How Growing Green Sows Death

I wanted to address the continuously growing organic food movement. Several of my closest friends are  avid supporters, and in recent years hearing them talk about their increasingly organic lifestyles made me wish that I too could be so committed. This summer I was lucky enough to land an internship with an NGO that devotes itself to reducing and eliminating hunger throughout the world. I thought that this would be a great way for me to learn about the wonders of "growing green" and get me on board with this faction of the environmentalist movement. However, I found myself feeling increasingly disappointed with organic food activists (by organic I mean food that is grown without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or genetic modifications). Here's why:

Allow me to introduce the man who, as it has been said, "saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived:" Dr. Norman E. Borlaug. Father of the Green Revolution, Dr. Borlaug is the architect of the miracle wheat that increased food production first in Mexico and later in Latin America and Asia. This single innovation allowed for the world to feed the rapidly expanding populations of nations in these areas (think India) and others across the globe. His only goal in life was to save the lives of those that face the threat of starvation on a daily basis. And to a large extent, he did just that.

However, Borlaug's success was not achieved without circumventing many trials. During the last years of his life, Borlaug focused on the situation in Africa. The prevalence of starvation is so widely know that we often find ourselves making colloquial references to it (Mom: there are starving children in Africa without any food at all, so EAT THOSE LIMA BEANS), without perhaps fully grasping the  direness the situation. For example, environmentalists frequently oppose the construction of infrastructure, due to its environmental impact. Here was Borlaug's response:

"These extremists who are living in great affluence...are saying that poor people shouldn't have roads. I would like to see them not just go out in the bush backpacking for a week but be forced to spend the rest of their lives out there and have their children raised out there. Let's see whether they'd have the same point of view then. I should point out that I was originally trained as a forester. I worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and during one of my assignments I was reputed to be the most isolated member of the Forest Service, back in the middle fork of the Salmon River, the biggest primitive area in the southern 48 states. I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it's wrong to force poor people to live that way."

This is the problem I see with the environmental movement, particularly the organic movement. It is elitist, to the point of condemning others to death by starvation in order to satisfy the movement's moral obligation to opposing technologies and innovations that it does not understand. Now I am perhaps one of the most insufferable, privileged, elitist white males you will ever have the misfortune to meet, but that does not mean I am incapable of recognizing my own mistakes. Or that I find it acceptable to oppose the production of foods that could save millions if not billions of peoples' lives so that I can sleep knowing that the salad I had for dinner used lettuce grown organically. As Borlaug said, it is plain "elitism, and the American people are vulnerable to this, too. I'm talking about the extremists here and in Western Europe....In the U.S., 98 percent of consumers live in cities or urban areas or good-size towns. Only 2 percent still live out there on the land. In Western Europe also, a big percentage of the people live off the farms, and they don't understand the complexities of agriculture. So they are easily swayed by these scare stories that we are on the verge of being poisoned out of existence by farm chemicals. Bruce Ames, the head of biochemistry at Berkeley, has analyzed hundreds and hundreds of foods, including all of the basic ones that we have been eating from the beginning of agriculture up to the present time. He has found that they contain trace amounts of many completely natural chemical compounds that are toxic or carcinogenic, but they're present in such small quantities that they apparently don't affect us."

So what is the problem with organic food? There isn't one. There is not one thing about food that is grown organically that will cause you more harm than non-organic food. Except not having any of it to eat. Indeed, that will kill you. And this is the problem with organic food. It is not reasonable, practical, or even remotely advisable for the world to attempt to grow food organically. In order to achieve this misbegotten dream, we would be forced to cultivate VAST tracks of land that are currently off limits to protect all those other environmentalist concerns such as biodiveristy. Again let us hear from Borlaug: 

"It is because we use farmland so effectively now that President Clinton was recently able to set aside another 50 or 60 million acres of land as wilderness areas. That would not have been possible had it not been for the efficiency of modern agriculture. In 1960, the production of the 17 most important food, feed, and fiber crops--virtually all of the important crops grown in the U.S. at that time and still grown today--was 252 million tons. By 1990, it had more than doubled, to 596 million tons, and was produced on 25 million fewer acres than were cultivated in 1960. If we had tried to produce the harvest of 1990 with the technology of 1960, we would have had to have increased the cultivated area by another 177 million hectares, about 460 million more acres of land of the same quality--which we didn't have, and so it would have been much more. We would have moved into marginal grazing areas and plowed up things that wouldn't be productive in the long run. We would have had to move into rolling mountainous country and chop down our forests. President Clinton would not have had the nice job of setting aside millions of acres of land for restricted use, where you can't cut a tree even for paper and pulp or for lumber. So all of this ties together."

And this with the marvels of modern pesticides, fertilizers, and genetic engineering. Yet organic activists claim that it is unnecessary. I promise if I could put it better than Borlaug I would:

"Even if you could use all the organic material that you have--the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues--and get them back on the soil, you couldn't feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests. At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There's a lot of nonsense going on here. If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it's up to them to make that foolish decision. But there's absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as plants are concerned, they can't tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers believe that it's better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It's a free society. But don't tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That's when this misinformation becomes destructive."

And I couldn't agree more. The claim that organic food has more nutrition value than non-organic food has been tested again and again (with many of the studies being subject to bias in favor of one or the other) but the results have been inconclusive at best. One such study found these results:

"After harvest, results showed that there were no differences in the levels of major and trace contents in the fruit and vegetables grown using the three different methods. Produce from the organically and conventionally grown crops were then fed to animals over a two year period and intake and excretion of various minerals and trace elements were measured. Once again, the results showed there was no difference in retention of the elements regardless of how the crops were grown."

Another study reached this conclusion: "From a systematic review of the currently available published literature, evidence is lacking for nutrition-related health effects that result from the consumption of organically produced foodstuffs."

Now some argue that organic food tastes better, smells better, or just plain old looks better. To that I say "hurray, eat it before it goes bad" because it will, quickly, and people without food will never get the chance to eat it anyway. There are plenty of issues concerning food production and the use of chemicals in any form. There is of course a reason why we don't pour RoundUp onto our morning cereal. Chemical fertilizers can damage water supplies, as can pesticides in addition to finding their ways into our bodies when we eat chemical-treated food. All the more reason to use them responsibly, and find better ways of using them. Or better yet, turn to genetic engineering to help.

But of course this runs into some of the greatest obstacles. Europe has largely banned any such crops, and there are concerns about genetic engineering from just about every angle. To the moral opposition:

"As a matter of fact, Mother Nature has crossed species barriers, and sometimes nature crosses barriers between genera--that is, between unrelated groups of species. Take the case of wheat. It is the result of a natural cross made by Mother Nature long before there was scientific man. Today's modern red wheat variety is made up of three groups of seven chromosomes, and each of those three groups of seven chromosomes came from a different wild grass. First, Mother Nature crossed two of the grasses, and this cross became the durum wheats, which were the commercial grains of the first civilizations spanning from Sumeria until well into the Roman period. Then Mother Nature crossed that 14-chromosome durum wheat with another wild wheat grass to create what was essentially modern wheat at the time of the Roman Empire. Durum wheat was OK for making flat Arab bread, but it didn't have elastic gluten. The thing that makes modern wheat different from all of the other cereals is that it has two proteins that give it the doughy quality when it's mixed with water. Durum wheats don't have gluten, and that's why we use them to make spaghetti today. The second cross of durum wheat with the other wild wheat produced a wheat whose dough could be fermented with yeast to produce a big loaf. So modern bread wheat is the result of crossing three species barriers, a kind of natural genetic engineering."

In addition, I find it much worse to force animals to copulate again and again to create something like the poodle. And I will promise you, a poodle is no more natural than drought-resistant wheat. Take the story of "golden rice." Ingo Potrykus worked for years to create a rice that could produce Vitamin A. This alone could drastically improve the plight of malnourished children in some of the most populous regions of the world. However, critics in Europe and the US fought against such innovations. While I would love to repost the entire article (it gives a look at both the concerns and rewards of genetic engineering) this post has grown overlong. Here is just one paragraph for those that didn't click the link:

"To Wambugu, the flap in the U.S. and Europe over genetically engineered crops seems almost ludicrous. In Africa, she notes, nearly half the fruit and vegetable harvest is lost because it rots on the way to market. 'If we had a transgenic banana that ripened more slowly," she says, "we could have 40% more bananas than now.' Wambugu also dreams of getting access to herbicide-resistant crops. Says she: 'We could liberate so many people if our crops were resistant to herbicides that we could then spray on the surrounding weeds. Weeding enslaves Africans; it keeps children from school.'"

And perhaps that sums it up best. Organic food, besides being literally more expensive, has hidden costs, just like so many other things in the world. It is not possible to have organically grown food and a world full of healthy and prospering people. And that is where I draw the line. Next time when you think that by buying organic you are saving the world, think about those that are not lucky enough to have your privilege position in the world. Buy the regular food, give it a thorough washing, and donate the money you saved to institutions that are trying to come up with better solutions.

So, what do you think?