Engaging the Organic Conventionalization Debate - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 173

communities than do industrial forms of agricultural production based on large-
scale units and hired labor (Goldschmidt 1947 ; Lobao 1990 ; Buttel 1996 ; Lyson
2004 ; Lyson et al. 2008 ).
Initially organics was based on local and regional systems dominated by direct
sales and an anti-industrial philosophy. The value chains were local and regional as
opposed to national and global. Because of the power of conventional agriculture,
the NOP rule focused on farming practices and a market label, rather than scale
or quality of life issues. Organic bifurcation creates a system whereby larger
certified operations supply the major retailers via indirect commodity-like markets
and smaller, non-certified operations service localized, direct markets. One group
converts to organics and farms to the list to capture the organic premium, while the
other farms agro-ecologically and sells on trust, resulting in “organic lite” and “deep
organic” archetypes of production (Guthman 2004a , b ; Constance et al. 2008 ). The
result is organic global supply chains based on comparative advantage and global
sourcing - not that dissimilar from conventional global supply chains (Gereffi and
Korzeniewicz 1994 ; Gibbon and Ponte 2005 ; McMichael 2005 ; Bonanno and Con-
stance 2008 ). Research (Howard 2009a , b ) documents the growing consolidation
in the organic industry over the past 10 years as the dominant conventional food
companies enter the market through acquisition and expansion.
The sociology of agrifood literature often employs a commodity systems or
commodity chain methodology to analyze trends in the food system and the
relationships among actors along the supply chain (Friedland 1984 ; Gereffi and
Korzeniewicz 1994 ; Gibbon and Ponte 2005 ). There are several kinds of commodity
chains, also called supply chains and/or value chains. Global commodity chains are
long chains that deal in undifferentiated commodities in indirect markets. These
chains tend to be characterized by unequal power where corporations drive the
chain and capture more of the profits (Heffernan 2000 ; Fishman 2006 ; Hinrichs and
Lyson 2008 ; Burch and Lawrence 2009 ). McMichael ( 2005 ) calls this “Food from
Nowhere.” Global value chains are problematic sociologically in that they tend to
externalize social, economic, and ecological costs.
Alternatives such as Fair Trade value chains (Raynolds et al. 2007 ) tend to
be built on a cooperative philosophy that encourages transparency along the
chain and reduces the middleman functions in an effort to transfer wealth from
the corporations to the producers. Local value chains are based on direct sales,
smaller scale, and community embeddedness. These types of value chains are more
likely to support the ecological, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability
(Kloppenberg et al. 1996 ; Lyson 2004 ; Hinrichs and Lyson 2008 ). CSAs, farmers'
markets, and farm to institution value chains are some examples. Agriculture in
the Middle (Lyson et al. 2008 ) value chains focus on operations that are too large
for direct sales and too small to compete in global commodity markets. They
propose the development of regional fair trade value chains as a mechanism to
support sustainable rural development by repopulating rural areas with moderate-
sized operations.
The conventionalization debate can also be interpreted within the macro dis-
cussion of the globalization of the agrifood system from a regimes perspective