Credit: Jim Wehtje/Photolibrary
TO GET HIGH YIELDS from food crops requires disturbing nature to deliver just what the crops need. First off, crops need fertiliser, which is often nitrogen in the form of nitrate and ammonia, because most plants can't draw nitrogen directly from the atmosphere. (Legumes are a famous exception – their root nodules hold bacteria that turn atmospheric nitrogen into nitrate.) Second, there has to be a way of stopping all the other robust plant and insect species from competing with or consuming your crop.
Non-organic farmers make use of chemicals to achieve these goals. Just prior to World War I, German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch learned to make ammonia synthetically. Their chemical reaction is still used today to produce more than 450 million tonnes of artificial fertiliser per year, and sustains the agriculture which feeds about
60 per cent of the Earth's population.
Organic farmers source nitrate from manures, gradually broken down by soil organisms. They use only naturally-occurring products to control pests, such as the elements sulphur and copper; pyrethrins and rotenone (both made by plants); BT spray and Spinosad (both made by bacteria). However, these natural pesticides are not harmless. For instance, sulphur irritates the lungs, and rotenone has been shown to cause Parkinson's disease in rats.
Certified organic farmers (those accredited by one or more of the six voluntary associations, from the Organic Growers of Australia to the National Association for Sustainable Agriculture) also subscribe to a code that includes kinder treatment of animals, a commitment to sustainability and environmental health, fair trade and social equity. But many of these practises are also pursued by 'non-organic' farmers. The core distinguishing belief of organic farming is that 'natural is better'. But does this conviction belief stand up to scientific scrutiny?
RACHEL CARSON'S 1962 book Silent Spring unleashed public concern about the dangers of synthetic chemicals, not just to birds and animals, but to humans. The incidence of human cancers were rising and suspicion fell on man-made farming chemicals.
There's no doubt exposure to high doses of pesticides is hazardous to health: in countless studies, high doses given to laboratory animals have caused birth defects, sterility, tumours, and damaged organs. But as any toxicologist will tell you, most chemicals – natural or synthetic, are toxic at high doses. The question is not, "do pesticides cause cancer?" Rather, do the small traces of pesticide residue we eat in our food really cause a problem?
Scientists are unable to test these chemicals directly on humans, so they use rats instead. To establish the maximum dose considered to be safe for humans, they find a dose that's completely safe for rats. Then they divide it by 100. Testing by Australia's national regulator, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, shows that pesticide levels measured in food are either well below the recommended maximum dose or are completely undetectable.
People live about 80 years longer than rats: that's 80 years longer for pesticide cocktails to accumulate and wreak havoc. Even so, it turns out that a lifetime's consumption of synthetic pesticides is a drop in the ocean compared to the natural pesticides we consume from the plants we eat. Plants have evolved a vast pharmacopeia of chemical weapons, and we consume many of these 'weapons' daily: caffeine in coffee, solanine in potatoes and psoralens in celery, to name just three.
Even the freshest organic apples – as well as other plant foods – contain natural compounds which, when extracted and given to rats in high doses, cause tumours. Toxicologist Bruce Ames of the University of California became famous in the 1970s for sounding the alarm on the cancer-causing (or carcinogenic) potential of man-made chemicals.
But after testing 'natural' pesticides in rats, he called off the warning. A paper he published in 1990 said it all. Entitled, "Dietary Pesticides (99.99 per cent All Natural)", it reported that in a regular diet, people consume about 10,000 times more natural carcinogens than synthetic ones. According to Ames, a single cup of coffee contains more natural carcinogens than a year's worth of the pesticide residues eaten on fruit and vegetables.
"Organic" food... laff...
"Organic" food is the new snake oil. The problem is, this nostrum is being wholeheartedly embraced not just by the pretty people and ivory tower elitists, but by governments, and little inconsequentials like actual facts are clearly not going to stand in the way of Politically Correct "progress".
If these whack-jobs have their way, within our lifetimes, we will once again be living in 14th-Century serfdom, complete with a super-privileged ruling class and rampant poverty, death and disease for everyone else. They won't come out and say it, but the fact remains, this IS the earthy-people's long-term goal.
Hoorah to you for adding another voice in the wilderness, and keep up the good work!
BadKarma Reader - have you actually done any real research?
There are the blind, the dumb and then there is the downright stupid! Hey BadKarma reader have you actually ever done any real research or indeed ever even been to the wilderness from which you say you cry?
Perhaps if you care to stop your blubber for long enough to visit www.i-sis.org.uk (and perhaps Ms Finkel could research a bit more non Monsanto backed data to refer to next time) and read...
"Dozens of prominent scientists from seven countries, spanning the disciplines of agroecology, agronomy, biomathematics, botany, chemical medicine, ecology, histopathology, microbial ecology, molecular genetics, nutritional biochemistry, physiology, toxicology and virology, joined forces to launch themselves as an Independent Science Panel on GM at a public conference, attended by UK environment minister Michael Meacher and 200 other participants, in London on 10 May 2003.
The conference coincided with the publication of a draft report, The Case for a GM-free Sustainable World, calling for a ban on GM crops to make way for all forms of sustainable agriculture. This authoritative report, billed as "the strongest, most complete dossier of evidence" ever compiled on the problems and hazards of GM crops as well as the manifold benefits of sustainable agriculture, is being finalised for release 15 June 2003."
Are all these scientists 'earthy-people' too? Funny that, I thought we all lived on this one earth... maybe you are from a different planet!
GM food
I totally agree, the proof that GM food is bad in many ways are there and we have to open our eyes and do something. That dossier of evidence, where scientist and authority worked on, is the proof that GM free food is the way to go and that we are working against our own good. To produce more is great, but what when our health is at stake. Quality over quantity they said? I'm pretty much certain that is we worked as hard to find ways to solve current agricultural problems in an ecological way, we would have less pollution, better global health and probably a lot less problems with new disease popping "out of nowhere"!
Just my 2 cents..
Vivi Peterson
Sustainable agriculture - a myth
No matter how, where or with what methods agriculture, i.e remove nature and plant whatever is unsustainable. The question then remains how to feed the current most devastating pests of the planet -us! Fiddling around the edges with GM, no GM organic, no organic etc etc is just that - fiddling around the edges of the population problem.
How about some of the 'actual facts' on GM?
Interesting that the first comment listed here is such a strong advocate of the article...hmm? Have you ever even looked into the 'actual facts' that you speak of? I found a very informative pod cast from Bob Phelps of Gene Ethics on wonderfulworldmedia.net. Check it out and then get back to me! The panels on lifting GM bans are sitting right now in Australia - do you even care about what you eat or are you a Mackers consumer? If they lift the ban on GM in Australia in Feb 2008, eventually no one will even have the choice of eating clean non-GM contaminated food and articles like this one are a travesty of mis-reporting.
A rather disappointing effort from a magazine that I had thought would know better.
Organic vegetables, beef, chicken, milk?
I don't agree with the last comment. Even if i respect your opinion, there was no way in the past to see if that snake oil was actually working. But today, scientists from all over the world proved that antibiotics and growth hormones will be bad for us in the long term. Think about kraft dinner and doritos, that just can't be good for out health ;) If we eat modified vegetables, beef, chicken, even milk, it's for only one reason, it's because right now we're putting money before health. Big corporation don't have enough opposition right now, so they do what they want.
Patty
You are ignorant
Organic food means that your body is not ingesting, storing, and altering DDT or other toxic chemicals. Thanks to non 'earthy-people' (by the way you also need the earth to survive) the meat industry is allowed to flourish and now every one who does not hunt for their own meat has to worry about not only whether their vegetables and fruits are genetically modified (which by the way there are no regulations for in the U.S.) but also what types of artificial hormones have been crudely injected (and by injected I mean force fed) into the animals scheduled for mass slaughter. It is sick. If you think that mass produced food is better, more environmentally friendly or nutritious I advise you to seriously reconsider.
Laff and a Haff!
BadKarma (pretty much says it all really!) I find it very ironic that you have been able to connect pastoral traditions to serfdom- You are defiantly suffering from a patriotic bout of paranoia! I see around me everyday, extremely sick, overweight people that have been cut down at a time in their lives that they should be at their healthiest, because of a misguided and abusive system that has no place in nature. If you want to understand what it is like to be subjugated, you need to look at a system that prevents one from having a choice as to how the very thing that they consume is produced!
Organic food
The cafeteria at Monsanto has banned genetically engineered food at the insistence of Monsanto employees. That's a pip, eh? The Bt plants that are so lauded in the article are responsible for the deaths of thousands of sheep , goats and cattle in India after they grazed on Bt cotton.Dr Finkel speaks of Australian farmers and 'modern farming techniques w/ safer pesticides that allow for living soil. Perhaps that is true in Australia, but my first hand experience is that you can't grow healthy food in sick soil. And you cannot have healthy soil by dumping tons of petro chemical additives, be it fertiliser(what?) or synthetic pesticides.As for the good Doctor's assertion that organic farming cannot feed the world,I refer her and anyone else interested to the recent University of Michigan study which shows not only can organic supply enough food to feed the world, but that it is the preferrable model for poor and developing countries.
Petro Additives: Say what it is, Urea
I used to work at a Urea Plant.
Urea is an organic chemical, same stuff you piss out every day in the process of eliminating Nitrogen from your system. It is highly soluble, and actually was the founding of organic chemistry when it was first produced from non-organic chemicals in 1828.
It is put on the soil in a dilted form, but chemically is not any different then your own, naturally produced kidney juice.
We are not putting oil on the ground. We are not putting anything on the ground as fertizer that is not naturally produced by every living organism.
One is just far more pure, clean, and easy to control.
The other is crap.
Josh