YOUR HEALTH

 

Organic is not the way

 

Today more and more educated and young people in the North America are embracing eating organic.

 

The organic movement -- which rejects pesticides, insecticides, man-made fertilizers and any genetic modifications (GMO) -- is no longer ‘fringe thinking’ but high profile, receiving space in regular green grocers, supermarket stores and the exclusive Whole Foods chain.

 

General Mills has blinked as well and is going to ensure all ingredients in its Cheerios cereal are GMO free -- to bolster declining cereal sales in an overcrowded market.

 

Yes, organic farming methods go back thousands of years, but today, as in the past it:

 

·        involves intensive labour due to constant manual weeding and hand or simple machine planting and crop collection 

·        has limited success at controlling bugs and disease attacks -- ongoing challenges with few ‘natural’ remedies

·        relies on crop rotation and leaving 1/3 to 1/2 of one’s fields fallow each year or planted with clover or other so-called ‘green manure’  which are left to die and be buried in the soil (See Wikipedia) -- to prevent depletion of soil nutrients

·        and, of course, any scientific genetic modification of food (GMO) is strictly verboten and shunned.

·        Finally, it uses traditional ‘organic fertilizer’ extensively; namely, 'poop' -- mostly from cows, sheep and pigs.

 

The above characteristics automatically result in reduced crop yields by over 1/3, increased spoilage and waste, and higher consumer prices of 10% to 30%. 

 

And the reliance on traditional animal ‘poop’  has revived the incidences of deadly animal E. coli bacteria, a harmless and common bug in animals, but a serious threat to human health and life: when ‘animal manure’ gets in direct contact with crops, vegetables, berries,  or leaks into nearby streams, rivers or wells and contaminates the water supply.   Just Google Walkerton Ontario or check out your local 'food poisoning outbreak' at some banquet hall offering organic fruits or vegetables to hundreds of guests.

 

 
While those who are affluent can afford the much higher food costs; can ignore the waste of arable land; can ignore laboratory tests that have proven organic and non-organic foods have the same nutrients and nutrition levels; and that some 70-80% of all foods sold in North America contain GMOs and have done so for well over a decade without harm ( Time magazine, Jan. 20, 2014, p.15) , the poor and low income of America, and the vast majority of the planets 7 billion people cannot.

 

The very scientific, modern farming improvements that are being shunned -- carefully designed pesticides and insecticides and precision man-made fertilizers (all of which come from natural ingredients), and GMOs (which are tailored to resist drought or excessive rain or bugs or disease) all have greatly increase crop yields and have allowed the West to become abundant in food -- so even our poor can eat.  And these western innovations have transformed food production (See Wikipedia “Green Revolution”) since the 1960s across India, Africa and now China -- so that billions no longer face starvation.

 

Yet educated Westerners are turning their backs on this progress.  They buy into the misguided belief that ‘natural’, ‘old-fashioned’ food is better for our health than foods with human intervention – despite no evidence to support this except, maybe, a placebo effect.

 

If this mindset spread around the world and ‘organic’ returns as the agricultural norm, three things are certain:

 

1. regular famines and starvation would return as has been the case for millennia under the vagaries of nature: drought, pestilence and crop disease

 

2. the world’s population would have to return to numbers that allowed organic farming at best to meet the food needs of the population:  no more than the 1.5 billion as at the start of the 20^th century. 

 

Today, there are 7 billion people.

 

3. and while most people today live in cities and towns and no longer tend the ‘organic’ fields as of old – the manual labour needed for traditional organic food production would require well over 50% of the population to go back to the farm.