Questioning the Ideals of the Organic Food Movement

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Dennis Averey

For 40 years, the environmental movement has been touting organic farming as the ideal for world food production. Environmentalists say that organic farming is wonderful: it produces more nutritious and safer food, creates no pesticide residues, and has no harmful impact on the wildlife in our fields. And it needs lots of small-time, low-tech farmers, wielding short-handled hoes, thus helping to create "rural employment." Unfortunately, that idyllic picture is inaccurate.

Safe and nutritious?

In a February 4, 2000 TV news essay, ABC News' John Stossel interviewed Katherine DiMatteo, Director of the US Organic Trade Association, which represents organic farmers and retailers. He asked her if organic food was more nutritious than conventional food. Ms. DiMatteo said—twice—that "organic food is just as nutritious as any other food." Then Stossel asked her if organic food was safer. Ms. DiMatteo replied that organic food standards were really not about safety.

Why did the head of the organic food industry back away from the long-held claim that organic food is safer and more nutritious? Stossel was also interviewing Dr. Les Crawford, former head of the Food Safety Inspection Service for the US Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Crawford was prepared to challenge Ms. DiMatteo on any misstatements of fact.

Pesticides

In conjunction with the Stossel show, ABC News paid the food safety lab at the University of Georgia to compare the safety of organic and conventional food samples.

The first surprise for most viewers was that no pesticide residues were found on either organic or conventional foods. (The FDA has been finding for years that US foods carry only tiny traces of pesticide residues—about 1 percent of the allowed levels.)

The second surprise was that some of the organic foods carried much higher levels of bacterial contamination. Such crops as peppers, celery, and parsley were virtually contamination free. However, in the sprout and "spring greens" samples, the organic produce was twice as likely to be contaminated with dangerous pathogens, and the levels of contamination were 100 times higher than for conventionally grown crops!

Cancer risks

The US National Research Council, the Canadian Network of Toxicology Centers, and the national cancer institutes of both countries, agree that they can find no cancer risk from modern pesticide residues. In fact, our non-smoking cancer risks have been declining since the 1960s, just when we began spreading pesticides more widely than ever before. Lead arsenate, which I used to dust on the family garden in the 1940s, was both carcinogenic and immediately toxic. (I would have to use a moon suit to apply it today.)

Environmentally safe?

Ms. DiMatteo dismissed the ABC News testing as a meaningless snapshot, and fell back on the traditional organic claim that "organic food is better for the environment."

In fact, organic farming is worse for the environment, as I told Stossel when he interviewed me, because it wastes too much land. Organic yields are only about half as high as mainstream crop yields. This is partly because organic crops are subject to more pest damage, but mainly because of the conceit that organic fertilizer is somehow better than chemical fertilizer.

The world has only one-quarter of the nitrogen in organic form that is needed to supply current food output, let alone tripling food output for a more affluent and populous world in 2050. A global mandate for organic-only farming would force us to plough another 5 to 10 million square miles of wildlands to create more nitrogen in "green manure" crops like clover and alfalfa. Conventional farmers take their nitrogen from the air, the composition of which is 78 percent nitrogen.

Organic fertilizers

Many organic farmers use manure to fertilize their food crops. (Most conventional farmers use manure only on animal feed crops.)  Manure is a known reservoir of such dangerous bacteria as E. coli and salmonella, which in North America alone cause about 250 deaths and millions of hospitalizations each year. The more virulent O157 strain of the E. coli causes another 25,000 serious cases, and 250 deaths—and leaves many of its victims with permanent damage to kidneys, livers or eyesight. (ABC, unfortunately, did not do the more expensive tests to determine whether any of the E. coli found on the samples was the deadly O157 variety.) It should not surprise us that the organic industry's answer to the vicious new O157 is to claim that it's caused by "factory farming," and is not found on organic farms. The US Department of Agriculture says the O157 bacterium is thousands of years old, and has been found on every cattle farm tested, even where the cows are isolated and grass-fed.

In the January 7, 1997, issue of the Journal of American Medicine, Dr. Robert Tauxe of the US Centers for Disease Control said, "Organic means your food was grown in manure," and strongly suggested we should stop using animal manure on our food crops. In the June 4, 1997 edition of JAMA, he noted in a follow-up letter to the editor that we allow the use of human sewage sludge on our farms only under strict controls because "extensive federal regulations specify levels of treatment....  Nothing comparable specifies what is required for composting animal manures to make them safe."

The organic food movement promises to save us from pesticide and cancer risks, which no medical authorities can find. Meanwhile, organic believers casually dismiss bacterial risks that cause death or permanent injury to thousands of people a year in North America, and many thousands more all around the world.

The debate in Britain

Interestingly, a similar debate about organic foods took place in Britain last year. The British House of Lords held hearings on organic food at which the UK organic farm organization was forced to say, like the US Organic Trade Association represented by Ms. DiMatteo, that it had no evidence that organic food offered greater safety or nutritional benefits. The British Nutrition Foundation, in fact, testified: "The nutritional value of organic crops is likely to be the same as that of convention- ally-grown crops."

As for the "environmental benefits," in its testimony before the House of Lords, the British organic movement could list only trivial things—more spiders in one field, somewhat more butterflies in another. The big question of saving room for wildlife was ignored. So was the most significant environmental problem for British wildlife: British farmers no longer raise many sheep, so they no longer interweave by hand the dense hedgerows which used to shelter many of Britain's songbirds. Why do British bird lovers subsidize organic farming, which doesn't foster much wildlife, instead of subsidizing hand-woven hedgerows?

The idyllic picture

What's left of the idyllic picture the organic food fans have been painting for us? Only the short-handled hoe. In Africa, women and children spend most of their waking hours hand-weeding their food crops. Somehow, I cannot imagine the eco-activists prying First World kids and their parents away from their computers, soccer games, and air-conditioned offices - to send them off to scrabble in the fields.

The organic farmers do a disservice to our conventional farmers, the best farmers in the history of the world. The modern, high-yield farmer produces more of the safest food ever seen, on the least land per capita we've ever needed, so we can have not only food, but wildlands into the twenty-first century.

And they've freed us from walking our rows of food crops with short-handled hoes.

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