Organic Food: Price vs. Cost

Many of my classes at Cal either focus on or find a sneaky way to incorporate a discussion of the benefits of eating organic produce.  Discussions at Berkeley are often awkwardly skewed to the left, to the point where even opponents of the organic food movement still somehow sound like leftists.  Opponents mainly focus on the high cost and low accessibility of organic foods while conceding the sustainability and health benefits of such products. I want to address the cost debate:

Conventional food is low price, but it is not low cost.  Non-organic products are able to sell at lower prices because their producers externalize cost into the environment and into the social system. The environment externalities: nonorganic farms require more energy, deplete nutritive soil and use large amounts of pesticides which contaminate water and habitats due to runoff.  The social externalities: pesticide use poses a potential threat to human health, overproduction fuels the obesity crisis and Big Ag  firms tend to underpay farm workers, creating a class divide and imposing food insecurity on the that population.  If prices are so low that it seems to good to be true, it probably is.  Ironically, we seem forget the American mantra, "there is no such thing as a free lunch," when it comes to purchasing food!


Recently, in a discussion facilitated by Berkeley's Edible Education series, guest speaker, Jib Ellison,  founder and CEO of Blu Skye Strategy Consulting, gave a great example of how to reduce the cost of food in an innovative and impactful way.   He told us the story of Dale Lewis and COMACO:


Dale Lewis loves elephants.  As a researcher in Northern Zambia, he watched in horror as poachers decimated his beloved elephant population.  He began to fight against the poachers' activities.  That drew a lot of negative attention to himself and his family from poachers ultimately resulting in his attempted murder.  Luckily, the authorities were able to find and imprison the poachers who had threatened Dale's life.  In the hopes of confronting his assailants, Dale went to the prison.  Instead of closure, Dale left the prison even more troubled because of what he had seen.  The sight of starving men drowning in their oversized clothes, made him realize that they would never stop poaching. They were literally starving to death and needed to do something -- anything -- to feed themselves and their families. 


This inspired Dale to change his approach to solving the poaching problem by creating COMACO (Community Markets from Conservation).  This organization cuts deals with poachers: in exchange for their guns, snares and their word that they will never poach again, COMACO will teach them how to farm.  COMACO partners with many agricultural and business organizations that help train Zambians to farm, process and market their agricultural products.   


This led to the creation of the highly successful brand It's Wild!. This product is 100% organic, high quality and low in price and has given the the participating farmers in Zambia food and economic security.

We need to find ways to replicate and scale this success story and incorporate these ideals into the US food system in order to achieve sustainability and profitability.  The answers aren't always where we expect to find them.  To solve the world's food crisis, we need innovative and passionate people, the kind of people that can transform a love of elephants into a sustainable agricultural business model.