Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
scale and long-term trajectory: some believe that it has come to be very
much like globalized industrial agriculture. This perspective emerged in
the 1990s, when scholars began to examine the political economy of or-
ganic production, with a focus on California. The authors of one seminal
1997 study concluded that “despite
. . . countervailing tendencies, organic
agriculture is beginning to resemble conventional agriculture.”36 Specif-
ically, the authors found that organic farmers were beginning to adopt
more intensive and possibly unsustainable agricultural practices such as
monocropping, so as to remain competitive in the marketplace and to
minimize economic losses. These farmers were also relying more and
more on large agribusiness for investment capital and employing undoc-
umented workers or paying lower than living wages for laborers. Rather
than solving the ills of industrial agriculture, the critics argued, organic
agriculture in California was instead maintaining and perpetuating the
status quo of an economic system that exploits nature and workers.37
Similarly, others point out that as the organic movement grows, corpo-
rations are becoming increasingly interested in obtaining a share of the
organic market. Corporate involvement has led to a watering down of or-
ganic standards in the pursuit of profit.38 Food activist Raj Patel and jour-
nalist Michael Pollan have called this phenomenon “organic-industrial”
farming.39 Others highlight the fact that organic standards and produc-
tion constrain and produce tensions for organic producers and their com-
munities in the developing world when they grow for export markets. For
example, illiterate farmers have found that organic certification requires
extensive and writen farm-level records that are burdensome and time
consuming to create. Some communities have also found the certification
process to be cost prohibitive and therefore inaccessible for poorer farm-
ers.40 Another scholar even went so far as to call organic certification a
form of “neocolonialism,” the reassertion of the power of former colonial
powers over their former colonies, as producers in the developing world
come to rely on export markets for their livelihoods.41
On a larger scale, many claim that neoliberalism—the economic liber-
alization of the world's national economies since the 1970s—is exacerbat-
ing these trends toward inequality and corporate control of organic ag-
riculture.42 Organic farming is increasingly top down and subject to the
