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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Big Ag's Big Lie About Organic Food
  • Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:29:40 -0600


http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.dailykos.com//140847/
Big Ag's Big Lie About Organic Food
By Jill Richardson, Daily Kos
Posted on June 23, 2009, Printed on June 29, 2009

You've been told a lot of lies, but right now I'm going to focus on
just one.

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:

Organics yield less/much less/half as much as conventional ag.
Organics can never feed the world.
We need pesticides/fertilizer/biotech to feed the world.
American farmers need to feed the world.
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).
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.





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