Booming Organic Sector Navel-gazes at Victoria Conference
By Wayne Roberts

An international conference of 1400 organic food producers and researchers from 92 countries met for the convention of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements in Victoria this August.

The mood was upbeat, as you might expect, because organics remain the hot new trend in food retailing, maintaining the brisk 15 to 20 per cent a year growth rate they've held to since 1990; Loblaws private label organics is booming at a 30 per cent annual growth rate.

The breakthrough gains, contrary to the stereotype about organic as a yuppie trend, are coming from the Third World. Peasants in the Third World, who make up most of the world's poor and hungry, are finding that organic methods reduce their costs of production (they don't have to buy fertilizres or pesticides)and increasing the range of products they can raise; using ducks instead of pesticides to get rid of insects in rice fields, for instance, yields two crops where before there was only one.

The expansion of the organic sector is also promising. There were 600 certified organic farms in Canada in 1989; 11 years later, there were 3108, covering 340,000 hectares (plus another 14,175 hectares of wild rice lands). In BC, 8.7 per cent of fruit and vegetable production is organic. Producers there are geared up for European sales, where demand for safety and quality is high, and for the provinces booming restaurant sector; indeed, it's not too much to say that Vancouver Island and southern BC are positioned to become the Provence of North America, known for their fine foods and la dolce vita.

But commercial success and la dolce vita are not primarily what the organic movement is about - it's about living in harmony with nature, and has more to do with hippies than yuppies - and that may explain why the mood at Victoria was also reflective and even at times anguished. Many in the organic movement are concerned that the organic sector is selling its soul as well as its soil to the same old industrial food system that created chemicalized food production.

Several of the keynote speakers poked at this very sensitive spot in the organic sensibility. The final word in the title of the sponsoring organization, IFOAM, is Movements, and movement, not sector or industry, is what organic advocates are still about.

Those familiar with the history of social movements will recognize this "sell your soul to the devil" lament as a common refrain of outgroups as their powerful ideas start to enter the mainstream. For my money, the commercial trends - still less than 5 per cent of the market, we need to remind ourselves -- are not worth a lot of angst. Some of the problem areas - the long distance travelled by organic food from California to Ontario, for instance, or the packaging involved in making organics serve the demands of convenience - will be worked through as the organic sector matures. When Ontario farmers ramp up for the organic market, for instance, there will be less need to import from California, and local brokers will be able to pull supplies together so that small farms can meet the needs of Big City retailers and farmers markets. I'm not a fan of self-sabotage, and I don't see any value in organic promoters being their own worst enemies by too harshly criticizing some admittedly negative trends, but trends that come out of the problems of transition, and trends that can be transitioned out when the time is ripe.

International organic conferences have traditionally been dominated by professional agricultural researchers who deliver highly specialized presentations on the yields from specific growing regimes and so on. There were two elements to this tradition. One, the main presenters were professional scientific researchers. Two, the audience was made up of professional organic growers. This conference will go down in organic history as the first to venture into the terrain of organic food production more generally (including fisheries, wild foods and urban food gardens, for example), and into the terrain of the urban consumer and food activist.

A major presentation was made by Lauren Baker on FoodShare Toronto's Good Food Box, its rooftop garden, composting program and recent partnership with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health to work with people with mental health and addiction problems to establish an urban farm on the site of the organization.