Organic agriculture faces difficult challenges: high production costs, difficult pest control and highly competitive imports.
Yet organic advocates pursue an agenda best described as anti-corporate and anti-technology, which is mostly unrelated to organic farming problems.
As a prominent organic farmer told me recently, “those advocates are sure not helping me.”
First some disclosure: I farm, but not organically, and rarely eat organic foods. They are more expensive with no net health benefits and mixed environmental benefits, in my view.
However, many Canadians disagree and spend $2 billion on organic food a year. More of it should be grown at home because 80 percent is imported. I applaud efforts to do so.
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Worrisome drop in grain prices
Prices had been softening for most of the previous month, but heading into the Labour Day long weekend, the price drops were startling.
To learn more, I attended the recent Guelph Organic Conference, which organizers say is the largest organic conference in Canada.
I actually attended two different conferences at the same time.
In one room were the organic farmers, marketers and advisers. The audience heard valuable information about marketing, soil fertility and controlling weeds, diseases and insects.
A top grower said he works about every day from April through early summer cultivating for weed control — often eight or more times per field. The money he saved from not buying herbicides is spent on farm equipment. His diesel bill is probably large.
Management of soil fertility, especially phosphate, is difficult. Some organic pest problems have no good answers at all.
Consumer demand has grown or at least held its own while Canadian organic grain production has declined, mainly because of high production costs and volatile organic grain prices. Organic contracts for the 2013 harvest are more than double the price for non-organic production, but expanded production is not expected.
Canadian demand is supplied increasingly from Chinese and Indian imports. We buy the grain their own hungry people cannot afford.
Contamination with genetically modified grain seems a secondary issue: up to two loads rejected per buyer per year, they said.
That’s partly because some organic growers plant non-organic seed to cut costs.
Speakers at this session didn’t say anything about non-organic agriculture. They were classy, genuine farmers and dealers.
The topics and tenor in the “other” conference were totally different. Organic farming problems were all but ignored.
Speakers boasted about organic agriculture being “pesticide free.” There was no mention of registered but potentially hazardous organic pesticides such as copper soleplate and rotenone.
But opposition to pesticides was nothing like that directed against GM technology. Vandana Shiva, a prominent Indian activist who condemns the Green Revolution and compares farmers who grow GM crops to rapists, was called an agricultural visionary.
The discredited work of French researcher Eric Séralini about supposed links between GM corn and tumours in rats was cited as gospel. There was no mention of its rejection by major food safety authorities and senior scientists around the globe.
Nothing was said about permitted uses for GM organisms in Canadian organic production, as specified in Canadian organic standards, such as the use of an enzyme from GM bacteria to make organic cheese.
There was no discussion about other technology permitted in organic production, such as genetic variation created by exposure to intense radiation and mutagenic chemicals, which is also called “genetically modified” under Canadian law.
One topic ignored in all the sessions I attended was microbial contamination, despite organic crop production’s high dependence on manure applications, especially for near-soil crops such as spinach.
According to the now famous Mark Lynas, three trillion meals containing GM ingredients have now been consumed globally with not a single illness attributable to the technology, while microbial contamination of organic food has killed many. Yet the organic advocates attack the former and ignore the latter.
Mainstream media, uncritical champions of organic culture for many years, are now asking the tough questions and digging deeper.
A Stanford University story about the largely non-health advantages of organic food swept the globe in late 2012. The same was true for the confessions of Lynas, a former anti-GM activist, in early 2013.
Misguided organic advocacy groups are doing a great job of setting up organic agriculture for these attacks while neglecting the real problems of the growers. Organic farmers need and deserve better.
