Organically grown food is not profitable

On the face of it, organic food is the way to go. It is good for the human body, fetches a higher price if looked at from the sellers perspective, and may last longer on shelves than a chemically saturated product would.

However in Trinidad and Tobago today organic foods are still in short supply, with no ready sources looming. It seems therefore the prospective buyer may need to rethink his or her approach in order to fill the ole food basket with goodies for the table.

Many agencies have sought to teach farmers of the benefits of growing food without the aid of synthetic, growth enhancing products, or would have them employ more of natures solutions when dealing with weeds and other aspects of land preparation.

Those agencies may revise certain techniques upon analysis though if they had to depend on product sales for their own funding – as the farmers must. The thing is a farmer needs cash in the short term, and chemically supported products gets an item ready for sale in a more consistent manner.

One argument would suggest that the buyer needs to get into the picture, forcing the issue in his favor. Stepping back into time, it was always the consumer who decided what he ate, even if he was a forest dweller. In more modern societies the choice on what the eater gets is made in boardrooms, and even by scientists. With food it need not be so. The food supply must not be tampered with, even in the name of science.

Man is an evolved species and gets by best on what he has eaten through the millennia, those products are derived from age old plants and parts of animals living off the land. The animals used must ideally have been eating naturally if the meat were to be pure. All of this is not rocket science.

In these hard times, as farmers seek to satisfy their bottom line, as good fiscal management demands, the consumer may need to take the initiatives to ensure the food which comes to the table is what he wants, not what the marketers feel is right.

To do that buyers must form a power structure. A cooperative of sorts. The idea already works for other groups. We observe farmers always conform to demands made by the large supermarkets. So too, the consumer must convince the supermarkets that they want organically grown food.

The decades past reveal that housewives back then had pressure groups, they commanded a voice on what supermarkets stocked, and tried to demand standards. A lot of it has remained with us, a lot of which we now take for granted. Maybe it’s time the housewife take charge of the society again.