Organic Food

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mrs. Humble. The debate about food has become extremely polarised in recent years, with those who advocate organic farming condemning so-called conventional farmers for their use of chemicals and their damage to the environment, not realising that conventional farming has changed for the better in recent years. The reality is that the two sides of this polarised debate are closer together than they sometimes think they are. The debate is timely for several reasons. The Soil Association’s organic fortnight was held in September and yesterday the National Consumer Council launched its second report, arising from its greening supermarkets project. In addition, the European Commission has introduced new Europe-wide laws on pesticides, which will be debated in a plenary session of the European Parliament on 23 October. Organic farming is not just about returning to farming as it was before the green revolution, or before farming became industrialised as our populations expanded and the demand for food increased. It is actually a belief system that has its roots in the anti-science backlash propagated by the vitalists, who believed that life arises from, and involves, special life forces. The teaching of an Austrian spiritualist or mystic called Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s gave rise to the modern organic farming movement. The early beginnings of organic farming have been captured in a recently published book, ““The Truth About Organic Foods””, by Alex Avery. In the early part of the 20th century, Fritz Haber, a German chemist, learned how to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere as nitric acid. Probably about 60 per cent. of the people alive today owe their existence to the application of nitrate fertilizers that are derived from that acid. Bosch, at the German company BASF, was able to commercialise the Haber synthesis to produce the nitrate required for ammunitions manufacture during world war one, when supplies of naturally occurring nitrates were cut off to the Germans. Unfortunately, as well as emitting carbon dioxide, the Haber-Bosch process emits nitrous oxide, which has an impact on climate change 310 times greater than that of carbon dioxide. Fortunately, nitric acid plants can be fitted with a cerium-based catalyst that reduces nitrous oxide emissions by up to 90 per cent. Inclusion of that gas in the EU’s emissions trading scheme would give European chemical companies an incentive to reduce their emissions of nitrous oxide. The pioneers of organic farming believe that the synthetic nitrate fertilisers produce food that lacks vital forces imparted by animal manure. Steiner believed that the special forces possessed by animal manure come from far-away planets."““Have you ever thought why cows have horns, or why certain animals have antlers?””" asked Steiner. He explained:"““The cow has horns in order to send into itself the astral-ethereal formative powers, which, pressing inward, are meant to penetrate right into the digestive organism....Thus, in the horn you have something well adapted by its inherent nature to ray back the living and astral properties into the inner life””." That is where the movement began. I would not have believed that people pat cow dung into cow’s horns and bury them in the ground in the belief that they increase the vital forces in manure, until I saw the six recent television programmes in which one of the cast of ““The Kumars at No.42”” toured India. He went to an organic tea plantation in Darjeeling, where women sat on the ground patting cow manure into horns to produce special water to water on to the tea plants. If anyone thinks that that is fantasy, organic farmers still believe it, at least in certain parts of the world, today.