On February 3 and 4 the annual meeting of UK's biggest organic body Soil Association will take place in Birmingham, addressing the triple challenges of climate change, resource depletion and food security as well as the need to develop new models for food and farming systems for the 21st century. Moreover, for the first time the organic Association will confront the problem of a "too posh image" of the organic industry with a special session devoted to debating "organic elitism".

"Organic is now seen as expensive and elitist," says the programme. "Have we been complicit in this positioning and how can it be challenged?" Concerning this topic, Patrick Holden, the Soil Association's director said in an interview with the Guardian: "The early adopters of any new approach to something tend to be people who are not only better educated but better off, because they can afford to try something that many not be economically viable."

Holden rejects the idea that organic farming and food should be elitist, however. "Right from the outset we challenged the orthodoxy of agricultural practices; the association was founded on the belief everything is connected: soil and food and plants and animals and people and the environment."

In general, the conference will debate whether a modified ‘business as usual’ strategy will suffice or whether preparing for the future will require the most far reaching changes to our food systems for more than half a century.


To view the full programme please visit the Soil Association's website.