This article originally appeared in the May 27, 2016 LocalHarvest Newsletter
it is reprinted with permission

Rebecca Thistlethwaite and husband Jim Dunlop run the Tastes Like Chicken Ranch in Los Lomas, California

I need to preface this discussion by pointing out my – and LocalHarvest’s – longstanding commitment to social justice, fair trade, and living wages. Yet, as a re-covering farmer who had a business large enough to have employees, I also understand the invisible math that most people never get to see. In the December newsletter we spoke to some of the challenges that US farmers face when competing with cheaper, imported food. If a retailer or a consumer can get a cheaper organic tomato grown for a 10th of the labor costs as a US organic tomato, they just might do that. Now imagine if those US labor costs were to go up 50%?
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photo by Rosie Newton
Healthy organic produce

As the organic market expands, the cost to consumers is slowly but steadily dropping, making organic food somewhat more accessible to more people. This has been good news for wholesalers, processors and retailers. For farmers—and farm workers—not as much.

Why hasn’t the expansion of the organic food industry translated into higher wages and farm gate prices?

The simple answer is because organic farming is at the wrong end of the value chain.

But that is true for all farmers. What puts organic farming at a disadvantage is, in an organic nutshell, capitalism.

The high retail price of organic food frustrates farmers and consumers alike. Reasons given for the price difference between organic and conventional food–for some crops up to 300 percent–revolve around factors like low supply and high demand, greater labor input and postharvest handling, inefficient distribution chains and disadvantages in economy of scale.
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Domestic Fair Trade and Farmer Justice Organizations

Domestic Fair Trade Association
The Domestic Fair Trade Association is a collaboration of organizations representing farmers, farmworkers, food system workers, retailers, manufacturers, processors, and non-governmental organizations. Our primary goal is to support family-scale farming, to reinforce farmer-led initiatives such as farmer co-operatives, and to bring these groups together with mission-based traders, retailers and concerned consumers to contribute to the movement for sustainable agriculture in North America. DFTA has posted on its website a detailed evaluation of fair trade claims in the US market. NOFA is a founding member of DFTA. http://www.thedfta.org/

Agricultural Justice Project
The Agricultural Justice Project (AJP) is a non-profit initiative to create fairness and equity in our food system through the development of social justice standards for organic and sustainable agriculture. On the website you will find a Tool-kit for farmers with resources on fair labor policies, intern con-tracts, fair pricing, contracts and the background for fairness in international law. NOFA is a founding member and a continuing partner in AJP. http://www.agriculturaljusticeproject.org/
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