Organic Food

I shall refer to that issue later. Organic food is described by the FSA as"““a holistic approach to food production, making use of crop rotation, environmental management and good animal husbandry to control pests and diseases…" There is"““restricted use of…fertilisers or pesticides””" and an"““emphasis on animal welfare””" and soil health. All organic food must meet minimum standards as set out in European Law. In the UK, the Soil Association is the main certification organisation. It claims that its standards are higher than those set by the EU. Of course, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has overall responsibility for regulating the organic food production and distribution industry in Britain. Organic food and food produced by conventional methods must meet the same food safety standards as those set by the FSA. Among other tests, the FSA analyses all foodstuffs for residual pesticides and food additives. On average, it takes farmers three years to convert from farming using conventional methods to organic farming credited by the Soil Association. Many farmers produce organic food without going through the costs of the transfer or accreditation process, but they cannot legally call their produce organic. The Soil Association believes that organic food, which is produced to high standards, is tastier, more nutritious, and contains less additives such as aspartame and monosodium glutamate, than food produced by conventional methods, although 30 additives are permitted in organic farming. The association claims that organic food is pesticide free and contains no food produced from genetically modified crops, that organic meat is free of antibiotics, and that there are no hidden costs of production. It also claims that animal welfare is better on organic farms and that organic farming is good for the environment. Undoubtedly, some of those claims are true, but non-organic farmers can also make them. Organic food is bought by some 75 per cent. of UK consumers, at least occasionally, but it makes up only about 1.6 per cent. of the overall food market. UK farmers are capable of producing 70 per cent. of the organic food sold in Britain, but produce only about 45 per cent. Sales of organic pork are actually going down because of the cost of organic feed, which is increasingly imported. According to the Soil Association, organic food and drink sales in the UK nudged the £2 billion mark for the first time in 2006, an increase of 22 per cent. on the previous year. To meet the increasing demand for organic food, buyers source their foodstuffs in far away places such as Chile, Kenya and Israel. A debate is raging about the damage that flying produce in from all over the world does to our environment. The justification for importing food that way is that foods such as strawberries can be made available throughout the year for British consumers, and that producing them out of season in the UK would be extremely costly and would require heated greenhouses. Although the Soil Association can control carefully the production of organic food in this country, it is doubtful whether it can assert the same degree of control in the many countries from which the UK imports its organic produce, which gives plenty of scope for fraud. Wal-Mart, for example, has been accused in the USA of selling ““organic”” food that was in fact not organically produced. Yields of organic crops are considerably lower than in conventional farming and more land is taken up by organic crops. Should we encourage developing countries to grow organic crops when, in many cases, they have a problem feeding their rapidly expanding populations? There is also the question whether growers in developing countries receive a fair price for the produce that they export to Britain. Yet more land is taken up by growing crops that produce natural pesticides such as, for example, chrysanthemums, from which pyrethrum is extracted in Kenya and Peru. There is a growing realisation that industrialisation of farming has damaged the environment, and there is a return in conventional farming to planting hedgerows, which leaves buffer strips of land in which wildlife can develop and survive, and crop rotation is coming back big style. Market gardening and farming was part of my life until I entered university in 1958. We produced organic food, although that was not our intention. It was difficult to keep aphids off the lettuce, and I dug many failed crops under as a result of infestation—we simply could not sell those lettuces. The only pesticide in the early 1940s was nicotine, which we piled and burned in our greenhouses. Similarly, we lost tomatoes to rust—a fungal growth on the stems of the plants— and our fruit was full of grubs and our root crops were similarly infested. My father and others like him in farming and market gardening were extremely pleased when chemistry came to our rescue with its so-called green revolution, which delivered pesticides and herbicides that prevented the destruction of our crops by various pests and weeds. Yields increased remarkably, and our business became financially viable. How many organic growers in Britain could today survive if they were not surrounded by non-organic growers that keep pests off their crops—the so-called umbrella effect, which I believe to be real? I do not wish to go back to the good old days that I described of food production in the 1940s. In the past 10 years there has been a 19 per cent. reduction in the volume of synthetic pesticides, as farmers switch to newer and better products. In any case, as I explained, the FSA regularly tests the levels of residual pesticide on all food, whether produced organically or conventionally. In August 2007, the Crop Protection Association welcomed the Soil Association’s acknowledgement at Hay-on-Wye that organic farmers use pesticides, which it had denied for most of its existence. Indeed, copper sulphate, pyrethrum—a nerve toxin and potential carcinogen—and other chemicals used by organic farmers are probably more dangerous to the environment than the pesticides used in modern farming. Organic farmers would like us to believe that organic foods are uncontaminated by chemicals when they are not. The organic pesticide rotenone, which is sold as Derris powder, is highly toxic to humans, yet organic farmers are allowed to apply it right up to harvest. It persists for a particularly long period on olives and is concentrated in olive oil. Farm workers who spray solutions of bacillus thuringiensis, a soil bacterium that produces a protein that is toxic to caterpillars, have reported respiratory problems, and it causes fatal lung infections in mice, yet organic farmers insist that what is natural is safe and that synthetic chemicals are extremely toxic. That is nonsense. Biocontrol of pests has been effective in some circumstances, especially for protecting high-value crops grown in greenhouses, but biocontrol often involves the importation of non-native species, with all the dangers that that might entail. The idea of organic food has been hijacked by modern supermarkets to increase their profits. Indeed, according to research conducted by Morgan Stanley in 2005, organic food is 63 per cent. more expensive than food grown by conventional farmers. The notion that organic food is tastier than food grown by conventional methods is not proven. Similarly, according to the FSA, the president of the National Farmers Union Peter Kendall and others, there is little evidence that organic food is more nutritious.