Positioning Organic Ethics - Re-Thinking Organic Food and Farming in a Changing World - page 308

implementation of research by all concerned citizens and scientists (Davies 2006 ).
This also will require more serious commitments to, and funding for research that
fully integrates natural and social science scientific approaches. In other words,
citizens become much more than informants. They are actors alongside researchers.
To do so will require fundamental changes in how research protocols are defined
and implemented. Scientists will need to accept that citizens may have different, but
equally valid, ways of knowing.
That does not mean that the science of the future should limit the freedom of
researchers or that research must depend solely on its acceptance by citizens. The
question is: how to invite open discussions for identifying and defining research
problems that include the ethical dimensions. Perhaps this means that we must begin
rethinking and redefining “scientific careers” that move us beyond the current pre-
occupation with “sustainability,” in order to bring transdisciplinary and ethically
oriented research values, skills and perspectives into the mainstream.
But ethical concerns, alone, may be insufficient in providing a base for moving
toward a sustainable future. This ethical perspective must be accompanied by more
analyses that make the currently internalized, or hidden, social, ecological and
economic costs of different agrofood chains, transparent. Social, economic and
ecological externalities are central for assessing the sustainability of any agricultural
approach, that also includes a serious calculation of food balances, food losses
and inefficiencies along the agrofood chain, including several other critical social,
economic and ecologic impacts of GMO application. Implementing this perspective
into the research agenda and political agenda is central for the future of a competitive
organic agrofood system.

14.3 Outlook

For the future, we must directly confront our current options. It appears that we are
faced with a choice of “investing in the soil and community,” or the stock market
and so-called cheap and convenient food. If so, are there paths open for an ethically
grounded reconciliation of these choices?
Given what we see as the overwhelming politico-economic power of the cor-
porate, multi-national food and farming industry, taking a constructively optimistic
perspective on the future may appear Pollyanna-like. As Günther Anders reminded
us more than 50 years ago, seem to faced with a situation vis-à-vis corporate power
in which “Whether we play the game or not, it is being played [on] us. Whatever
we [act or not], our withdrawal will change nothing” (Günther Anders in Baumann
2008 , p. 110). Nevertheless, knowing this, the challenge (and responsibility) is to
take the organic principles and forge new value driven farmer consumer partnerships
as the foundation for the development of a value driven future for the organic
movement (Storstad and Bjørkhaug 2003 ; Hinrichs and Lyson 2007 ; Conner et al.
2008 ; Padel and Gössinger 2008 ; Zander et al. 2010 ).