The Not-So-Sweet Success of Organic Farming

Over the past two months, David Gould has inspected pumpkin farms and fertilizer companies in China, consulted for the world's only organic producer of Noni juice in Tahiti, and followed the trail of non-genetically modified livestock feed -- from farmers' auctions to port machinery -- in India.

Gould is a Portland, Ore.-based inspector and certifier of organic foods. For an eco-minded scientist-activist, Gould appears to have an ideal job: he gets to travel to far-flung places, work outside and help Third World countries implement environmentally friendly development strategies. Theoretically, he's a standard bearer for a new, more sustainable form of global food production, in which local communities produce food that is consumed locally, without the input of expensive and possibly unhealthy pesticides or genetically modified organisms.

But organic farming in the 21st century is turning out to be a little more complicated than its advocates originally expected. For example, there was the time a few years ago that Gould was sent by Eco-Cert, a German certification agency, to oversee the company's first certification project in Japan.

"I was inspecting a Japanese food processor who was importing soybeans from China to process into goods for export to Europe," said Gould. "I said to Eco-Cert: 'We're circling the globe with organic. Isn't this a little bizarre, a little ... unsustainable?'"

If anyone's living out the ironies of the post-utopian world of organic agriculture, it's Gould. An independent contractor and consultant who works for public and private certifying agencies, Gould buys most of his own groceries from local non-certified family farms. He refers to himself as simultaneously living both on the "ideal extreme" of the organic spectrum and as an "agent of the USDA." As such, Gould embodies the conflicted attitude many greener growers, processors and certifiers are taking toward the increasingly industrialized field of organic farming.

Once the lowly stepchild of conventional farming, organic is poised for a family takeover. In 2001, global sales of organic foods reached $26 billion; by 2008, that figure is expected to reach $80 billion. Leading the push toward organic is the European Union, where Belgium, the Netherlands and Wales have set government goals to make 10 percent of all arable land organic by the year 2010. (In Germany, that figure is 20 percent).

The U.S., which has set no such goals, has almost doubled its acres of organic farmland since 1997. And on Oct. 21, 2002, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) will implement the nation's first federal labeling standards for organically grown and processed foods. The new USDA seal will apply to U.S. growers who, for the most part, produce food without the use of genetic engineering, growth hormones or pesticides.

But dig a little deeper into this world where more crops are being rotated and fewer poisons are being used, and the contradictions begin to sprout. As Gould points out, there's something, well, ironic about using massive amounts of non-renewable energy to ship organically grown food -- not to mention the inspectors themselves -- halfway around the planet. That most organically grown food is packaged and processed -- "until it's a stretch to call it food, much less organic," he says -- further undercuts much vaunted organic claims to benefit human health and the environment. And then there's the nasty little problem that the very act of certification itself puts constraints on small farmers who want to push organic farming even further ahead.

The original vision of organic farming as ecologically sustainable agriculture practiced by small farmers is giving way to big business. Organic's success is sowing the seeds of its own co-optation. "Certification used to favor the small farmer," says Gould, who holds a life sciences degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and claims a lifelong interest in the ways communities form around food supplies. Now, he contends, the mass market is rewriting the grass-roots story, turning organically grown food into a global brand (the National Organic Program, notes Gould, is part of the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service) rather than a social, economic and ecological alternative to conventional farming.