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In his Diet For A Dead Planet , San Francisco based investigative journalist Christopher Cook, covers the issue of the corporate co-opting of organic values in great detail. He quotes Ryan Zinn of the Organic Consumers Association who states:
"There are serious limitations to the organics revolution, which are likely to become more evident and problematic as corporations move in. Large-scale monocrop farming is the most applicable model for corporations seeking volume and market share. Although this would be an improvement over conventional farming because it is less toxic, it still fails to sustain soils the way diversified agriculture does."
Cook goes on to explain that current organic standards also do not guarantee an end to back-breaking, exploitive conditions for farmworkers and that, contrary to popular impressions, many large "alternative" farms, actually treat their workers quite conventionally.
Still, there is reason for optimism. Cook notes that many groups, such as Washington D.C. based Center for Food Safety, are pushing for a system that is "organic and beyond ", and advocates a more sweeping mission to maintain strong organic standards and to promote agriculture that is "local, small-scale, family-operated, biologically diverse, humane, and socially just."
While questioning whether these goals are more than the "feel-good idealism for a privileged few", or can actually make a real difference, Cook points to the goals and accomplishments of the numerous "community food security" projects now striving to make locally produced food less expensive and more accessible to working-class and impoverished people around the country.
One quote, from Food First’s Peter Rossert, makes both the dilemma and the opportunity very clear.
"We’re not going to get there by just wishing or hoping that social change or popular culture will just come around. It requires policy change. The system we have right now is the product of specific policies and policy biases. Policies by which 50% of American farmers, the smaller ones, get zero or only symbolic amounts of subsidies and the richest 25% get almost all of it. That is a policy that is written in a particular way that could just as easily be written in reverse-and would produce the reverse. There is nothing inevitable about it."
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