Organic Consumerism and urgency

The lat­est mar­ket report for British sales of organic foods has just revealed what has been expected – some pretty seri­ous drops in sales and that some food prod­ucts have remained very robust.  Almost every report over the past 18 months across the major mar­kets for organic food has shown a sim­i­lar pat­tern of declin­ing sales of organic food.  Indeed it appear that as soon as the global reces­sion hit jour­nal­ists were look­ing for some­thing that could stand as a sign of the excesses of the boom time and many of them chose organic food as that emblem.  Some peo­ple have sug­gested to me that super­mar­kets took organic food off the shelves in antic­i­pa­tion of declin­ing sales, and in doing so cre­ated a self-fulfilling prophecy.  What­ever the exact mech­a­nism it has cer­tainly been a tough time to be attempt­ing to sell organic food.

Some com­men­ta­tors, such as Julian Rose, have sug­gested that organ­ics has lost its way, and there has been much jus­ti­fied crit­i­cism of the mar­ket­ing of organic food as elit­ist and expen­sive.   To be fair if his­tor­i­cal prece­dents are any guide then organic food will bounce back once the reces­sion is over.  Dur­ing the reces­sion of the early 1990s organ­ics was very badly hit, with the amount of organic land shrink­ing.  The organic indus­try is much bet­ter placed than it was and in some areas such as organic dairy prod­ucts, the pic­ture remains gen­er­ally good.

Com­men­ta­tors such as Julian Rose are point­ing out is the increas­ing loss of faith in the role of green con­sumerism in mak­ing changes in agri­cul­ture of a scale that will make a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence (see my forth­com­ing book).  Rather organ­ics is becom­ing part of the mar­ket­ing strate­gies of the super­mar­kets, play­ing a big­ger role in prod­uct dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion than it has in mak­ing changes to agri­cul­tural prac­tices and poli­cies.   Cer­tainly a project about the mar­ket­ing of organic food that I was part of a few years ago demon­strated that the gap between organic food pro­mo­tion and that for non-organic food was clos­ing.  Yet the same project showed there was a def­i­nite appetite amongst for many peo­ple for the changes that organic food promised, and for a food sys­tem not dom­i­nated by a hand­ful of com­pa­nies.  The dis­quiet was largely around the mech­a­nism – consumerism.  

The ques­tion that the wider organic move­ment now needs to address is whether con­sumerism is the route that is going to make the changes that they hope for or if other forms of action offer a more effec­tive route.