Another of those times that Greenpeace can go boil their heads

The point at issue here, for us at least, is not about deforestation nor food produced from areas which have been. It’s about the costs of the suggested systems:

Sini Eräjää, Greenpeace EU’s food and nature campaigner, said that the demands would have rendered the deforestation law “meaningless”.

“For example, mass balance systems allow the mixing of goods that meet legal sustainability criteria with those that do not,” she said. “They would drive a coach and horses through the middle of the EU’s due diligence proposal through which vast quantities of unsustainable and illegal goods could follow.”

The argument from the food production side is that the world should not build another entire system of grain silos, ships and railway cars for these sustainable crops as well as that current system reserved for conventionally produced. The Greenpeace argument is that the second system should be built.

As if we should rewire the country for those green and renewable electrons to distinguish them from the conventionally produced. As we don’t do that with electricity perhaps we might not with food.

Or perhaps we should. We’re open to the idea that consumers would like to know that their food is pure, pure by whatever standards those consumers think is worth having. All we would insist is that consumers who demand a certain purity have to pay for their purity demand.

What Greenpeace is demanding is that the entire global system be rewired to accord with their desires. The costs of which will fall upon all consumers of course. We think the correct solution is that those who desire the separately farmed, collected, transported and processed pay the costs of doing exactly that.

That is, some voluntary badge or scheme, perhaps similar to Fairtrade or the like, which allows consumers to - as we agree entirely they should be able to - distinguish the products. Rather than Greenpeace insisting that everything must be done this way so that all must carry the costs.

After all, we do in fact have examples of this in the food system already. Both kosher and halal foods are widely available and the costs of that availability are carried by those who desire foods produced to those standards. Which is exactly as it should be.

Our suspicion here is that Greenpeace doesn’t want to accept such a system because they know that not enough people care for their obsessions. There aren’t enough consumers who would voluntarily pay the extra that is - at which point Greenpeace can go boil their heads of course.