by Bernard Roth » Sat May 16, 2009 7:40 pm
Actually, this has nothing to do with Organic and everything to do with corporate factory farms. The fact that big farm companies exploit workers is old news. The fact that they have moved into exploiting the organic niche is old news.
The main issue here is that Big Corporate Organic inherits that "warm and fuzzy" from an old ethos (the hippy farmer) that Big Corporate doesn't suscribe to. It is natural for people to juxtapose the concepts of organic and caring and come to the wrong conclusion.
Most of the organic I buy is from small farmers who sell at the farmers market. But when I am in a store and offered a choice between Big Corporate Organic and Big Corporate Chemically-treated produce, I am only making a decision on ecological rationale, not labor standards. I have no faith that, for example, workers on organic Mexican farms are treated any better than workers on non-organic Mexican farms. Or on Driscoll properties. Without having any extra information about the labor standards on a farm, I make an ethical choice based on the information at hand.
So this article seems like it is partly propaganda intended to raise skepticism about organic farm practices without offering the consumer any useful information that can help address the problem of labor standards. Instead, it is a deliberate slight of hand that will get people to think about organic and non-organic with equal skepticism re: what they don't know about labor practices instead of reinforcing ethics based on what they do know about the environment.
Regards,
Bernard Roth
