Survey: is this the beginning of the end of organics? (TreeHugger)

Survey: is this the beginning of the end of organics? (TreeHugger)
Well there in lies the rub, pure organic ingredients does not intrinsically equate to nutritious products once the large food manufacturers have got their hands on it and pushed it through their processing plants. It’s a little like low fat foods, they are not necessarily healthy they are just low in fat.
The way I see it is that the organic movement is increasingly going to be faced with pressures from both the large retailers and the big food processors who want to incorporate the organic appeal into their product range, they will push and pull the definition of organic to its limit to allow them to continue with their industrial low cost processing methods. Equally the very term organic may get fundamentally compromised by their marketing tactics. It will only take a few “exposes” of the real nutritional value of say a processed cookie that has a couple of organic ingredients in it to throw consumer doubt on the whole idea of organic as healthy.
There is no question that organic and healthy foods are coming out of the niche and into the mainstream, and this is a good thing, however organic food ingredient production does not benefit from the same economies of scale as industrial food production- there are only so many cows that can be organically grazed on a hectare of land, only so much wheat that can be grown while ensuring soil sustainability. This means that more and more farmland needs to be converted over to organic production, this process is not overnight. There are going to be problems in the supply chain, with bottle necks at a basic commodity level, and maybe later at packing plants, and food manufacturing if we are to ensure a proper separation between organic and none organic products. This will cause huge problems for the supermarkets and the food producers who will naturally try and cut corners to get to market as quickly as possible.
We have to watch very carefully the way the market is growing, give it all our support so that it stays true to the core organic values, and keep up the media pressure to stop the message being drowned out by the advertising try to hijack the word Organic.
In the UK we already have a number of “organic” food labeling schemes, each one slightly different, the big retailers and food producers are busy trying to torpedo the idea of a compulsory government regulated food labeling scheme, Even within the best of our quality regulators, the Soil Association, there is pressures as the implications of the explosion in organic is being absorbed and thought through.
There is no simple or clear answer, or if there is I am too simple to understand it, however I think that we have to ensure that the essential link between organic and healthy must be maintained and that this territory should not be yielded to the food processors.