Organic farmers: Contributing to the resilience of the food system?

Abstract

Advocates of organic practices claim that organics should play a greater role in growing our food. If this is so, we need to ask how such practices contribute to our food system (Campbell 1997) in a way that will enable it to better feed the people on our planet with safe food produced in a sustainable and resilient way. It is widely acknowledged that the context in which food is produced is changing rapidly and food producers are facing enormous challenges in very uncertain times (Urry 2005; McIntyre et al. 2009; Pretty et al. 2010; National Academy of Sciences 2011). According to Darnhofer et al. (2010a, p. 546) present and future uncertainty “may increasingly require farmers to keep their farms flexible to be able to respond to new challenges as they arise.” If the practice of organics lives up to the rhetoric associated with it from its beginnings as a social movement, then it will have a lot to offer in the present and future in terms of its contribution to the possible pathways to adaptation and flexibility it offers to agricultural practices in general.