Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Organic

Organic Food not Nutritionally Better than Conventional

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passion fruit yeppoon 2009A SYSTEMATIC review of literature over 50 years finds no evidence for superior nutritional content of organic produce.

There is no evidence that organically produced foods are nutritionally superior to conventionally produced foodstuffs, according to a study published today in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Consumers appear willing to pay higher prices for organic foods based on their perceived health and nutrition benefits, and the global organic food market was estimated in 2007 to be worth £29 billion (£2 billion in the UK alone). Some previous reviews have concluded that organically produced food has a superior nutrient composition to conventional food, but there has to date been no systematic review of the available published literature.

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Whale Meat as a Western Taboo

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It’s free-range, organic and tastes like an exceptionally tender eye fillet.  I am referring to the whale meat, lightly roasted in black pepper, I enjoyed Tuesday night in Tokyo.       

 

The Japanese delegates at the conference I am attending here in Tokyo thought it unusual I was keen to try whale. 

 

“Its taboo for Westerners,” was one remark.  

 

Of course whale is not on the menu here at the New Otani Hotel, but it is available downtown.    It was a New Zealand friend, David, a computer programmer who has lived in Tokyo five years now, who took me to the restaurant that served whale.  

 

Like me he has no respect for the high profile anti-whaling positions of our respective countries or the idea that some food should be taboo.

 

The word taboo was a discovery and addition to the English language from Captain James Cook.  Visiting the Pacific island of Tonga in 1777, the Captain noted in his journal that ‘taboo’ signifies a thing is forbidden.   

 

The emergence of whale meat as taboo is a hallmark of the arbitary and religious nature of modern environmentalism.  

  

 

 

Little Whale Steaks, Tokyo, September 9, 2008
Little Whale Steaks, Tokyo, September 9, 2008

 

Fishers Snagged: Not Farmed, Then Not Organic

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According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times the market for organic foods continues to grow with sales reaching US$13.8 billion in 2005 compared with US$3.6 billion in 1997.

But there’s not much ‘organic seafood’ about because of problems with definitions and also what fish eat.

Now I would have thought a wild Atlantic salmon would automatically qualify as organic. But according to the US Agriculture Department to be organic you need to be farmed: read the full story here including that: “Environmentalists rightly argue that many farm-raised fish live in cramped nets in conditions that can pollute the water, and that calling them organic is a perversion of the label. Those who catch and sell wild fish say that their products should be called organic and worry that if they are not, fish farmers will gain a huge leg up.”

A New Year’s Resolution: No More Organic Food

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Joe Fattorini writes in The (Glasgow)Herald about his new year’s resolution which is to give up eating organic food:

It’s self-indulgent, wasteful and frankly immoral. But you know how it is. I was swept along with the trend, and it felt good at the time. But I don’t want to be a hypocrite. So I’m giving up organic food in 2006.

The incident that stiffened my resolve was a white rubber-banded wrist thrusting across me to grab organic apples. Here was someone who professed solidarity with the world’s hungry. Yet they support a farming method that would starve over half the world.

The world was farmed entirely organically as recently as 1900. Since then the global population has increased over 3.5 times.

Unfortunately, the area cultivated for food has merely doubled. Even so, collectively we’re better fed. In the past 50 years, the number who are starving has halved as the population has doubled. This almost miraculous turn of events is down to nitrogen fertilisers.
When it comes to basic needs such as food, the most important development of the last century has been the creation of nitrogen fertilisers. By replacing the nitrogen lost when a crop is harvested you can continue to plant the same plot of land each year without losing productivity. This means the same area of land produces anything up to double the quantity of food.

… So I know what you’re thinking. “Yes, but I don’t want to feed the world organically. Just my precious family.” I’m sorry, but that’s rather along the same lines as: “I know they guzzle petrol like there’s no tomorrow and are far more likely to kill pedestrians. But my family is special. I really need a beast of an SUV with spinning alloy wheels and DVD players in the headrests.”

At the very least, in a country like ours that produces excess food, organic farming robs land that might otherwise be used to promote bio-diversity. That’s because organic fields need to be left fallow, growing leguminous crops or livestock whose faeces can be used to return nitrogen to the soil. Yes, you read that correctly. The inefficiencies of organic land use make it less environmentally friendly than conventional farming whose efficiencies mean we can return land to nature. But there’s a more sinister perspective. In our lifetime we’ll see global population top 10 billion. We’re lucky it won’t be more.

That alone means finding 35% more calories to feed the world. On decreasingly fertile land. But if we are self-indulgently to insist that we are so important that we should be fed organically, with its yields some 20% to 50% lower, that can only put an additional, unnecessary strain on feeding the planet. Every organic mouthful makes it more difficult to feed the most vulnerable. As the distinguished Indian plant biologist CS Prakash put it: “The only thing sustainable about organic farming in the developing world is that it sustains poverty and malnutrition.”

Now if this all makes you feel a little gloomy, then I’m delighted to report that like all the best resolutions, giving up organic food makes you feel better almost immediately. I already feel freed from the hypocrisy. Organic food sales have doubled since 2000. According to Mintel the greatest growth is currently among “lower-income consumers” and those concerned about the health impact of pesticide use in conventional farming.

But wait a minute. Organic food – because it’s so inefficient to produce – is considerably more expensive than conventionally farmed food. Yet it brings no health benefits and doesn’t even taste better. If it did, then the Advertising Standards Authority wouldn’t have upheld complaints against the Soil Association for describing organic as “healthier” than conventionally farmed food. Or as the Food Standards Agency put it in 2004: “Organic food is not significantly different in terms of food safety and nutrition from food produced conventionally.”

… I can see a few hackles rising at the suggestion that organic food is a “middle-class indulgence”. And you’re right. It’s more a brand, or perhaps a religion. “Organic” sits up there with McDonald’s, Microsoft, Starbucks, Tesco, Shell and Lucky Strike as one of the great brands of the twentieth century.

Read the full article here: http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/53522.html
Published in the Glasgow Herald on 3rd January, 2006

Talking Up Chuck Benbrook To Talk Down GM

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Imagine meeting a person who was once a top advisor to American Presidents Jimmy Carter, George Bush Senior and also Bill Clinton! He would have to have been rather special to have survived both sides of politics for that long as a top advisor.

According to Michael Thomson writing in The Land this week (pg 24) and also ABC Online, Dr Chuck Benbrook is that special – he was an advisor to those three US Presidents.

Dr Benbrook is currently touring Australia at the invitation of The GeneEthics Network with the tour sponsored in large part by the organic food industry. Organic Wholefoods, Organic Wholesalers, NASAA, Select Organic, Eden Seeds, Four Leaf, Lovely, Australian Certified Organic, Biological Farmers of Australia, Melrose Health Supplies, PureHarvest and The Diggers Club all feature as sponsors on the flyer advertising Benbrook’s visits to all capital cities.

I heard Benbrook speak this morning in Brisbane. He had apparently just come from a meeting with senior Queensland government officials including Deputy Premier Anna Bligh.

The key message on the GeneEthics flyer is that GM Crops have been a failure in the US and “Australia can’t afford to repeat America’s costly GM mistakes!” At the meeting Benbrook claimed he wasn’t anti-GM just against first generation GM crops particularly GM soy. He then preceeded to tell the audience the technology is risky.

They say when you are writing for a newspaper you should put the really important information in the first couple of paragraphs, given The Land piece and ABC Online claim Benbrook has been a top advisor to US Presidents in their opening paragraphs – well this is what gives the guy so much authority. This is why we should trust and believe him – this is why we should be suspicious of GM food crops. This is why someone is paying Benbrook to fly all over Australia and visit every state capital and Canberra for two weeks to tell us about GM.

What sort of positions would you expect a top advisor to three Presidents to have held? He would surely need to have been much more than an advisor to a congressman or Executive Director of the Board of Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences. Is it enough to have been Executive Director of a Subcommittee of a House Committee on Agriculture or Agriculture Staff Expert on the Council for Environmental Quality?

Benbrook has obviously worked within the Washington bureacracy, but I am not sure it is appropriate to claim “Top Advisor to three Presidents”?

The only really remarkable piece of information I could find out about Benbrook was that he was sacked from the Board on Agriculture at the National Academy of Science.

A piece in the journal Science (Vol 250, No. 4985, Nov. 30, 1990, pg 1202) refers to Chuck as Charles and explains:

“Charles Benbrook, a hard-charging critic of agribusiness who for 7 years has headed the Board of Agriculture at the National Academy of Sciences, is leaving his job. According to several sources, he was handed his walking papers by academy president Frank Press and given less than a month to clear out.”

So what has Benbrook done since he left the Institute in 1990? According to the Pew Charitable Trust he runs Benbrook Consulting Services, a small consulting firm based in Sandpoint, Idaho.

I would rather discuss the pros and cons of GM food crops – the social, environmental and economic costs and benefits. But it seems our newspapers and organic industry prefer to talk up the credentials of a consultant from Idaho on the basis he is good at talking down GM.

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The piece in Science can be downloaded by clicking here. It is about 270 kbs.

When in Drought, Grow Organic

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My friend Dr David Tribe from Melbourne University has just started his own blog, click here. Congratulations David!

I was scrolling through his recent posts and there is a great paper on organic farming, download file. Well it provides good quantitative comparative data on yields, nitrogen inputs, and nitrogen leaching for conventional and organic systems for trials in Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia.

It is a pity they don’t include the data from the Rodale Institute in the US.

Scott Kinnear, a Director of The Biological Farmers of Australia and Victorian Greens Candidate, and others, often quote the trials from the institute as evidence that that organic farming systems are superior to conventional systems and in particular that they give a higher yield.

Indeed Kinnear claims as much on page 9 of a recent speech titled How Organics and Slow Food will Feed The World:

“Organic farming in the US yields comparable or better than
conventional industrial farming, especially in times of drought”.

The only example of this that I can find is a paper titled The performance of organic and conventional cropping systems in an extreme climate year, by Don Lotter, Rita Seidel, and Bill Liebhardt of the Rodale Insitute. They write:

In five out of six of the drought years during the 21 year experiment, corn yields were significantly higher in the organic treatments than those in the conventional treatment. The 1999 drought year being far more severe, results were more complex, and showed differences between the two organic crop systems.
Rainfall during the 1999 crop season totaled only 41% of average. The critical month of July had only 15 mm of rain, about 17% of the average. Crop yields were reduced to less than 20% in corn and 60% in soybean. Most farmers would have abandoned such a dismal corn crop; however, this kind of stress can expose differences between crop management systems that mild stress conditions cannot.

So if you don’t mind a really dismal yield, and if in drought, well you could go organic.

Otherwise, as the GMO Pundit, Dr Tribe says:

A review of farming performance in practice shows that for the same crop yield, organic farming requires more land than is needed with conventional farming with synthetic fertiliser.