Organic food is significantly more expensive than food from conventional agriculture, whether in a delicatessen or discounter. “This is only possible because consumers do not have to pay the follow-up costs of conventional agriculture for nature and the environment at the cash register,” is the credo of the Upper Palatinate organic farmer and chairman of the State Association for Organic Farming in Bavaria, Hubert Heigl. If these consequential costs were included in the price of conventional food, Heigl concluded that their price would sometimes double.
Heigl now has the backing of science for this. The industrial engineer Amelie Michalke, who conducts research at the University of Greifswald, and Professor Tobias Gaugler, who teaches business administration at the TU Nuremberg, are analyzing exactly these follow-up costs in a large-scale research project. The most important result: “They are immense,” says Gaugler. “If you add them to the retail prices, a kilogram of conventionally produced minced meat should actually cost 18.84 euros instead of 9.18 euros, which is twice as expensive.”
With cheese, such as Gouda (12.94 euros instead of 7.98 euros), the difference is not quite as dramatic, according to Gaugler, but it is significant. And it is lowest for fruit and vegetables. Conventional apples should cost 1.87 euros instead of 1.69 euros per kilo. All in all, the ecological follow-up costs of agriculture in Germany, at around 90 billion euros per year, are more than four times as high as their gross value added (21 billion euros per year).
Probably the most important reason for this is the immense nitrogen consumption of conventional agriculture when fertilizing. Many farmers fertilize so intensively that the plants on their fields can only partially absorb the nitrogen applied. The excess is converted into nitrate in the soil and settles in the groundwater. However, nitrate is a pollutant which, among other things, is suspected of being able to cause cancer. In many regions of Bavaria, but also in Germany, the nitrate content of the groundwater has long since exceeded the limit values. In order to guarantee clean drinking water, water suppliers have to treat the groundwater in such cases or drill new wells into unpolluted groundwater streams. Both cause high costs, but are not included in the price of conventionally produced food.
The costs of species extinction are immense
Another example of the follow-up costs of conventional agriculture is the use of chemical pesticides. Herbicides, fungicides and insecticides not only destroy the weeds and pests against which they are applied. Scientists hold them responsible for the dramatic decline in the native animal and plant world as a whole. The consequential costs that society incurs as a result of the loss of species are also considered to be immense. Michalke and Gaugler are currently working on parameters that are as precise as possible so that they can apply them to individual foods.
Of course, there are also ecological follow-up costs in organic farming. Simply because organic farmers also run their machines with diesel and thus blow the greenhouse gas CO₂ into the air. But because organic farmers do not use artificial fertilizers or chemical pesticides, the follow-up costs of organic farming are much lower than those of conventional farming. It also guarantees the preservation of groundwater that is as natural as possible and biodiversity. For the industrial engineer Michalke it is therefore clear: “We need organic farming as a sustainable form of agriculture.”