CONSERVATION
Small is beautiful, and old farming
is new again

by Andrew Taylor
June 2004

Organic food and agriculture has for the last few years been the fastest growing sector of both the agricultural and food retailing economies in Western Europe and North America . Yet both domestic organic agriculture and even the import of foreign produced organic goods is in its infancy in Romania . Why is this so, and what does it tell us about the relationship between agriculture and consumer preferences in Romania?

In the US the effects of chemical inputs in agriculture were first described by Rachel Carson, the founder of the modern environmental movement, in the classic text Silent Spring. She describes the chemical weed killers, pesticides and fertilisers ìAs crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life Ö this birth to death contact with dangerous chemicals may in the end prove disastrous. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weaponsî. The effect on public opinion at the time - 1962 - was dramatic.

In Western Europe the rise of organic produce is often portrayed as a reaction against the emergence of industrial agriculture, which treats crops and animals as mere units of production, arising out of the productivist nature of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). A series of food health scares, from mad cow disease to listeria in milk, have shaken public confidence in official definitions of food quality. Combined with growing concern over farm animal welfare consumers, since the mid 1980's, began to reject food produced under factory conditions using large chemical inputs.

Consumers have begun to make the connections between the way their food is produced, broader issues of public health and started using their purchasing power to reject the productivist agricultural ethic which, through its ecological destruction, has led to the food scares and degraded the quality of nature's bounty in all senses, other than the immediate visual sense on the supermarket shelf.

By the early 1990s consumers had begun to factor the purchasing power and buying decisions of the large supermarket chains into their conception of the problem of what was increasingly being described as the crisis of food quality. Having spent years being economically squeezed between the twin pillars of the CAP and the supermarkets efforts to drive down farm gate prices, farmers took matters into their own hands and farmers' markets sprung up across Europe and North America. By removing the supermarket as price and quality broker, farmers have been able to both move ideas of quality away from perfectly formed produce and re-orientate them toward taste, whilst also reducing the cost of organic produce to consumers and simultaneously increase their own margins.

Many academic writers have argued that the power of consumers can only really be exercised when peoples more basic concerns have been satisfied. Indeed the growth of interest in environmental issues can be described in terms of post-materialist values. The logic of this argument is that organic food, which is usually more expensive than non-organic, is the preserve of the rich, who can afford to make choices based upon criteria other than price.

A visit to any market in Romania illustrates the inherent paucity of this logic, since all local markets are packed with vegetables and often animals grown in the gardens of peasants and untouched by chemicals of any sort. Thus a rather odd situation results, where the subsistence existence of the very poor provides access to homegrown and naturally produced food and the very rich are able to buy certified (mostly foreign) organic food. Bizarrely in Romania it is the aspirational middle class and urban masses that consume the largest quantity of intensively grown, chemically treated produce.

The problem with access to organic produce is not so much wealth, as the process of economic change and the marketing power of multinational capital that comes with it. For it is not so much the process of economic exchange that leads to the industrialisation of agriculture; rather it is the movement of capital into food production and processing. This has two important consequences.

First is the transformation of agriculture from a family based way of life to an economic investment which leads to a detachment of the human spirit and a distancing from the owners relationship to the land, resulting in the loss of stewardship. Second is the need for growth which stimulates the search for ever more powerful and poisonous chemicals on the land, as described by Rachel Carson, whilst driving the attempt to increase sales that is the function of marketing.

Marketing managers devote their energies to trying to convince target consumers, those aspirational educated types with reasonable salaries, that their product is somehow better than others. Whilst quality marketing can lever out the competition, it costs a lot of money, thus embedding the power of big capital in influencing consumer tastes and definitions of food quality. For those in doubt think about why we consume chewing gum or fizzy drinks that don't even contain fruit juice, but only chemicals.

There can be no doubt as to the phenomenal achievements of marketing people in affecting patterns of food consumption. They are indeed working their magic on those aspirational consumers as they explore the shelves of Carrefour and Cora in Romania today. However it is disgust with the growth ethic that marketing has become the flag bearer for what has turned consumers against industrial scale agriculture in Western Europe and North America. In their search for organic, welfare-certified farmers markets, consumers have decided that small is beautiful and as the American writer Howard Kahn put it ìold farming is new againî.

In Romania even the rich are just beginning to discover a taste for the organic, but it is still as a much a lifestyle statement as a genuine concern for food quality. Whilst the rest of society, outside the elite, is still being sucked into the superior packaging and nicely waxed foreign apples of the food industry. Meanwhile the agrochemical giants are busily hawking their wares to unsuspecting farmers. Yet it is possible that this country could still avoid the horrors of food scares, EU growth driven agricultural policies and the reach of the agrochemical lobby.

To do so we the consumers must take responsibility of our key role in the food supply chain and see beyond the glossy wrapping and presentation of the supermarket. For although we seem individually powerless, each decision to purchase fresh food from the market and not the supermarket is money directly to the producer. In Britain food markets all but disappeared and have been rediscovered with ënew' farmers markets. They still exist here and we are far luckier and healthier for it than we realise. The only way to keep them is to support them. For we can wax lyrical about the wonders of country food as much as we like, but access to good quality safe food ought to be a right that we exercise daily. It will only remain so if we choose to invest in the lives of those that produce the food and maintain the Romanian countryside in its pristine condition. Perhaps next time you pick up a loaf of supermarket bread you might step back and mutter an adjusted version of the Lord's Prayer for the modern age ñ Ö give us each day our daily bread, and please don't let it contain too much DDT, PCBs or other chemical compunds!

Andrew Taylor runs Connect-CEE, an outdoor training company.