bright future for organic food?

i'm a big fan of organic food. call me what you want, i don't care. i like it for all the environmental reasons and the simple fact that it tastes a hell of alot better than it's irradiated/genetically modified/pesticided/synthetic fertilized/growth hormoned/etc. counterpart. yeah, i actually enjoy tasting my food. imagine that.

the main complaint for most americans, in relation to organic food is that it costs too much. it can be twice as expensive as non-organic food and most americans are more interested in having enough food for their families, than eating food that is healthy for them, which is perfectly understandable.

recently we've seen the cost of food rise drastically. apparently the price of some varieties of wheat have risen 90+% in one year. the blame for the rise in food prices has been placed on increased bio-fuel production. farmers are switching their crops from wheat to corn, with corn being more lucrative. so what we have here is less wheat being planted and harvested - wheat being a main component of western man's staple - and more corn. corn, in the food chain is used for sweeteners(surprisingly, only about 5%), feeding livestock(59%), export(25%), and to add a certain something to various food concoctions. it's percentage of use in bio-fuel production is 17%. it rarely makes it's way onto america's dinner plate in it's native form. it has little, if any nutritional value. i don't know that i've ever seen organic high fructose corn syrup. i'm not sure it even exists. instead, agave nectar, honey or some kind of cane sugar are used as sweeteners in organic foods. organic corn is not used in bio-oil production and won't be for the foreseeable future. in non-organic corn production, sweeteners and bio-oil production account for over 20% of corn's final destination.

without using it for sweeteners, or bio-fuels and most likely export, we can assume that the vast majority of organic corn is used for feeding livestock. the only reason why a farmer would ever shift his/her fields from wheat to corn would be for an increase in the amount of livestock to feed, which is unlikely.

for food to be organic, it must meet strict requirements. if meat or something that comes from an animal like milk or cheese is organic, the animal cannot consume any non-organic food. crops' fertilizer must be organic. everything within the production of organic food must be organic, whereas non-organic farming could use an organic component in it's production, but won't because of cost. in addition to this, the bulk of organic farming uses a co-operative business model, where prices are set democratically and not by corporate edict. because of this, the organic market is free of the rampant market speculation of it's non-organic sibling.

without the same speculation machine driving organic farming's market, the cost of organic food could eventually achieve parity with non-organic food. this could make things very interesting.

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