No accounting for a Silent Spring: the discouragement of organic agriculture

Across the European Community the demand for organically produced agricultural produce of all kinds (corn, fruit, vegetables etc) continues to rise at an exponential rate and the supply of locally produced organic products, although increasing slowly, is considerably less. Consequently organic produce is imported from around the world in order to satisfy demand; the average journey from farm to consumer of organic produce is 4,000 kilometres, with associated pollution effects of transportation. At the same time the European Commission openly espouses the free market philosophy which supposedly matches supply with demand while continuing to maintain its controversial Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which is supposedly designed to support local farmers in producing the products demanded by local consumers, with the cost being incurred by those consumers in the form of higher prices. EC policy would therefore seem designed to promote locally grown organic produce but this is not happening; instead chemically based agriculture continues to predominate. The purpose of this paper is to examine the reasons for this through a review and critique of the European regulations concerning the support of farming. In doing so we argue that there are both intended and unintended consequences of the application of CAP throughout the EC and that one of the unintended consequences is that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is increasingly becoming the norm across Europe. In considering the causes of this we argue that one major cause is predicated in accounting and its persistent failure to adequately account for externalities.