Food, Farms & Solidarity

Front matter

CHAIA HELLER

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FOOD, FARMS

Contents

ABOUT THE SERIES ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi i Introduction: Creating a New Rationality of Agriculture in a Postindustrial World 1

The New Paysan Movements: French Industrialized Agriculture and the Rise of the Postindustrial Paysan 39 3 The Confédération Paysanne: Philosophy, Structure, and Constituency 69

PART II The Confédération Paysanne’s Early Anti-cmo Campaign, from Risk to Globalization Union Activism and Programs: Early Campaigns and Paysan Agriculture 89

PART III How France Grew Its Own Alter-globalization Movement Caravans, GMos, and McDo: The Campaign Continues 163

Traveling to Washington, D.C. 198

The Battle of Seattle 221 10 Postindustrial Paysans in a Post-Seattle World: New Movements, New Possibilities 248 1 Conclusion:

French Lessons; What’s to Be Learned? 291

NOTES 307 WORKS CITED 311 INDEX 323

ABOUT THE SERIES

This series addresses two trends: critical conversations in academic fields about nature, sustainability, globalization, and culture, including constructive engagements between researchers within the natural, social, and human sciences; and intellectual and political conversations among those in social movements and other nonacademic knowledge producers about alternative practices and socionatural worlds. The objective of the series is to establish a synergy between these theoretical and political developments in both academic and nonacademic arenas. This synergy is a sine qua non for new thinking about the real promise of emergent ecologies. The series includes works that envision more lasting and just ways of being-in-place and being-in-networks with a diversity of humans and other living and nonliving beings.

New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century aims to promote a dialogue between those who are transforming the understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. The series revisits existing fields such as environmental history, historical ecology, envi-

About the Series ronmental anthropology, ecological economics, and cultural and political ecology. It addresses emerging tendencies, such as the use of complexity theory to rethink a range of questions on the nature-culture axis. It also deals with epistemological and ontological concerns, in order to build bridges between the various forms of knowing and ways of being that are embedded in the multiplicity of practices of social actors, worldwide. This series hopes to foster convergences among differently located actors and to provide a forum for authors and readers to widen the fields of theoretical inquiry, professional practice, and social struggles that characterize the current environmental arena.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I especially want to thank members of the Confédération Paysanne for opening their meeting rooms and barn doors to me during the first years of researching this book. The generosity of spirit I experienced there will forever be unparalleled. I want to thank Bruno Latour and Michele Callon for allowing me to play thesard as a research fellow at their Centre de Société de I’Innovation at L’Ecole des Mines. The intellectual rigor and my affiliation with this uniquely French prestigious institution provided me the golden key to the city and throughout outre Paris (anyplace in France that’s not Paris) as well. I also express gratitude to Claire Marris and Les Levidow for keen insight and encouragement. I thank the National Science Foundation and the University of Massachusetts for making the research a financial possibility. Jackie Urla and Rich Fantasia, members of my dissertation committee, you are shining stars. I will always be indebted to the vision, mentorship, and friendship of the father of “green ecology,” the political theorist Murray Bookchin. May his soul rest in the utopian light he emanated while alive. Back in the 1980s, he helped me

Acknowledgments understand the collision course between capital, nature, and culture that is so palpable in this story.

This book would not be possible if it weren’t for the rigorous guidance and support of Arturo Escobar. My gratitude is boundless, transcending words. What a rare and eager mind. Who else could bring poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, political economy, political ecology, and anthropology together with such creative and political conviction?

My adoration to Lynn and Jim Morgan for being family friends and warm welcomers as I’ve tiptoed gingerly through the gates of academia. I thank Donal O’Shea at Mount Holyoke College for having the generosity and dedication to help keep me around. So many thanks to colleagues and students at Mount Holyoke College who continue to make my head spin in a good direction. I thank Eleanor Townsely for her dizzying intellectual embrace. I thank Mary Renda for her patience as I found my feet again in gender studies after my long sojourn into anthropology land. Thanks to Deborah Heath, with that warm wily smile and that passion for sts, food theory, and cool ideas generally.

This project is scented with the utopian aroma of the Institute for Social Ecology (1sE). Some people say that one simply writes the same book over and over. And I guess I am guilty of writing variations on a theme: looking for sparkling chips of what is utopian and solidarity based within a neoliberal world. My friends and colleagues at the ıse have kept my eyes on the dazzling mirrored ball of hope for a different world. How can I thank you all? Dan and Betsy Chodorkoff, Brian Tokar, Brooke Lehman, Ben Grosscup, Beverly Naidus, Bob Spivey, Ben Paul, Eric Toensmeir, and Michael Dorsey: each of you, in your own way, have kept the rug from completely slipping out from under our collective hopeful feet. What a commendable burden and display of good sense.

On the family front, this project has been touched, held, read, and reread by so many wonderful people. How to count them? My parents, Audrey and Bill Heller, forever stand at the sidelines of book road, cheering me on, hoping my labors might eventually bear fruit. I suppose I won’t make it to Carnegie Hall, and I won’t ever write, as my father laments, “the great American novel,” but this is the best I can do for now. I thank my sisters, Carol and Laura; Sandra and Dick Smith; and Allen and Judy Kronick for being the kind of family one would not just acquire, but would actively choose without hesitation.

xii

Acknowledgments

Too many friends to list, but I will try! Some friends worked directly on pieces of this book, others floated ideas, yet others crossed their fingers: Lizzie Donahue, Jessie Weiner, Ilana and Neil Markowitz. Newer folks in my life since I became a mom: Deb and Kris Thomson-Bercuvitz, Sarah Swersey and Jeff Waggenheim, Caitlin Healey, Eleanor Finley, Owen James, Sarah and Peter Acker, Pam Lewis, Joy Ladin. Older friends to whom I am so indebted: Sally Bellerose, Deborah Cohen, Jaime and Mellissa Campbell- Morton. So many old friends flew the coop from this fabulous valley, but I remember and thank you all for being part of this journey.

I want to thank all of the people at Duke University Press for determining that this story should and would indeed be told. Valerie Millholland and her wonderful staff have been hard at work to bring this book out into the world.

Finally, my heart is a pomegranate, brimming with jeweled seeds, when I think of Alan Goodman and Ruby Heller-Goodman. Alan, you have helped me truly understand the meaning of a biocultural synthesis. To Ruby, as one of the more palpable products of that synthesis, I thank you for putting up with such a busy mama who loves you even when drowsing bleary-eyed before the screen. And Alan, how can one complete such an endeavor without the ongoing support, encouragement, and intellectual prodding of a true soul mate? Thankfully, I will never know that answer because, Alan, you have come through in resplendent colors. You are my best friend and the smartest guy in the room. What a blessing.

xiii

It all started with the milk. We heard Vermont farmers—paysans—were fighting against genetically modified milk. They'd heard about it, heard it was going to be approved soon, and were fighting it. It’s a growth hormone, genetically modified, that makes cows produce more. All paysans know that more milk means the end. And so somewhere in 1993, some of us traveled to Vermont to talk to paysans there. When we came back, we decided to take up the issue of milk here and oh, did we make a ruckus [bordel]. Within just a few months, we had the milk banned Europe wide. — MARCEL BONITAIRE (personal communication, February 4, 1999)

1 Introduction

Creating a New Rationality of Agriculture in a Postindustrial World

And so it all began with overproduced, spilled milk. In the early 1990s, small dairy farmers in France were dumping milk and protesting price drops linked to overproduction. At the same time, talk about genetically modified organisms (GMos) skittered through the international dairy world.' A new cmo was destined for the dairy industry. A genetically modified hormone would be injected into cows worldwide, increasing production and benefiting large-scale farmers operating industrial dairies. News of the new milk poured through the union of self-identified paysans (peasants) from the Confédération Paysanne, France’s second-largest agricultural union, composed mainly of smallholders. Many had read about cmos from agricultural newsletters that reported on farmers in Vermont and ecology groups trying to comprehend a new form of agricultural science, agricultural biotechnology. The paysans had even received a few e-mail messages via the union’s newly installed Internet connection at its national headquarters just outside Paris.

In 1993 three members of the Confédération Paysanne left their villages (most never having left the country) to fly to central Vermont to do their homework. In return, local Vermont dairy farmers cheerily received the union members. The farmers offered information and warning about the economic pitfalls of the newly approved genetically modified milk. This milk, they explained, is produced by cows injected with recombinant bovine growth hormone, called r-BGH. The idea of cm milk presented a dismaying prospect to dairy farmers already struggling to survive in an era of overproduction.’ Fortified with facts and figures, the small contingency of the Confédération Paysanne returned to France. Months after their return, they fought for and won an EU-wide ban on genetically modified milk that remains in place today. Not long after, they won the fight to label all Gmo products in Europe.

Like the Confédération Paysanne, Vermont dairy farmers and activists led a campaign against emos. While their ultimate goal was to ban genetically modified milk, their initial, more modest objective was to request that the product be labeled. After a two-year struggle during 1994 and 1995, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in favor of the high-powered dairy lobby. According to the courts, labeling requirements represented an infringement on corporations’ freedom of speech (Tokar 1999). While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the milk in 1993, the Vermont Supreme Court set the stage fora de facto no-labeling policy for all Gmo products, and it remains in place to this day—uniquely in the United States.’

A Producer-Led, Anti-¢mMo Movement: Rediscovering the Confédération Paysanne

I traveled to France to study the movement against GMos in early 1997. My original goal was to understand why France (unlike other European countries such as Austria, Germany, or the United Kingdom) lacked an ecology movement strong enough to drive a successful mobilization. I was aware that Greenpeace France did organize a small direct action in which activists blocked cargo ships carrying genetically modified foodstuffs before they arrived in Normandy. However, this action garnered little publicity or popular support. I had yet to imagine that French small-scale farmers, or smallholders, might share much in common (on a strategic and cultural level) with those in the Global South. Outside the Global North, producers such as peasant farmers (rather than consumers and ecologists) primarily spearhead movements against GMos.* As I would soon learn, the same would be true in France. I had failed to remember the French farmers who traveled to Vermont just a few years before—and who, within months, had enjoyed such success in the European policymaking world.

I was unaware that France, like the Global South, was home to a movement of peasant-identified farmers. Peasants, I thought, no longer existed in Europe. I knew that peasants in Britain were driven to near extinction as early as the fifteenth century because of the enclosures of the commons (Neesen 1993). I assumed incorrectly that French peasants had shared the same fate. While bucolic ideas of French peasants still abound in French marketing, film, and tourism, I thought that for centuries they primarily occupied the world of the French imaginary. Upon my first chance encounter with the Confédération Paysanne, I soon learned that the notion of the French peasant— although changed dramatically over time— was still very much alive. Beginning in the 1970s, a set of new paysan movements emerged in France, resisting the industrialization of agriculture that had gotten under way following World War II.

Members of the Confédération Paysanne who traveled to Vermont in 1993 were at that time already plugged into an international network of farmers and indigenous peoples in nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), many located in the Global South. These southern organizations, associated with biologist-activists such as Vandana Shiva and Devaru Nanjundaswamy of the Karnataka State Farmer’s union in India, had been discussing the Gmo question since the 1980s. They voiced concerns regarding the impending dominance of cmos in the international agricultural market. Word had it that companies planned to create patented emos in the form of seeds for a variety of commodity foodstuffs, beginning with milk. After targeting global staple crops, such as cotton, corn, canola, and soy, biotechnology companies would move on to create genetically modified versions of wheat and rice, perhaps the most crucial staple crops of all. The predictions of southern organizations proved true. In the 1980s, U.S. multinationals (¢.g., Monsanto and Novartis) bought small start-up companies developing genetically modified varieties of staple crops and prepared to commercialize these products within the next decade (Rabinow 1996). If all went well, by 1996 several staple crops would appear globally in the form of genetically modified seed and mos processed into foodstuffs (Shiva 1993a).

Biotechnology companies won the right to patent genetically modified seeds in 1981, subsequently preventing farmers from saving or sharing seeds purchased from these corporations (Shiva 1988). Farmers purchasing GM seeds from companies such as Monsanto are obliged to sign one-time use agreements that legally forbid them from saving or trading seed issued from GM plants. One-time use agreements break a centuries-old tradition in which farmers save, select, and share seeds gleaned from plants during harvest time. Seed saving is not just central to improving seeds and plants suitable for particular microclimates; it is also a crucial form of solidarity practiced among farmers who have collaborated, since the beginning of agriculture, to create site-specific crops for local communities in a spirit of mutualism, rather than private ownership.

With the advent of one-time use agreements, many smallholders and ecologists pondered the global implications of multinationals inserting themselves into so many nodes of the agriculture production line—from milk, seeds, and inputs to trees, fish, and animals. Could agricultural biotechnology render all farmers, both big and small, dependent on the decisions, practices, and monopolizing tactics of multinational corporations? Biotechnology companies such as Monsanto and Novartis pledged that GMOs would increase production. Targeting large-scale industrial farmers as their primary market, biotechnology companies also promised that their products would lower farmers’ costs for herbicide and pesticide. This news fell on the dejected ears of international organizations of smallholders. They were already struggling to survive in an age of overproduction and price drops as peasant communities disappeared across the globe.

The Confédération Paysanne offers a distinctive response to this postindustrial condition. At this historical juncture, industrial agriculture forced smallholders to devise novel strategies to maintain economic means and the meaning of their rural and agricultural ways of life. Instead of simply promoting alternative agricultural practices, such as organic or sustainable agriculture (associated with movements in other countries), the Confédération Paysanne promotes a distinct rationality of agriculture that it calls Paysan

Agriculture (agriculteur paysanne).

Postindustrial Agriculture: A Useful Heuristic?

The term postindustrial agriculture points to that which flows out of, but is distinct from, industrial agriculture. Postindustrial agriculture is both a consequence and an accompanying condition of industrial agriculture. Even though it occupies the same temporal space, postindustrial agriculture is marked by its own distinct features. When most people think about a postindustrial condition, they conjure images of abandoned factory-neighborhoods left behind in cities such as Chicago or Detroit after industry pulled up its roots and moved to the Global South (Raymond 1998; Raymond and Bailey 1997). Or they might envision workers in Malaysia laboring long hours for low pay in electronics factories in free-trade zones with few, if any, services or benefits. Few think “farmer” when they think “postindustrial.” But just as postindustrialization drives factory workers into a state of economic and cultural chaos, postindustrial agriculture also represents a set of challenges for farmers. Smallholders live in an era when industrial agriculture attempts to render their services obsolete. The mere existence of smallholders (and their requests for subsidies in the Global North) is considered a nuisance to farmpolicy makers fostering the industrial model.

It is useful to offer a brief, working definition of industrial agriculture. While the book cannot present a comprehensive picture of the industrial model, I offer a broad ten-point set of conditions of industrial agriculture. A useful caveat: single components of the ten-point set are not necessarily integral to an industrial system. Rather, it is the grouping of the ten conditions of industrial agriculture —the ways in which they form a systemic gestalt — that endows industrial agriculture with its distinct function and effects.

TEN CONDITIONS OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

1 Intensive farming methods: The concentration of many agricultural products (plant or animal) on a given area of land.

2 Extensive farming methods: The production of agricultural products across large plots of land, often up to thousands of acres.

3 Chemicalization of farming methods for increasing production: The use of synthetic and petroleum products for controlling weeds, pests, soil productivity (fertilizer), fungi, and so on. Since the 1960s, this model also promotes hybrid and genetic-breeding approaches to create “high-yield” seed varieties to be paired with chemical inputs. In the Global South hybrid seed and chemical packages are central to Green Revolution technologies which were introduced between 1940 and 1970 by uN and other international agencies to enhance agricultural production.

4 Motorized and electronic technologies to increase the speed, productivity, and circulation of agricultural products: The intensive reliance on motorized and electronic machines in plowing, harvesting, spraying, transporting, and so on.

5 Monocropping: Replacing a previously diverse model of agricultural production with a model that favors the production of fewer cultivars across vast land areas.

6 Subsidies and loans: Granted by government farm policies and private banks, most often to farmers who embrace the industrial features listed above.

7 Production of “modern foods” (fast foods, pre-prepared foods, frozen foods, and processed foods): Often seen by many consumers as affordable, convenient, and safe.

8 Modern ideal of bigger farms with fewer farmers in rural areas: Often perceived by state bodies and corporations as cost-effective and efficient, relying on fewer workers to pay.

9 Modern agricultural discourse promotes industrial model as universally beneficial and inherently progressive: Focus on food productivity and food security in a world in which overpopulation is a rationalizing force behind industrial productivism.

10 An instrumental rationality informs practices related to industrial agriculture: In general, a logic of efficiency, profitability, and productivity pervades discourses and practices related to the industrial model.

Industrial agriculture has implications for the kind of agricultural product it yields, the amount of land an individual farmer will use, and the environmental and health effects of farming and food production. It also promotes a reliance on a petroleum-based economy for producing and circulating agricultural goods while reducing the genetic biodiversity of cultivars. State and private bodies promote the industrial model through subsidies and loaning practices. Industrial agriculture subsequently reduces the number of farmers eligible to earn a living wage. The system is normalized by an ongoing appeal to an instrumental rationality that promotes the model as modern, progressive, and inevitable. The industrial model is primarily designed to enhance productivity while lowering production costs. Large-scale farms produce high yields (of fewer crops) by using chemicalized, motorized, and electronic farming methods. Farmers who are able to follow this model receive far more farm subsidies and bank loans than smallholders who either cannot or will not do so.

Postindustrial agriculture is a set of social, cultural, and economic conditions that flows out of industrial agriculture — these conditions are neither preindustrial nor industrial. To speak of a postindustrial agricultural condition highlights the historical and cultural specificity of the experiences of smallholders worldwide in both contesting and accommodating the industrial model. It also highlights the practices of industrial corporations in creating their own postindustrial strategies, which include agricultural biotechnology, while also appropriating and dominating markets of organic and so-called natural foods.

TEN CONDITIONS OF POSTINDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

1 Production of agricultural surpluses in staple crops (such as wheat and corn): The result of a subsidized, chemicalized, intensive, and Fordist method of industrial agricultural production. The production of surpluses is facilitated by un-driven agricultural policies that concentrated the world grain trade in the Global North, leaving peripheral nations in the Global South to engage in low-profit export-oriented cash cropping (Kasaba and Tabak 1995).

2 “Dumping” of surpluses onto the agricultural economies of southern nations: Food materials not destined for the agro-foods industry and retail are sent to the Global South in the form of aid and cheap commodity grains. After just a few dumps, a local agricultural economy in a village in the Global South can be destroyed indefinitely (Wise 2004). This creates a condition of postindustriality for smallholders struggling to survive in southern nations.

3 Deregulation of prewar trade policies for increasing profits: Allows powerful institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (wTO) to increasingly determine aid, trade, tariff, and import policies worldwide, eroding small-scale agriculture, particularly in the Global South.

4 Agricultural biotechnology: Inserted into the industrial chemicalized, motorized, and monocrop model.

5 A reduction of biodiversity due to monocropping and the replacement of regional cultivars around the world by multinational corporate seed varieties: Local knowledges about the value and preparation of local varieties diminish along with a diverse local food supply.

6 Government farm policies and loaning agencies edge smallholders out of farming markets: Rural zones become home to unemployed or underemployed rural dwellers who often relocate to cities.

7 The industrial model creates foods often perceived by consumers as low quality, unsafe, and departing too far from so-called traditional farm products: Increased appetite for artisanal, organic, and traditional haute cuisine foods— particularly in wealthy nations; co-optation of alternate, organic, or local agriculture food discourses and practices by big industrial producers.

8 Fewer farmers leads to neglected rural zones: “Multifunctionality discourse” becomes a way for government agencies to discuss solutions to degraded rural zones regarded as hazardous to local economies, environments, and agro-tourism.

9 Alter-globalization discourses: Promote grassroots organizations composed of peasants, women, the landless, indigenous peoples, the unemployed, and youth. The focus is on food sovereignty, rather than food security. Rather than frame the problem of landlessness and hunger in terms of overpopulation, alter-globalization groups emphasize problems of political underrepresentation in nondemocratic state and private bodies.

10 A solidarity-based rationality informs many aspects of postindustrial agriculture: The rise of international Ncos and grassroots movements composed of smallholders and indigenous peoples signals a collective fight for “people over profit,’ community self-determination, and a value of cultural fabrics over productivity and efficiency.

At first glance, many of the postindustrial agricultural conditions appear to be integral to the industrial model. However, many represent the intended consequences of industrial agriculture. Supporters in the United States of the industrial model, for instance, hope for surpluses to emerge from industrialized systems. These surpluses are needed to feed the agro-food industry that use agricultural materials necessary for the production of processed, pre-packaged, frozen, and fast foods. Surpluses are also needed for aid-based organizations seeking to dump relatively inexpensive subsidized foods into the agricultural economies of poor southern nations (Vorley 2004;

McCullough, Pingali, and Stamoulis 2005). Of interest here is the synergism between agricultural surpluses, export agriculture, subsidy policies, and deregulated trade practices. Together, these conditions of postindustrial agriculture work together to complement and support the industrial model while disenfranchising smallholders around the world (Van den Ban 1999).

In the Global North —and increasingly in the Global South —smallholders find it difficult to earn a livable wage by feeding a local or regional population. Instead, large-scale farmers around the world dominate the agricultural domain, working to feed the agro-foods complex and cash-cropping export industries (Pollan 2006, 93). Some large-scale farmers achieve degrees of wealth. Most, however, farm intensively and extensively as possible, hoping to maintain a middle-class lifestyle. Those few who head up agro-foods industries, major food distributors, and agrochemical companies make the biggest profits.

Postindustrial agriculture is a global condition. It affects smallholders in both the Global North and South, albeit in different ways. In the Global North, smallholders such as those in the Confédération Paysanne navigate their way around the industrial system, trying to devise strategies to rationalize their own existence. Southern smallholders face a far more dramatic scenario. For decades they have endured the long-lasting effects of land practices associated with uN-generated development schemes, including the Green Revolution. As a result, southern smallholders struggle with problems such as lack of access to tillable lands and waterways for subsistence farming (Kasaba and Tabak 1995). Those fortunate enough to have access to land for small market-oriented ventures face soil erosion and resistant weeds and pests. The problems are often the result of decades of Green Revolution technologies.

Despite these difficulties, powerful institutions often appear disinterested in the plight of smallholders enduring the effects of industrial agriculture. Organizations such as the World Bank and the Gates Foundation still actively promote the Millennium Development Goals. These goals were established by all uN member-states in 2000 with the aim of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, establishing sustainable agriculture, and attending to the educational and health needs of peoples living in poor countries. Their central strategy has been to reduce the number of farmers engaged in food production. Southern smallholders are thus increasingly headed for landlessness, hunger, and unemployment (Menzel and D’Aluisio 2006). The lucky few who find wage-earning employment are often obliged to toil in urban industrial manufacturing sectors owned by multinationals. In these contexts, peasants are proletarianized, transformed into workers in an industrial sector that is often dehumanizing, dangerous, and exploitative. Postindustriality thus hits smallholders unevenly. While those in the Global North may receive limited subsidies and degrees of social welfare, southern peasants often face chronic poverty, landlessness, and starvation.

Strikingly, northern smallholders in countries such as France stand in solidarity with southern farmers, attempting to build a movement that can create a viable postindustrial condition for smallholders everywhere. Movements to transcend the industrial model represent an effort to level the global agricultural playing field so that everyone gets a chance to farm, eat, and enjoy a dignified way of life.

Postindustriality and the Appropriation of Industrial Alternatives

The ubiquity of mass-produced factory-made food catalyzes a popular and romantic desire for niche markets in haute cuisine and artisanal, local, and organic foods. It also generates a desire for nonedible agricultural products such as “natural” cleaning products and clothing made of organic cotton or hemp. Many in this postindustrial desert wander hungrily through any quaint farmers’ market or natural grocery store, searching for an oasis that Michael Pollan calls “Supermarket Pastoral” (2006, 137). Between the 1960s and 1990s, many people disenfranchised by industrial society in the Global North turned to back-to-the land movements. Many became smallholders who produced organic goods for local markets. The entry of these neosmallholders, however, did little to reverse the trend toward the reduction of the number of smallholders generally. There is no balance of power between large and small producers: disempowered organic smallholders still stand on the bottom rung of the economic food chain. Ironically, the idealistic organic smallholder of the 1960s to 1990s prepared a popular appetite for organic foods that is currently satisfied more cheaply by big corporations. Two mega corporations sell most of the fresh organic produce from California today (the state with the largest organic output) (Pollan 2006, 162).

The story of organics in the United States is one of organics gone industrial. From 1998 to 2002, the U.S. Department of Agriculture put in place the National Organic Rule, which set standards for production methods as-

IO sociated with organic foods.” While some organic growers today fear that these standards will be lowered over time, others fear that raising government standards will render smallholders unable to afford the techniques and methods required for state certification. And yet other small organic growers eschew organic certification all together for economic and political reasons. Resisting government discipline, they forged terms such as postorganic and beyond organic, discursively establishing the legitimacy of their own noncertified organic foods.

Meanwhile, nodes in the agro-foods complex (including supermarkets such as Whole Foods Market, Safeway, and Small Planet Foods) sell organic products issued by corporations such as Dole, Cascadian Farm, Greenways Organic, and Earthbound Farm. Produce generated by large-scale organic companies is often incorporated into pre-prepared and processed foods for time-conscious consumers. Earthbound, for example, sells precut carrots packaged with single-serve containers of ranch dip dressing. Cascadian Farm (now a subsidiary of General Mills) produces organic frozen Tv dinners. Other value-added organic foods include H. J. Heinz’s organic ketchup and PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay’s organic Tostitos and Sun Chips (Ganis 2002).

One might think that organic smallholders might benefit dramatically from big business’s interest in organics. Yet while some small-scale producers do manage to stay afloat through direct sales at farmers’ markets, farm stands, and restaurant venues, most are barely able to make a viable living as farmers. Most agro-foods corporations and supermarkets buy produce from industrial-scale organics growers because their monocropping and extensive systems produce more of the same product in a shorter amount of time, which is necessary for freezing, processing, and shipping across wide distances. In addition to posing a threat to organic smallholders who are unable to compete in the swelling organics market, industrial organics perpetuates existing environmental and health problems. Industrial organics means that fewer acres and bodies will be exposed to toxic chemicals, but these benefits cannot be offset by the fossil fuels, packaging, and resource-intensive operations required to produce a limited variety of organic crops. In turn, these crops must be distributed by trucks across highways that span vast distances (Ganis 2002). Organics is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the agricultural world. Large-scale organics increasingly edges into the turf of organic smallholders. Organic farmers working on family farms, or in communitysupported agriculture programs, continue to struggle to earn a living wage.