The Real Cost of Cheap Food -
By Will Allen, AlterNet.

The question about the real price of food should be rephrased: Is it
worth sending cheap, poisonous food to the starving masses?

Sometimes shoppers are confused by the differences in price between
food grown organically and food grown conventionally. Usually organic
loses the price war argument in comparison to what is called
"conventional" food. Of course, we are all mostly aware that organic
means grown and processed without chemical fertilizers, antibiotics,
hormones, toxic pesticides, sewage sludge, irradiation and genetic
manipulation.

But, what does "conventional" mean? Is food called "conventional"
grown and processed with chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, hormones,
toxic pesticides, sewage sludge, irradiation and genetic manipulation?
Yes it is. And, this is one reason why the price war argument should
be reframed. Instead of comparing the price of organic food with
"conventional" foods (which sounds so normal and safe), let's compare
organic food prices to the food price of toxic or poisonous food,
which is what "conventional" food is.

The vegetables, fruits and grains that grocers and agribusiness giants
label "conventional" are actually loaded with systemic chemicals,
which you cannot wash off. The meat is laced with hormones,
antibiotics, prions and multiple resistant bacteria that are difficult
or impossible to cook out of beef, lamb, chicken or pork.

Clearly, something in our food system has gone terribly amiss since a
majority of the food is loaded with poisonous pesticides, laced with
antibiotics and hormones and infused with genetically modified growth
hormones or genes from rats, bacteria, viruses and antibiotics and
then -- through some bizarre logic -- labeled "conventional." Once one
realizes how toxic "conventional" food is, it doesn't look that cheap.

Once one realizes how toxic "conventional" food is, it doesn't look
that inexpensive.

Besides the food safety dangers, there are three additional costs that
consumers pay for "conventional" food. Estimates are that about half
of all the food that U.S. citizens eat is processed. This includes
breakfast cereals, breads, flour, tofu, cheese, chicken pot pies, Lean
Cuisine and thousands of other products. Most of the ingredients that
make up the processed foods come from soy, cotton, corn, rice, canola
and wheat. More than 75 percent of these processed foods have
genetically modified ingredients. Soy (96 percent), corn (74 percent),
cotton (95 percent) and canola (98 percent) are the most genetically
manipulated crops.

Soy, cotton, corn, rice and wheat are also the most subsidized crops
in the U.S. Those five crops receive more than 80% of all the taxpayer
subsidies. In addition, many other "conventional" crops also receive
government support from the taxpayers, including milk.

Consumers make cheap food cheap when they pay their taxes.
"Conventional" food would be impossible without the farm subsidies --
which means that consumers pay at least two times for most
"conventional" foods they buy. They don't seem so cheap anymore -- and
that does not include the expenses associated with health issues that
occur as the result of eating toxic "conventional" foods.

Unfortunately, everyone pays the second subsidy bill, even the buyer
of organic foods, because the subsidy is a tax imposed on all of us by
the Farm Bill, which is written by congress and the White House. The
current version was just passed by both houses of congress on the 14th
and 15th of May, 2008, and most of the current bill is business as
usual: billions more for the richest farmers growing the five most
subsidized crops.

The third payment for "conventional" food will also be made by the
taxpayers, who will pay to clean up chemical spills, cancer-cases,
injured farmworkers, injured citizens, polluted groundwater, trashed
rivers, oceanic dead zones, contaminated wells, and toxified land that
result from the toxins used to produce "conventional" food. The
environmental clean up record for the chemical corporations is not
good, so don't look for help when the time comes to repair the damage.

When faced with judgments against them, the chemical giants always
find a loophole, stall the procedure with whatever tactic that works,
and spend enormous sums on legal defense teams. More often than not
they escape with no punishment or merely a slap on the wrist for the
most egregious crimes, including willful groundwater and soil
pollution, poisoned food, widespread illnesses, and death.
Unfortunately, both "conventional" and organic consumers will foot
this bill.

One of the worst examples of chemical corporation irresponsibility
occurred in Bhopal, India in 1984. A chemical plant that produced
cotton pesticides leaked a nerve gas; more than 28,000 people were
killed and 250,000 blinded and seriously injured. That plant was owned
by the chemical and battery giant Union Carbide. When its CEO offered
to pay reparations to families of the deceased and to the injured, the
corporation decided that such a move, though laudable and charitable,
was not in the best interests of the stockholders, so no compensation
was paid by the corporation.

The fourth payment for "conventional" food is often made at the
doctor's office to treat obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high
cholesterol, cancer, birth defects, Parkinson's and a hundred other
ailments related to pesticides or poisoned food.

Pundits and scientific hacks will say anything to protect big chemical
and factory farming, refusing to discuss these "irrelevant" external
costs of our modern food system, including subsidies, environmental
cleanup, and skyrocketing medical bills. Instead, they argue that we
need cheap food to feed starving people around the world. We have had
a long history of public resistance against dangerously toxic food in
this country. We have also had a long history of chemical corporation
smokescreens that hide just how dangerous and deadly cheap food is.

As early as the 1870s, farmers and householders got sick from using
arsenic and ingesting arsenic in their food and beer, and they began
to protest aggressively. However, the FDA continued to protect the
large-scale farmers and the chemical corporations from attacks by
small farmers, food safety advocates, consumer protection proponents,
and environmental groups through the teens, the 1920s and the 1930s.

From 1933 to 1937, the founders of Consumer Reports and Consumer
Research warned the U.S. public that they were being poisoned by a
steady diet of arsenic, lead, cyanide, fluorine and sulfuric acid.
Those organizations continued their efforts to protect the consumers
from toxic food through the 1940s and 1950s, and they continue their
efforts still.

In 1962, Rachel Carson advised that we must stop damaging and
degrading our natural landscape. She warned us to stop eating food
poisoned with DDT, lead arsenic pesticides and other chemical sprays.
Such "buyer beware" and nature protection advisories from earlier days
are even more urgently needed today. Things have gotten much worse.
Everything is toxic now. Back then it was just the food. Today it is
almost every surface and tool around us.

Our current food supply is more toxic than ever before and our
environment more damaged. Many pesticides no longer work because the
pests have become tolerant of the poison. So, only the most toxic
chemicals kill the bugs, which have developed a resistance to the less
poisonous chemicals. Consequently, today the most toxic chemicals are
the most used pesticides and fertilizers.

Beyond the external costs of "conventional" cheap food, an important
aspect of the real price of organic food is the care and commitment to
balanced soil health that is a major requirement when transitioning to
organic farm management. In organic, the goal is to restore and feed
soil life. That requires applying composted manures or vegetables to
inoculate the soil with microorganisms. It also means providing
organic (vegetable) matter so that the soil microorganisms have plenty
to eat. To effect this balancing act, organic farmers add lime,
compost, fertilizer crops, gypsum, a bit of phosphorous and some
potash.

The fertilizer crops are the hardest element for new organic growers
to include because they must take land out of production to grow the
fertilizer crops. This is good for the next crop but hard for the
farmer to adjust to growing a crop that he or she plows in. Instead of
using pesticides, organic farmers closely monitor their crops and
release beneficial insects, plant trap or companion crops to confuse
the pests, or plant when pests are not such a scourge.

While "conventional" food is usually cheaper in the supermarket, and
is easier to manage on the farm, it comes with a dangerous load of
pesticide and fertilizer residues that are causing cancers, illness
and death. When we analyzed pesticide and fertilizer data for the book
"The War on Bugs," we concluded that the corporations call chemical
food "conventional" to conceal the fact that the food they produce is
grown with the most toxic chemicals on the planet.

If the question about the real price of food was rephrased to ask what
is the difference between the price of toxic and organic foods, we
would not be marveling about the high cost of organic food, nor
advocating to send toxic "conventional" surplus food to the starving
millions. Instead, we should be asking "How cheap would poisonous food
have to be to be a good deal?"