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Organic consumerism

By Fred Hansen - posted Wednesday, 4 June 2008


That’s all that is left, finally proving once more: you can’t fool the market with dodgy products. Only customers can fool themselves or can be scared into buying useless stuff.

Competing genetically modified food

This happens frequently, with biased government regulations under the label of “consumer protection” from supposedly harmful things such as GM food. Often lobby groups who push to regulate GM foods are also beneficiaries because they have stakes in the “alternatives”: organic is aiming to supplant GM food.

However, the market constantly outweighs and undoes all this lobbying. It has already happened that me-too labels have swamped the organic market. And, at the supply side of the market, human nature does the rest. For instance the organic requirements for mechanical rather than chemical weed extraction are not only onerous, but are costly, and increase the “carbon footprint” of organic food - if we for a moment assume that such thing is feasible. This means producers of organic food tend to drop all these onerous and costly stuff. It is, for example, well known that organic farmers have resumed the use of some brands of pesticides most of them herbal but others chemical.

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Organic brand void

The true believers are now competing with the big retailers, and indicating their adherence to the traditional regime of biodynamics on their labels. Yet since true believers have the habit of forming ideological factions, competition has descended into “label wars”. The effect is confusion and diminishing consumer confidence.

Another new invention of the true believers is - fashionable in times of carbon worries - “food miles” which are intended to favour local produce. In fact this has divided the producers of organic food, for it is thwarting market penetration and their export business. This is just one of the unintended consequences of “food miles” policies.

In addition, the message is finally trickling through that the higher price for organic food is not justified by better quality. For example, free range eggs don’t always taste different from regular and cheaper eggs.

So if the superior quality of organic food has been endlessly diluted, leaving its produce as ordinary as any other, the argument for consumer choice is pointless. And even if it isn’t a pointless argument the price signals emanating from organic produce should be sufficient to guide consumers.

The huge demand that has been created by the big companies could never have been matched by the produce of traditional biodynamic farming. How is it possible to replace or emulate the venerable principles of Steiner? Well the market has done its part but science has to do the rest.

Health and environmental benefits?

In 2006 a comprehensive review of 400 scientific papers by Faidon Magkos and colleagues could not detect any evidence that organic food was healthier than conventional food.

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Abraham Lincoln’s mother famously died after drinking milk from a free-range cow that had grazed on a snakeroot plant.

With regard to the hazards pesticides supposedly pose to our health, the American toxicologist Bruce Ames has stated that “a single cup of coffee contains more natural carcinogens than a year’s worth of the pesticide residues eaten on fruit and vegetables”. Anyway, traces of pesticide will still be detected in those states which have effective food quality control and protections for consumers.

All the other beneficial myths regarding environmental protection or sustainability and even conservationism have not withstood scientific scrutiny.

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About the Author

Dr Fred Hansen is a science writer having published mostly in Germany and the UK. He came to Melbourne a year ago and has published some articles in the IPA Review. He also has a regular blog at the Adam Smith Institute in London. Dr Hansen was a green MP in the state parliament of Hamburg in Germany in the mid-1990s and chaired the science select committee there.

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