Organic Food

The hon. Gentleman makes two pertinent points—one about the testing of natural or synthetic chemicals to know whether they are safe, and one about the dose. Those are the key issues, not some mysticism about where they come from. The hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) said, and we would all agree, that we want an improved environment. One of the claims for organic farming is that it is good for the environment. An experiment called the Boarded Barns farm experiment was done in Ongar, Essex, comparing organic farming, integrated farm management and conventional farming. It found in virtually every case that integrated farm management was more productive, because 50 per cent. more land was often needed for organic farming—as well as more manure, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East said. Rather surprisingly—the statistics are extremely difficult to obtain—it appears that integrated farm management, rather than organic farming, is better for biodiversity and bird life. One of the issues that the Soil Association and the organic farming movement often do not address is that organic farming requires an enormous amount of field ploughing, which destroys worms and makes it much more difficult for bird life to survive. In a parliamentary answer, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent, North (Barry Gardiner) mentioned"““the inherent environmental benefits delivered by farming organically.””—[Official Report, 16 April 2007; Vol. 459, c. 90W.]" I ask the Government to look at the Boarded Barns farm experiment and consider whether they can sustain and justify that position. I do not believe that it is justifiable. There is undoubtedly a great uneasiness out there about science. It has been caused, for instance, by BSE and the problems 40 years ago with thalidomide. Those two issues caused a lot of damage and death—we do not yet know the extent of the damage—but it would be a mistake to replace scientific assessment with something else. The fact that science does not always get it right is no excuse for moving away from the scientific method. One of the so-called successes of the Soil Association and the more extreme parts of the green movement—well, less extreme, I suppose—was the more or less worldwide abolition of the use of DDT following the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was taken up by the Soil Association. It has been said that DDT causes cancer of the liver. Silent Spring said that it was responsible for the decline in this country of the osprey population, the decline of peregrine falcons and the thinning of eggshells. Latter inspection has showed that none of those claims is true, but DDT has been banned more or less around the world. Aid agencies will not support countries, such as Uganda, that continue to use DDT. Over time, that has led not to the relatively small number of deaths such as those from BSE nor—I would not want to minimise it—to the sort of damage done to a number of human beings by thalidomide but to millions and millions of deaths around the world, and especially in the third world. Nevertheless, banning the use of DDT is claimed to be one of the successes of the movement. The debate is therefore a plea for people to take a rational look at the huge problems that confront us. We seem to have got ourselves into a situation in which the Soil Association has taken over, with the Government putting its members on quangos and certifying certain things, but what lies behind it and what it is doing is essentially irrational. I believe that we have lost the public relations argument—that we have lost the battle of spin—and that, in the short term, the rationalists have lost to the irrationalists. If that continues—if we try to approach the huge problems of global warming in the same way—then we will make the wrong decisions. That will be costly, and only the populations of richer countries will be able to afford to eat. Again, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East for giving us the opportunity to debate the subject.