Are Market-Driven Policies Enough?
Author InfoKlonsky, Karen Greene, Catherine R. Abstract Organic food production has rapidly growing consumer demand in the U.S. and other industrialized countries, along with a worldwide regulatory framework and rapidly developing support infrastructure, making it a premier technology in the efforts of many public and private organizations that advocate more sustainable farming practices. The use of organic farming systems for crop production in the U.S. has grown rapidly during the last decade, but is still under 0.5 percent of total U.S. farmland-substantially less than in many countries in Europe and elsewhere. Within the U.S., conversion to organic farming systems has been more extensive in particular commodity sectors and regions. In California, for example, about two percent of the state’s crop acreage is managed under organic farming systems, and over 15 percent of the dairies in some New England states are organic. The objectives of this paper are to examine commodity-sector an
