Back to the Land: The Paradox of Organic Food Standards

By J. Guthman. 2004

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines how the rent-creating conventions that regulate organic food production undermine growers' abilities to farm in a less intensive manner. The paper builds on a growing literature on food governance which points to the unintended consequences of standardization and their verification. The argument is based in theories of rent, with specific attention to how the constructed scarcity of organic food creates rents that are competed away or appropriated. The author also discusses how organic regulations may manifest in monopoly ground rents, especially given the attention paid to land in organic certification. Insofar as these rents pass through to land values, they contribute to a broader pattern of land valuation that pushes farmers to grow the most valuable crops in the most productive ways—an imperative that is not necessarily conducive to organic farming as it is generally envisioned.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Plant Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e823237853d336494cf9408055eacc9a2fbeac78

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. D. Klooster
2. R. Galt
3. K. Warner
4. S. Lockie
5. J. Guthman
6. T. Mutersbaugh
7. D. Halpin
8. P. Howard

In Plant Science

1. D. Klooster
2. J. Guthman
3. R. Galt
4. K. Warner
5. T. Mutersbaugh
6. P. Howard
7. S. Lockie
8. D. Halpin

In Strategy and Management

1. D. Klooster
2. R. Galt
3. S. Lockie
4. J. Guthman
5. T. Mutersbaugh
6. D. Halpin
7. K. Warner
8. P. Howard

Citations in the corpus

• The quality of sustainability: Agroecological partnerships and the geographic branding of California winegrapes (2007, background): “Organic agriculture has emerged as the best known alternative food label (Guthman, 2004b), but as Guthman (2004a) has argued, certification and labeling schemes may create perverse incentives for growers.”
• The Moral Economy Is a Double-edged Sword: Explaining Farmers’ Earnings and Self-exploitation in Community-Supported Agriculture (2013, background): “On the one hand, “much of California’s organic industry is characterized by oligopsony, with a handful of very powerful buyers and hundreds of less-than-committed growers who sell to them” (Guthman 2004c, 305).”
• The Trouble with ‘Organic Lite’ in California: a Rejoinder to the ‘Conventionalisation’ Debate (2004, background): “…organic production, in rule-setting, inter-sectoral dynamics, and agronomic practices.2 What I hope to show, albeit here only schematically (but see Guthman 2004a), is that in California agribusiness involvement does more than create a soft path of sustainability – an ‘organic lite’, if you will.”
• Environmental Certification of Forests in Mexico: The Political Ecology of a Nongovernmental Market Intervention (2006, background): “…1999), a kind of misguided development intervention that spreads market relations, privileges the concerns of global elites, legitimates current patterns of consumption, and distracts from the need for more direct government regulation (Laschefski and Freris 2001; Conner 2004; Guthman 2004a).”
• Beyond organic: Consumer interest in new labelling schemes in the Central Coast of California (2006, background): “This is a change from the 1990s, when organic certification was conducted by state, regional and private organizations, and their standards varied ( Guthman, 2004 ).”
• Understanding and (dis)trusting food assurance schemes: Consumer confidence and the ‘knowledge fix’ (2008, background): “Certification is beginning to be researched in the literature, but predominantly from the standpoint of farming and food production (e.g. Guthman, 2004; Mutersbaugh, 2002; Mutersbaugh et al., 2005; Klooster, 2005; Hughes, 2000).”
• Fighting Standards with Standards: Harmonization, Rents, and Social Accountability in Certified Agrofood Networks (2005, background): “Rents are earned as `returns from scarce assets' (Gereffi, 1999), yet scarce assets are, following Schumpeter, ephemeral qualities created (or eliminated) through economic and political activity (Guthman, 2004).”
• The 'Conventionalisation' thesis reconsidered: structural and ideological transformation of Australian organic agriculture (2005, background): “As with conventional agriculture, organic farmers who resist subsumption in this manner risk losing comparative advantage and market share to other producers as organic farming is subjected to the same cost-price squeeze as conventional agriculture (Guthman 2004b; Smith and Marsden 2003).”