Wal-mart: the white knight of the organic food business?

There's an interesting piece by Field Maloney, a New Yorker staffer, on "the dark secrets of the organic food movement" in Slate that makes many good points but ends with the batshit insane suggestion that Wal-mart's entry into the organic food biz might be a good thing.

There's no guarantee that a consumer is doing the right thing simply by buying a product labeled "organic." Big producers have watered down the label, for one thing, and as Maloney explains:

When the Department of Agriculture established the guidelines for organic food in 1990, it blew a huge opportunity. The USDA—under heavy agribusiness lobbying—adopted an abstract set of restrictions for organic agriculture and left "local" out of the formula. What passes for organic farming today has strayed far from what the shaggy utopians who got the movement going back in the '60s and '70s had in mind. But if these pioneers dreamed of revolutionizing the nation's food supply, they surely didn't intend for organic to become a luxury item, a high-end lifestyle choice.

Absolutely right. Eating out-of-season organic tomatoes from Chile or California in New York is probably worse for the environment than eating New Jersey tomatoes that lack the organic label.

But Maloney wanders onto much shakier ground when he goes on to suggest that:

It's likely that neither Wal-Mart nor Whole Foods will do much to encourage local agriculture or small farming, but in an odd twist, Wal-Mart, with its simple "More for Less" credo, might do far more to democratize the nation's food supply than Whole Foods. The organic-food movement is in danger of exacerbating the growing gap between rich and poor in this country by contributing to a two-tiered national food supply, with healthy food for the rich. Could Wal-Mart's populist strategy prove to be more "sustainable" than Whole Foods? Stranger things have happened.

Really? I'd like to know what would be stranger than that.

I won't argue that anti-Wal Mart prejudice doesn't contain some elements of snobbery, or that eating organic can be simply one more status symbol for wealthy consumers. But it's a ridiculous argument that to say that Wal-mart will somehow "democratize" the organic food business. Wal-mart's history of how it treats its workers and suppliers and local communities is there for all to see. A recent U.C. Berkeley study concluded that Wal-Mart "actually reduced the take-home pay of retail workers by $4.7 BILLION dollars annually." What organic farmer who desires to make a good living is eager to deal with that company?

And there's no small irony to the juxtaposition of this story with Why the nation's largest community garden must become a Wal-mart warehouse. Tom Philpott argues that the heartbreaking battle over Los Angeles' South Central Community Garden is a microcosmic illustration of the essential contradiction between community sustainability and the inexorable logic of global trade (of which Wal-mart is certainly one of the prime movers).

Down the road, food should be organic AND locally grown. That's the basic argument for real "homeland security." Whole Foods, while it has its shortcomings, is probably somewhat approachable on the latter issue.
Can a leopard change its spots? Anything's possible. But based on its track record with employees and providers, having Wal-mart dominating the organic food market is an idea that almost too awful to contemplate.

Here is the Organic Consumer Association's manifesto for "breaking the chains":

The answer to Wal-Martization and so-called “Free Trade” is ethical consumer purchasing and political action--building and supporting local and community-based producers and businesses through solidarity, collective purchasing power, and mutual aid. Fair Trade, not Free Trade, must become the global norm, with organic and sustainable production leading the way. Local and community control over essential goods and services provides the only solid foundation for economic democracy, a sustainable environment, and public health.