James5

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Following up my earlier post on the rise of the big organic supermarkets, I thought this article from The Observer on the state of the organic market in the UK was interesting. The boom in demand for organic produce has left many supermarkets unable to source enough produce locally, which means having to import products from places as far off as Argentina. The long distance these ‘organic’ food travels calls into question how green the products are. Green buyers are starting to look to organic as the new green as the more sustainable option. Buying local reduces transport costs, energy use, reliance on oil and has consequential effects for climate change and pollution. Additionally, buying local helps to improve local communities, provides jobs and skills locally and means you can ensure a fair wage is being paid to those who make your goods.

Of course buying local is not without it’s negatives. Firstly, getting consumers to switch to organic food is hard enough (especially with the myriad of labels out there, with not an insignificant amount of fraud occurring) - telling them that they need to look for yet another label may be tough. Also, consumers expect to be able to get any product whenever they want it - lettuce in winter or tropical fruits all year round. But local industry can’t supply fresh, organic varieties of all food all the time. And some foods just aren’t designed to be grown in certain climates - Australia really shouldn’t be growing rice! - whether consumers are willing to give up their favourite delicacy is an hard question.

Secondly, defining ‘local’ is hard. In Australia we’ve had to tackle this difficulty recently with products labelled “Made in Australia”, “Product of Australia” and everything in between.

Thirdly, there is the wider historical and structural issues of international trade and colonialism. The West has spent the the last few centuries encouraging countries to produce crops for export and just stopping buying from them could prove devastating for small industries and farmers. A while ago, when Coca-Cola changed their recipe to include a vanilla-substitute rather then real vanilla, the economy of Madagascar crashed and only recovered once the new formula was dumped (see Wiki). And that’s just one corporation changing it’s habits!
When you see the stats of some of the products bought by UK supermarkets you can certainly see that importing organic food is not a sustainable, long-term option:

Apples from New Zealand fly 10,000 miles. Creating 3.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide, as much as an average household creates in a year from using electricity.

Potatoes from Israel travel 2,187 miles.

Prawns from Indonesia travel 7,278 miles.

Mange trout from Zimbabwe travel 5,130 miles.

Hopefully this will encourage people to look beyond the label. Just because Safeway stocks an organic product doesn’t make it the best buy - sure it’s probably better then buying the non-organic one next to it, but why not pop in at your small, local fruit shop or organic health shop and see what they have to offer. It seems that the mainstreaming of organic has started to lead to a warping of the movement into something it was designed to replace - but I guess organic was just the first part of a larger fight, next stop food distribution and local sourcing!

(Also see: WorldChanging article about an American eat local challenge)

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