As food prices soar, will anyone buy organic food?

What does the future hold for that most extravagant of foods, organic food? Even when the Celtic Tiger was in full vigour, prowling around the place with a strut, we were told that organic food was too expensive. Now, every news report about the price of things is talking about the fact that people are cutting back.

A recent RTE news report on the topic interviewed a woman who ran a nail bar. She said that people were now only going for the essentials � like waxing.

How we survived as a culture without nail bars didn�t seem to come into the discussion. That nails bars have �essentials� while organic food is too expensive says a lot about our priorities.

Organic producers face rising costs, undoubtedly. Particular sections within the overall sector are especially vulnerable, such as poultry, pork.

While organic dairy and tillage have medium level vulnerability the rest - horticulture, beef, sheep - may start to see some competitive advantages emerge, as their overall external inputs can be lower.

In particular, those who have been at the less advantageous end of the market may see things improve for them: hill farmers sometimes buy in hay for the winter, but their overall purchasing of external inputs is low. Some simply don�t buy any inputs, and manage to out winter without buying in feed.

It is likely that seasonal eating will re-emerge � small scale horticulture focused on the regional market should be a key aspect of this, and policy should reflect this.

Pork and poultry may well become treats rather than staples, and more mature mountain meats may emerge, such as sheep meat over spring lamb.

Already, there is something of a move towards this: Hugh Fernley Wittingstall�s River Cottage Meat book waxes lyrical about extra-mature mountain lamb �is a great passion of mine and of a growing band of aficionados, and I believe it offers great potential� according to the man himself.

This type of meat is was in fact the meat of the kings in ancient Ireland: wether was used as feast and wedding meat by the chieftains.

Hill sheep and cattle offer great potential for converting to organic: the 450,000 hrectares of commonage, along with greenland of just over 350,000 hectares, produces very little product at present: 2,500,000 kg of meat. That�s 3.2 kg per hectare, and about �10 million output at �4 per kilo.

For these farmers to consider the organic option would involve very few substantial farming changes, and few of the ever more expensive synthetic inputs. We may yet see a controlled, well managed return of farming to the hills over the next decade, and it should be certified organic, to avail of the maximum mark up for farmers.

Meanwhile, the price of farming goes up and up in what have been the most intensive, most productive and profitable of places. Fertiliser, pesticide and fuel prices are soaring, and will most likely continue to soar.

The raw materials for P and K have increased three fold in the last year. The price of Sulphur has increased ten fold.

Oil and gas, inherently implicated in the production and transportation of fertilizers, are running out - even what�s left will at a certain point prove too costly to extract.

Simply put, it will use up too much oil to take out of the ground the last 1-2 trillion barrels. And as it happens, there are only 1 trilllion barrels known � the other potential 3 trillion of reserves are exactly that � potential.

Farmers have already started to use less fertilizer .The true cost of conventional farming is starting to hit home, and farming is actually becoming more organic in style and substance.

Polemicists like Kevin Myers may argue for even more industrialisation, for a race towards GM, for all kinds of everything within the current oil dependent paradigm.

In reality, farmers adapt, prices between some organic and conventional products begin to equalise, seasonality re-emerges, and the previously disadvantaged, such as hill farmers, may begin to get an advantage.

In these post Celtic Tiger, recessionary days, organic farming and food is actually well placed to step up and to step in.

(For more on this topic, have a look at the food monitor site )