Local and Organic Foods

Farmers all over the world are in trouble. The government seems to provide subsidies on one hand and cause much grief with depressed prices, a result of bad policy. Added to that, there are huge subsidies to industrial farms that operate on a massive scale. These industrial farms don't have much concern for envrironment and damage the land and neighbouring small farms in the long run.

Farmers' situation in India is really worse because the governement, after making sure that farmers are addicted to fertilizers and pesticides removed the subsidies. Then it removed the credit support. Then it went on to destroy the trading structures (cooperatives) and then removed the excise duty on imports. The result is increasing production costs with reducing prices. This drove millions of farmers to bankruptcy and many of them committed suicide. Even today, the problem is not properly addressed.

Farmers market is touted as a solution to bring the urban community to the small farmers. Agreed, some of the folks at the farmers market are not really farmers, but middle men. But a great majority are farmers. Buying local also helps reduce pollution/carbon consumption because food travels less distance from source to the plate. Besides fresh food tastes better. In US, on average food travels over 1200 miles from source to the plate.

Organic food helps farmers, land, environment and you. I have been reading about the increase in incidence of cancer in rural areas due to increasing pesticide exposure. Organic farmer can avoid that. It helps you by reducing your intake of pesticides and chemical fertilizers which are mostly derived from Petroleum.

With those goals, we started off on buying organic/pesticide free fruits and vegetables as much as possible at the local farmers market. It has been over a year now and we keep going there every weekend.

This experiment is a success