Fair trade, bio-food and the environment

The Economist is telling us that voting with one's trolley can be a very misguided endeavor, here.

Buying Fair Trade, organic or locally produced food can indeed produce the opposite results one would expect. The article makes some good points which are not necessarily on everyone's mind.

But no matter how we twist it, the only way to be environmentally friendly (i.e. as little pollution as possible) is to be less. Because with today's population, either we use pesticides to achieve high yield for a given crop per hectare, or we farm organically and then we need several times the amount of land (and then bye bye rain forest). In any case we are not in harmony with Mother Nature.

And this will be true until we are less beings on this planet or when Science will have given us a pollution free, renewable, plentiful source of energy together with genetically modified plants able to produce more with less (of which, coincidently, The Economist has more info in the same issue, here).


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