Engaging the Organic Conventionalization Debate - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 172

manufacturing and retail sectors as major retailers offer organic products, develop
their own store brands, and account for increasing percentages of organic sales.
These data support Guthman's concerns over agro-industrialization. The organic
premium has attracted corporate entry, which will compete on economics of scale,
which will lead to industry integration, consolidation, and concentration and an
increasing cost-price squeeze, which shrinks the organic premium, thereby forcing
smaller producers out of business or relegating them to marginal indirect markets.
Fourth, the research from Texas indicates that indeed it is the larger conventional
operations that are interested in organics, and that economic concerns are the major
barrier to entry. The 2008 Farm Bill policies are designed to address the concerns of
the Pragmatic Conventionals in Texas.
A useful framework to interpret the conventionalization debate is the “Four
Questions in Agrifood Studies” (Constance 2008 ). 2 The first question is the
“Environmental Question” which asks: “What is the relationship between modern
agriculture and the quality of the environment?” (see Carson 1962 ; Buttel 1987 ,
1996 ; Klonsky 2000 ). The environmental dimension of the crisis of modern
agriculture was the first to reach critical mass, generate a social movement critical
of reductionist science and chemical monoculture, and produce legislation (SCS,
EPA, SARE, NOP) to address the negative externalities (Constance and Choi
2010 ). Organics is the most far reaching of these programs as the certified organic
label stretches beyond national borders and restricts the huge US market to those
producers that meet the USDA/NOP standards. Organics is a good example of what
German philosopher Ulrich Beck ( 1992 ) calls reflexive modernization, which would
argue that upon reflection we realized that chemical intensive monoculture generates
significant negative externalities. It was a mistake to blindly adopt it but we can fix
this error through the reflexive use of science and appropriate technologies, such
as growing food using organic methods. Most all agree that organics improves
environmental quality as it drastically reduces chemical contamination. Many
observers also agree that the compromise over the USDA/NOP standards created a
structure that favored eco-input substitution over agro-ecological farming. Guthman
and associates argue that with conventionalization organics loses its broader social
and agro-ecological potential to transform food production and instead becomes a
system of eco-input substitution and farming to the list.
The second question is the “Agrarian Question” which asks: “What is the
relationship between the structure of modern agriculture and the quality of life in
rural communities” (see Buttel and Newby 1980 ; Lobao 1990 ; Heffernan 2000 ;
Lyson 2004 ). The quality of life for farmers and rural peoples is influenced by the
structure of agriculture and the type of commodity chains they are linked to (Lyson
2004 ; Gibbon and Ponte 2005 ; Constance 2008 ). Research indicates that family-
based, middle-class farm operations tend to support a higher quality of life in rural
2 The Four Questions are: Environmental, Agrarian, Food, and Emancipatory (see Constance 2008 ).
While all four questions do apply to organics, in this analysis we employ the Environmental and