Eighties, farming is an export business, hence it became an absolute abettoir for family farms in the late Eighties - everybody was saying "sink or swim" while holding peoples heads under water.
Well, you know, kids been running away from the family farm since Able, maybe there's some resentment here or something, I dunno.
But at this point, it's really about the fact that involves a total change of lifestyle and corpo-wonks don't like to get their soft little hands dirty, the right act like they want things to go back to the old ways, but those are the old ways, you have stick your fingers in the dirt.
But otherwise, yeah, organic yields are better, and the soil doesn't degrade - depleted soil caused the Dust bowl, that was agribusiness, mechanization that time, and ultimately, the difference between industrial farming and organic farming is that industrial farming is machine friendly, but the finished product tends to suffer, and it apparently requires increasing subsidies to pay.
Farm subsidies at that point were largely paying farmers not to grow - the problem being soil depletion, you have to allow a certain amount of the land to lie fallow for a time to replenish the soil, and that is essentially the difference between the two methods, you have to replenish the soil, or nothing will grow, if nothing grows, the wind blows the dirt away to reveal: more dirt.
Now it's treaties and shipping, marketing subsides, manipulating the commodities market, fucking with the money supply, politics, in short - the price could easily double tomorrow when suppliers can exert that much control over market conditions - they do like certainty and money in the bank even better.
And, they got a huge advantage, they took over a lot of family farms in the Eighties, tore down the houses so the machines can go in the longest straightest lines possible, human hands hardly touch the stuff, and they can grow maximum acreage - that's the trade off, the yield per acre is lower, but you can farm more acres - economies of scale, that's how industry works - but in this case, you'd be out business in a hurry without subsidies, it's not sustainable without depleting someplace else.
These varieties genetic engineers fuck with however, are symbiotic, we have evolved in tandem of the course of centuries, the are the result of painstaking and time consuming selective breeding, endless experiment and accident, we've been living together - but of course that's labor intensive again, and we can't have that.
So really, you going to pay for it either way in the end, it's more about soil stability and decent food - keep at it you gonna end up eating used motor oil - but somehow, to the conservative mind, a subsidy for a family farm to maintain fertile soil for coming generations is much more offensive than subsidies for your golfing buddies to rope 'em and rape 'em, and he who has the most toys wins.
It's all about how you want to live I guess, that GM stuff will destroy your kidneys, and it tastes like crap, but cheap foodlike substances leave you more money to spend on other shit you don't need, yeah?
You should try it though sometime. Stick your fingers in the dirt I mean.
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