Food scandals, permeating haze, steady deterioration in living conditions and myriad other environmental ills are conspiring to make organic farming a chic concept.

Several colleagues of mine already have expressed fantasies about spending their retirement years among green valleys, working a plot of the farmland in the organic way, living by the sweat of their brow, far from the madding crowds, pollution and haze.

Unbeknownst to them, their bucolic view can be savored only from a distance, long accustomed as they are to such urban amenities as cars, air conditioning and flush toilets.

By contrast, true Chinese peasants showed greater fortitude in their backbreaking struggle to wring subsistence from the often meager soil, often in fear of crop failures, and famine.

Notwithstanding the hardships associated with farming, since farming provides the only rational, honest and sustainable way of human existence, successive Chinese dynasties invariably made great efforts to make farming a dignified way of life.

Alas, traditional farming no longer makes economic sense in the industrial age.

Since organic farming can't be justified by cost-efficiency analysis in the modern context, "organic" cannot be but a marketing label.

As organic farming captures the eye of big money Ñ venture capital or private equity Ñ some projects labeled "organic" are registering explosive growth. That's the first sign of green gone wrong.

Pursuit of fast profits

As one Chinese involved in organic farming noted recently, capital's natural pursuit of quick profits is totally incompatible with the rhythm of traditional agriculture, which, in the absence of machines and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, can be only small in scale, intensive in labor and low in output.

When organic farming becomes a much-touted business model, there are strong incentives to turn it into a deceptive or, worse, destructive practice.

Heather Rogers's "Green Gone Wrong: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Eco-Capitalism" explains how the market prices small organic operators out of farming despite growing demand for their products, how buying green can sometimes result in disastrous environmental and social consequences, and why market forces may not slow climate change.

"As organic goes mainstream, its methods increasingly resemble the environmentally disastrous commercial practices it was meant to challenge," the book observes.

Anyway, few of us are really prepared for organic food.

With organic farming, customers are expected not to eat out-of-season produce, for out-of-season produce means one of two things: It is either grown in artificial conditions, which can only be energy-consuming, or delivered over long distances, which is fuel-intensive.

Production costs, given the low output and high human costs, are prohibitively high.

Despite commanding higher Ñ sometimes by 500 percent Ñ prices for their products, the growers barely hang on economically.

As the book observes, the majority of small producers have to depend on "off-farm income" to make ends meet.

It would be easier to understand why in China even modern farming with the advantage of chemicals is fast becoming a lost art among younger villagers.

With deepening urbanization, and urban sprawl, small farmers are further marginalized, being driven from far-flung suburbs.

Before long, organic farming producers would realize it would be much cheaper to cut corners, or just buy the "organic" certification. This is a common patter observed elsewhere.

Eco-capitalism

In China, it is fairly common for "organic" growers to send carefully prepared organic samples for testing.

Where the soil is to be tested, the growers can apply chemicals on leaves to ensure that testing of soil will not betray the presence of chemicals.

Such is the nature of organic farming that independence from modern industrialized farming methods means a majority of people must be supported by doing their own farming, which were the conditions of most human societies before industrialization.

Early Chinese responded to this low efficiency and risky (for it was prone to crop failures) method with a culture that put on a high premium on honest labor in farming relative to nearly any other profession, and a near religious attitude toward nature and its most important bequest, food.

When I was young, wasting food was a cardinal sin, the surest way to earn a reprimand in that society of scarcity.

Although people are beginning to view primitive farming methods in a new light, powerful market forces can no longer tolerate a practice that does not answer market dictates for quick profits.

As one beleaguered Chinese organic food grower remarked, organic farming can be an enterprise only conceived of "human conscience," not as a meaningful business option.

"The market ... cannot register the larger effects of choices made by economic decision-makers Ñ be they major industries such as mining, energy and manufacturing, or shoppers buying organic sugar at Whole Foods in the hope of protecting the environment," the book observes.

When every economic activity crystallizes into glowing GDP growth, who cares how poisonous that figure can be? Before long, investors in organic farming would learn how to play the much-touted green concept for high returns, at the expense of the environment.

As the book observes, in the Upper Parana Atlantic Forest, where only 8 percent of the forest remains, deforestation for farmland Ñ much of it growing monocrop organic sugarcane Ñ is flattening the landscape.

Unchecked consumption

In the island of Borneo, which has some of the most extensive, untouched tropical rainforest in the world, a subsidiary of the Duta Palma Nusantara Corporation had become the owner of a concession to convert the forest to palm oil, in response to the global demand for palm oil for cooking and biodiesel fuel. Within two years the subsidiary flattened 15,000 acres and it was on track to convert 50,000.

As Rogers claims, "when organic materials are used for fuel, they ... compete for soil with either food crops or natural ecosystems."

Failure to appreciate the philosophy behind the life of our ancestors means we would continue to flirt with green concepts.

In the 1990s, some thought that living with a small energy footprint meant building your own austere home out of recycled materials. That is being supplanted by the idea of "eco-luxury," which holds that you can do your part to avert climate change by buying things that support being environmentally conscious.

There are "carbon-offsets," a mechanism for celebrities to pay for the carbon pollution their jet-setting lifestyles generate.

There are all these stunts because we are reluctant to address what prevents us from truly going green: our greed, our desire to get ahead, and our readiness to prostrate before the false god of the market.

"We need to push the discussion further to include a questioning of the limits of market mechanisms as tools for curing environmental ills," the author concludes.

The current global economic model depends on unchecked consumption, and this is inherently incompatible with an environmentally responsible way of life.

A truly green life must start with rejection of the concept of standard of living and well-being, which can only be based on excess production, consumption, and waste.