THE FREE MARKET - FREER FOR SOME THAN OTHERS

Article published in Country Life, February 1999

Daily the media reports some horrendous food related scandal. Who knows what the cocktail of additives, pesticides, preservatives, irradiation and plastic packaging are having on our health? And then of course there's the terror of C.J.D. or E-Coli. Within this context mothers like myself, on a daily basis, have to decide what food to give our kids. Increasingly many people believe that our food chain is in the grip of an unsustainable system of industrial production that is in its very nature harmful to the land, cruel to animals and intrinsically unhealthy.

By opening my own organic vegetable garden, I wanted to provide an alternative. I felt confident that, offered fresh chemical free produce grown in their locality, a portion of the supermarket clientele would defect . By avoiding middlemen and their long distance transport costs, I imagined my prices would be highly competitive. It was a joy to think that my reputation as a raving eco-fanatic might for once be an asset, reassuring the public of the sincerity of my intentions and the authenticity of my product prior to my qualifying for the much-coveted 'organic' label. I also had every hope that the high-profile name, Badminton Natural Vegetables, would help boost sales.

Despite reservations about the viability of the business, my ever-generous husband donated a large-walled garden to the cause - a former allotment site with excellent, grade 1 soil - and a home for my gardener. What more could an organic revolutionary want? Oh, apart perhaps from a few similarly idealistic ecologists to devise a favourable cost benefit analysis.

Just over two years after we began planting in November 1996, our vegetables are famous in the locality. People happily queue at the weekly village stall in Badminton to get their hands on our grubby gems. "I will never buy organic from a supermarket again," enthused one regular customer. Through a budding network of veg boxes, our labour of love is distributed out to a ten mile radius. We also sell at the hugely popular local farmers markets that have attracted so much media attention.

Sounds rosy doesn't it? Sadly, the reality is rather grimmer: profits are non-existent and my substantial investment remains un-recovered. But why? People want what we produce. I have a super-efficient gardener. Isn't that what the theory of supply and demand is all about?

The Free Market - Freer For Some Than Others

The truth is that despite the undoubted demand for organic produce, attempts by small producers to find a niche in the food market invariably hit a brick wall. It is a wall made up of government subsidies promoting the interests of big producers and their unrealistically cheap imports. As a result, small organic farmers, along with small conventional farmers, are not able to compete with intensive, centralised forms of production and distribution.

There's nothing complicated about it: through our governments, we taxpayers pay for the roads, bridges, rail links, high-tech research and development, and aviation fuel that make long-distance production and supply possible. Take away these subsidies, and small organic producers like myself could compete with the Big Four supermarkets. Their fertilised, sprayed, preserved, processed, far-flung produce would be revealed as laughably expensive beside our far cheaper, fresh, natural, locally-produced vegetables.

My painful experience is confirmed by any number of other organic growers, including Jan Deane, winner of the 'Lorraine Award for Conservation', who started her organic farm in 1984 from a caravan. "You don't go into growing organic vegetables for the money," Jan told me, "because it's actually very difficult to make a living. People growing on 10, 15, 20 acres have a really tough time."

Tim, Jan's husband, works over 80 hours a week and, to supplement their earnings, Jan has had to work off-farm: three days a week for the Soil Association - the organic certification body. To make ends meet, Jan and Tim often work far into the night. The recompense, of course, is that they love their work - they just wish there was a little less of it and a slightly better return!

As Jan says: "After paying off the casual workers at the end of the week, Tim said that he wished he earned as much as they did - and we're talking about £4 an hour!". A vital ingredient to organic growers remaining viable is WWOOFERS - Willing Workers On Organic Farms - who indeed need to be willing to work extremely hard for nothing more than board and lodgings.

As a result of these hardships, although 80% of the UK population would prefer to eat food free from chemicals, we have to import 70% of our organic produce. Organic growers in other parts of Europe receive generous subsidies, and have captured 20 percent of some European markets. There is also growing evidence of better health in their populations and big money saved in other parts of their economies. In other words, political inaction here means that other economies and people are reaping the benefits: of healthy soil, uncontaminated water, vibrant wildlife populations and healthier rural employment that we should be enjoying.

While out of touch ministers see organic food as little more than a niche market, UK tax revenues are still used to subsidise systems which use chemical and energy intensive methods to maximise production. It takes, for example, 11 cal of energy to produce and transport a corn on the cob to your table, which then gives you 1 cal of energy. Billions of pounds are pumped into research and development into bio-technology and finding new methods to maximise production as opposed to researching the natural husbandry organic agriculture demands. Besides direct financial subsidies like this, £1 billion is spent annually to remove nitrates from our drinking water.

The price we pay for centralised, intensive production and the inherent food miles comes in many guises. Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have made global warming a reality. This has upset the entire global eco-system - the destruction of Central America by Hurricane Mitch being only a foretaste of the shape of things to come. Our over-dependence on polluting, long-distance transportation has much to do with the fact that the lives of 1 in 4 of our children are blighted by asthma (a truly scandalous figure that has doubled in just eight years), with 5,000 people dying every year as a result of respiratory diseases.

Supermarket Clean Sweep

Prime movers in this system, with a strangle hold on producers and consumers alike, are the supermarkets: more than 70 percent of all British food sales are now made through the biggest five. Experience suggests that if they are allowed to remain the major retailers of organic produce, prices to the organic producer will be steadily squeezed while the price to the consumer will ensure steadily increasing profit margins.

The large centralised distribution systems used by supermarkets mean that local small scale farms are deemed "inefficient". And their demand for uniform, scrubbed, blemish-free produce means that much organic produce is rejected. The reality is that retail outlets want uniform size and shapes for convenient transport and shelf stacking. And the myth that consumers demand soil free produce is eloquently quashed at Farmers Markets where customers know they will stay fresh longer with soil on. Under the pressure of having to conform to supermarket standards organic production will be forced to become large-scale, specialised and centralised, forcing out small local producers, with the usual adverse effects on the quality of our health, rural economy and environment.

I would like to see vigorous government support for shortening the distance between the producer and the consumer. This would give a life-line to the 25,000 small conventional farmers currently on the brink of bankruptcy in the UK, and secure a future for small diverse organic producers.

Rather than taxing labour, we could tax non renewable fossil fuel use, pollution, waste and the exploitation of natural resources. In this way, the true cost of transporting food half way across the world - to our economy, food chains, local employment, atmosphere and health - would be internalised into the price.

Organic growers currently subsidise the consumer to the tune of eighty hours a week and one aching back - they are working to protect our health and our environment with their labour. If we are to level the tilted playing field for small producers, we need to remove the subsidies and regulations that favour large intensive centralised producers.

As for my immediate situation as a landowner who has to employ people on an hourly basis, I have to pay for all the hard work and dedication owner-occupiers would put in to achieving a viable business. The costs seem exorbitantly high, given that we are only just managing to keep our heads above water. For us, the way forward may be to supply wealthy city people who can afford a fair price, and to move towards community supported agriculture, to keep the food at a reasonable price for local people. Local people with accounting, marketing or growing skills, or who are willing to do manual work and would like some time working in the fresh air of a quaint Gloucestershire village, could hand over portions of their time in exchange for boxes of delicious vegetables.

One of the reasons I started my local veg scheme was to widen the understanding of the benefits of local production for local consumption. And there are many more benefits here than meet the eye. To grow local food for local consumption is to think global: doing so benefits producers and consumers in both North and South. At home, profits and jobs stay in the local community, rather than disappearing into the sordid casino of global money markets (as is the case with 90% of supermarket profits). Local economies and communities are thereby revitalised. Abroad, people retain their productive land to grow food for themselves rather than cash crops for foreign exchange to repay debts.

Clearly, local food means everybody can dispense with juggernauts for long distance transport, dodgy preservatives, and questionable genetic modification of food for global distribution. The result is less traffic, fewer accidents, less pollution, fewer roads, lower incidence of asthma, fewer chemicals, fewer greenhouse emissions and a healthy rural economy. Everybody gains.

If the public wants to take an active part in promoting local production for local consumption, they need to break their supermarket chains and seek liberation in small independent food outlets to ensure the survival of the small producer. With our politicians free only to utter words from deep within the corporate web, it is up to us to demand a shift from global dependence to local interdependence by voting with our purses and wallets and buying local food.