The Problem With “Organic”
about the author
Devin Miller is a junior Political Science major at Virginia Tech who also writes for the campus newspaper, the Collegiate Times. He is an Eagle Scout, political moderate, and an avid outdoorsman.
Organically grown food is viewed as a more environmentally friendly method for growing and producing agricultural products. There seems to be a great deal of common sense behind this; growing food that is free of the pesticides, hormones, and petroleum-based fertilizers that industrial agriculture commonly uses sounds like a much “greener” way to produce food. As a result, organic farming tends to share much more in common with 19th century agricultural practices, rather than the more artificial processes of today. Unfortunately, common sense isn’t always an accurate way of looking at something, and, oftentimes, a method or solution that appears to be better than the system that exists, in fact, is not.
The greatest problem with organic food is that it is a highly inefficient process. Organic farming produces less food and requires twice the acreage to produce the same crop as modern farming techniques, which goes against the environmentalist ideas of opposing deforestation and trying to reduce the amount of land human beings use. If the world fully switched to organic agriculture, it would use twice the amount of land to produce the same amount of food as modern farming.
Switching to organic agriculture would also provide a significant problem for feeding Earth’s human population. According to Norman Borlaug, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, if the world switched to organic farming, about 4 billion people could be fed, which would mean that over 2.5 billion people would starve to death.
With current world population growth, each year the agricultural industry has an additional 80 million mouths to feed, and by mid-century, the Earth’s human population will be around 9 billion people. The agricultural system will have to account for this substantial increase in population by becoming more efficient and productive. Organic farming is already too inefficient, and has too much spoiled yield due to pests and weeds, to come even close to feeding Earth’s current population, let alone feeding an Earth populated by 9 billion people.
The fact is that all the synthetic pesticides and fertilizers that modern agriculture uses are very efficient at producing food. Before we used such chemicals, famine was a common occurrence whenever droughts or storms occurred. But thanks to modern farming techniques that utilize synthetic chemicals, genetically modified plants, and machines, famine worldwide has been substantially reduced, as have the dramatic price hikes in food that also occurred in the earlier era.
Yet organic agriculture would take us back to a time when famine and price spikes were common occurrences, when a drought would mean that thousands, even millions, of people might be starving to death and displaced from their land. Organic farming is essentially pushing away all the advances in farming made since World War II, trying to take us back to a more inefficient and unproductive agricultural era.
This inefficiency has unfortunately had tragic effects. In the early 2000s, the government of Zambia banned donations of genetically modified corn from the US, incorrectly believing that the food was ‘toxic’ (even though the same food was eaten by hundreds of millions of people in the US and around the world). The government’s attempts to feed its people on ‘traditional’ agriculture were disastrous; mass starvation followed, and, even when people were dying from lack of food, the government was still shipping genetically modified food sent as aid from the US out of the starving regions.
Another problem with organically grown products is that they aren’t healthier. The argument is that organic foods don’t have chemical residues that non-organic food might. However, organic pesticides are far less efficient then modern synthetic pesticides, and thus require a far greater application of these chemicals, usually around 7 times as much. ‘All natural’ does not mean that it is healthier, and organic pesticides can be very harmful; rotenone is a natural poison used by some native tribes, pyrethrum is carcinogenic, and sabadilla is highly toxic to honeybees. The claim that something being ‘all natural’ is better for you is absurd. Lead, asbestos, and hemlock are ‘all natural’ substances as well. The natural world can create poisons and toxins just as well as man.
There was a time when synthetic pesticides left harmful residues on food, but that was many decades ago, and, today, food production is a highly regulated process, with synthetic pesticides and fertilizers being fully biodegradable with decades of study demonstrating their safety.
Organic food isn’t actually any safer, due to the high amount of manure used as a fertilizer, which results in a greater risk of contamination. In 2006 there were two major outbreaks of E. coli that both resulted in death and illness; both were traced back to organically grown spinach and lettuce. While organic foods make up only 1% of food sold in the US, they account for 8% of our E. coli cases.
All of that manure also has a negative impact on our rivers and oceans. One of the biggest problems with agriculture is that runoff from fertilizer into the ocean increases the nitrate levels in the water, leading to algae blooms that absorb nutrients and lead to massive ‘dead zones’ in the ocean. Modern agriculture seeks to cut costs by reducing the amount of fertilizer used, but organic agriculture uses a greater amount of fertilizer. This would, in turn, increase the amount of nitrate in the oceans if organic farming were increased.
Now there certainly are significant problems with modern agricultural techniques. Questions about genetically modified plants and hormone use still need to be answered, as do questions of overuse of underground water tables and over-reliance on petroleum-based machinery. But the answer to these questions cannot be found by going back in time with organic agriculture. The solutions to our agricultural problems don’t lie in the less efficient past; they can be found as farming continues to move towards the future.
