Food fraud

Food fraud

Tim Hammerich
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Over the years there have been many reports of food fraud in which someone sells a premium product and insteads ships something that is lower priced. One reason this keeps happening, says The Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Smith is due to treating farming practices as a luxury item.

Smith… “To me, this signals an issue when we're sort of tying value in the food chain to luxury goods. And I think this is also a relevant question when it comes to carbon markets as well, where the good thing is associated with like the more expensive thing and we're able to upsell products because they're virtuous on an emissions or an ethical or whatever standpoint. Then that opens the door for fraud to be done, where you're actually just selling the basest product and making it seem like it's like a very high value product. And we can't ever know. I think just fundamentally these are commodities, like the commodification of this is gonna always make it difficult to say whether this is good or bad. And to me, the conclusion of a lot of this work was to say we really shouldn't be making the better thing, more expensive. We should be making the cheapest thing better.”

Smith specifically sited examples of fraud in organic grain, pasture raised livestock, and avocados from Mexico.

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