121 Purchasing What does this kind of collaboration between ministries look like The five ministries work completely separately from one an other Agriculture doesn t have anything to do with Nature Nature doesn t have anything to do with Health And Eco nomic Affairs is entirely focused on the money But now for the first time they re thinking Maybe these things are relat ed And so the Ministry of Finance says maybe we should take the initiative in establishing some performance indica tors for soil water biodiversity and the climate then mone tise them and convert them into tax instruments But then who specifically should be taxed Such instruments impose tax penalties on individuals who generate costs for society on the one hand and support in dividuals who save costs for society on the other We have to subsidise companies and farmers who don t just think in terms of kilos produced per hectare but who provide a ben efit to society in the form of clean soil or clean groundwater Is that the reason why organic companies are now turning to true cost accounting We are pioneers and have to push forward with vision and leadership to establish practices that are not yet main stream We always hear people say I won t do it until ma jor supermarket chains like Rewe and Edeka get on board This is the language of the latecomer Trendsetters are al ways a minority We won t progress any further if we just keep complaining about the discount shops who are final ly starting to sell organic products or yearning for the good old days of the 1980s We have to blaze new trails we have to show leadership We don t have a problem with compe tition But only if the math is fair Organic is not too expen sive conventional is too cheap because we are passing on the costs of destroying the environment We ve been saying this for thirty years but now we are showing how to correct the problem And the banks are joining in So how do you make certain that the true costs are correctly accounted for The calculations are performed each year by well known auditors like Ernst Young This is not something we throw together ourselves on a rainy Tuesday afternoon It has to hold water We have calculated that conven tionally grown apples in Argentina cost 1 163 euros per hectare in terms of loss of fertile soil Organic farming brings society a gain in soil fertility worth 654 euros You can add that up and then you see that organic agricul ture gives you an advantage of around 1 800 euros per hectare We follow the same procedure for water the climate and health And in the end a kilo of organic ap ples is 19 cents cheaper for the consumer Does the person buying fruit in the supermarket understand this calculation It s easy to say that the consumer doesn t understand it Wherever there is a will there is always a nother way First we get our message to a minority of consumers These are the early adopters who shape the markets of tomorrow Here we are not talking about the people whose mantra is cheap cheap cheap please There s no use preaching to deaf ears We are there for the con sumers who are shaping tomorrow s markets This is our role The more environmental damage you pass on to future generations the cheaper the price It s an unnatural situation

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