When the situation is reversed: (e.g. 'Non-Organic foods are just as healthy as Organic foods') there's often ad hom's directed at the researchers and an alleged 'whoring oneself out' to Big-Agri.
I wonder if people think it's reasonable to consider the hidden incentives in study that come up positively for Organics? After all, organic is usually:
- much more expensive (ability to charge a premium / higher margin)
- suppliers can maintain a semi-monopoly by limiting who gets to use the label "organic"
These characteristics, are afterall, a business's dream, not the ability to sell a commodity in an int'ly competitive market.
There are "hidden incentives" in virtually every study, and one should always remain highly skeptical. One of the biggest perversions of science is the probability of wide publication (essentially the virality of a finding), vastly increasing the likelihood of finding the desired outcome.
However to your "business's dream", organic products are more expensive to buy because they're much more expensive to produce. If we actually look at businesses in operation, the vast majority seek to minimize selling price by doing everything possible to minimize production costs, which is the opposite of your claim.
Businesses don't do everything possible to minimize absolute production costs, they try to minimize relative production costs. All else being equal, if my business and all my competitors are forced to pay twice as much for components, we will all raise prices, we will probably keep similar margins, and we will all make more profit. "All else being equal" is the hard part but it's not too far from reality in some situations.
> if my business and all my competitors are forced to pay twice as much for components, we will all raise prices, we will probably keep similar margins
No, the organic food fight has always been about should we reap the (positive) economies of scale that are so abundant in agriculture? That's the cost structure of concern here and it only applies to one side - those currently taking advantage of those efficiencies. We were able to feed society with family farms, it just took 90% of the population to be farmers.
I wonder if people think it's reasonable to consider the hidden incentives in study that come up positively for Organics? After all, organic is usually:
- much more expensive (ability to charge a premium / higher margin)
- suppliers can maintain a semi-monopoly by limiting who gets to use the label "organic"
These characteristics, are afterall, a business's dream, not the ability to sell a commodity in an int'ly competitive market.