Big Ag's Big Lie About Organic Food

Posted by Jill Richardson, Daily Kos at 10:50 AM on June 23, 2009.

You've actually been told a lot of lies, but right now I'm going to focus on just one. It comes in many different forms:

1. Organics yield less/much less/half as much as conventional ag.

2. Organics can never feed the world.

3. We need pesticides/fertilizer/biotech to feed the world.

4. American farmers need to feed the world.

5. If we tried to feed the world with organic, because it yields less than conventional ag, that means we'd have to use more land to grow the same amount of food (and cut down the forests).

6. Third world countries need pesticides/fertilizer/biotech (bought from American/multinational corporations) or else they won't be able to feed themselves.

No doubt it would be DISASTROUS if we all switched to organic and then we didn't have enough food to feed everybody! But that's only if you buy into the idea that organic cannot compete with yields from conventional farming AND the idea that hunger is caused by producing too little food (it's not). Well... here's what the largest study ever conducted to study this question found...

To me, one of the biggest clues of what a carefully guarded lie we are told, a lie that those at the highest levels of our government believe and use to make our policy, was when a biotech/pesticide lobby group came out in opposition to Michelle Obama's organic garden. Well, they didn't really come out... I kinda outed them on my blog and the story went from there to the Colbert Report (and pretty much everywhere else).

What was the biotech and pesticide industry afraid of when Michelle Obama planted an organic garden? This.

Meanwhile, Kass told the children, the teachers and the press that the garden already had produced lettuce, snap peas, beans, kale, collards and chard. Kass said he has taken 90 pounds of produce from the garden, including broccoli and green beans and "one beautiful eggplant." He also said he has harvested herbs "every night," which are not included in the 90 pounds. The garden has produced only one cucumber, which Kass saved for the children to harvest. It was supposed to be a white cucumber, but it had turned yellow.

Kass said no chemicals — fertilizer or herbicide — had been used on the garden, but that the underlying White House soil had been "amended" with crab meal from the Chesapeake Bay, green sand compost and lime powder. A White House spokeswoman also said that only organic fertilizers and insect repellants will be used and that lady bugs and praying mantises will be introduced to naturally control other insect populations. A honeybee hive has been set up nearby for pollination purposes.

Kass said that the only insect problem he had noticed is that "something is nibbling a little bit on the kale."

Pardon the metaphor, but by planting an organic garden, Michelle Obama acted like Toto, pulling back the curtain to reveal the little man pretending to be the almighty wizard. That man - or men - behind the curtain are the biotech, pesticide, and fertilizer industries, who desperately want the American people to believe that they are absolutely necessary to prevent our starvation.

They call for using "science" in agriculture, but they ignore what science actually says. According to a paper called "Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply" published in 2007, a study (referred to by Jack Heinemann as "the largest meta-analysis ever conducted on the relative performance of agroecological and conventional... agriculture") found that organic CAN feed the world. Specifically, on average, organic systems produce 92% as much as conventional agriculture in the developed world. However, in developing countries, organics produces 80% MORE than conventional agriculture. Therefore, the paper concludes:

With the average yield ratios, we modeled the global food supply that could be grown organically on the current agricultural land base. Model estimates indicate that organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base.

The reason why there's such a stark difference between the developed and developing world is not because organic magically produces more in developing nations. Rather, it is because the farmers in those countries often lack the crop inputs used in the developed world to obtain such high yields. As the inputs used in the U.S. involve a LOT of oil, a resource we are running out of, this says to me that our best route to maximum yields in the future is going organic now.

Another claim by proponents of chemical agriculture is that we wouldn't have enough nitrogen to produce our food without synthetic fertilizer. The paper addressed that too, stating in its abstract:

We also evaluated the amount of nitrogen potentially available from fixation by leguminous cover crops used as fertilizer. Data from temperate and tropical agroecosystems suggest that leguminous cover crops could fix enough nitrogen to replace the amount of synthetic fertilizer currently in use. These results indicate that organic agriculture has the potential to contribute quite substantially to the global food supply, while reducing the detrimental environmental impacts of conventional agriculture.

In a press release, one of the researchers from the study summed up their findings perfectly:

Perfecto said the idea that people would go hungry if farming went organic is "ridiculous."

"Corporate interest in agriculture and the way agriculture research has been conducted in land grant institutions, with a lot of influence by the chemical companies and pesticide companies as well as fertilizer companies—all have been playing an important role in convincing the public that you need to have these inputs to produce food," she said.

There's a lot of pressure right now to pass a new bill that would "help" the world's 1 billion hungry people, focusing on those in S. Asia and Africa, by promoting chemical agriculture in those parts of the world. We are devastating our own environment with these techniques, and doing so with little benefit to our farmers. Let's not export our bad ideas.

Tagged as: agriculture, organic food, corporate propaganda