For all the rhetoric and chitchat about food sustainability, our local agriculture industry is in crisis now. Local food is becoming scarcer as more growers call it quits. Hawai'i is losing its egg producers, ranchers and real farmers at an alarming rate and nothing is on the table to change this decline.

Most of Hawai'i's farms are small. In fact, excluding some of the historical large ranches and plantations, our average size is about 4 acres while the typical Mainland farm is tens of thousands of acres. Example? My farm of tropical fruit is the largest certified organic operation on O'ahu and is less than 7 acres. Earthbound Farm, the largest Mainland organic grower, is about 40,000 acres.

Being small means we are generally under the radar screen of administrators, don't get big bang for the buck and don't carry a big stick to influence legislation.

Small also means less volume, less supply and that none of us can guarantee the "consistent supply and consistent quality" that the big wholesalers and retailers demand in the name of their customers.

The reality in Hawai'i is that "small" is a fact of life and a farm is not a factory.

Economics 101 doesn't work in Hawai'i because our retail grocery markets remain extremely unstable and unreliable.

All economic factors such as supply, demand, prices and availability are controlled by the large wholesalers, distributors, importers and retailers who would rather deal with one big distributor in California than a gaggle of small independent farmers here. Thus no one will invest in increasing their supply-side when demand is artificially controlled by outside imports and controlling wholesalers.

Don't believe it? Fact: Last year in the middle of local mango season our then-distributor cancelled all local mango orders in favor of imported cheap South American mangos to increase their profit margin. Fact: It's continuing now. Did you see that large grocery chain ad for imported mangos for 50 cents a pound? There are federal laws against this kind of "dumping" of cheap imports but not for agriculture here in Hawai'i.

So farmers don't control the prices, wholesalers do, and they do this in the name of their customers, who they say want and deserve cheaper, poorer quality food over local food.

If this is true, then we don't even have a consumer commitment to sustain a local agriculture industry. Maybe our customers are actually very happy buying cheaper Mexican mangos, Chinese ginger and California avocados. The largest single grocery consumer base in the state is the military commissary system, which gets 100 percent of its organic produce from the Mainland. Maybe ag sustainability is unattainable.

A BAD BARGAIN

We cannot afford to trade off our farmers and our environment for cheap lettuce. With every case of imported produce we introduce invasive insect species that make Hawai'i the most vulnerable environment in the nation.

Knowing of this threat our administrators have responded with a program to increase the staff of import inspectors. This kind of reaction is a good first step but fails to address any real solution to decrease imports by increasing local supply.

Clearly there is a distinct price differential between local and imported produce that must be addressed. Farmers need to cut costs and our legislators must help. To make sustainable agriculture a reality we will need to invest in programs that ultimately empower the farmers to reduce costs and increase supply.

Our local consumers must be the voice for change and start demanding more local produce in their retail markets because we cannot continue to lose our growers.

Actually it can and will get worse. There is now a major effort to impose a food safety and tracking system designed for huge Mainland farms on our small-farmer population. This food-safety movement is the attempt to reduce the risk of food contamination driven by the hysteria following huge spinach, meat and tomato recalls on the Mainland — not Hawai'i.

This system is not science-based, provides no guarantees and is being driven by those same large distributors and grocery chains that control imports and prices and want to reduce their own liability for packaging and processing contamination at the expense of Hawai'i's farmers.

There is a bright spot. This past legislative session focused much attention on the "protection and preservation" of agriculture lands and, in fact, tapped the state treasury to acquire ag lands. But there are no plans in place to actually use those lands.

Now is the time to support initiatives that put actual farmers into the equation and make those lands productive for food. Maintaining the status quo is the enemy of progress. We must institute an affirmative action program for agriculture to ensure sustainability. Failure to do so will result in the continued decline of our farming culture.

We've tried globalization, now let's get back to localization; let's get Hawai'i's farms feeding Hawai'i's people.

Al Santoro, with his wife, Joan, owns and operates Poamoho Organic Produce in Waialua (www.poamoho-organic.com); he is also president of the Hawai'i Cooperative of Organic Farmers (www.hicof.org). He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.