PLANK SEPTEMBER 12, 2012
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Has anyone noticed that the war of words over organic food has become nearly as ritualized as a high-school debate-team practice session?
First, there will be a provocation. For example, a few weeks ago scientists at Stanford University published a meta-analysis of food-policy research that concluded that organic foods have no more nutritional value than nonorganic food, if slightly less pesticide residue. Next, organic food advocates will rise to make what forensics professors call the appeal to nature, arguing that nutrition is not the point; the point is to protect plants and animals, including ourselves, from factory farming and toxic chemicals. Then the opposing side (professional contrarians, developmental economists) will stand up. Their counterarguments may be ad hominem, as when New York Times columnist Roger Cohen called the organic food movement “an elitist, pseudoscientific indulgence shot through with hype,” but are usually ad misericordium, that is, based on compassion: Organic farming takes place on too small a scale and won’t solve world hunger any time soon. Resolved: we can save the planet or feed its people.
Is there a less polarized way to think about the future of farming? Jesse H. Ausubel, an environmental scientist who directs the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, thinks he’s found one. You might say he argues from nature as well as compassion. His claim is that high-yield farming, that is, high-tech, non-organic agricultural practices that produce more crops per square foot, is actually kinder to the environment than lower-tech, organic farming. Ausubel insists that his politics are green, but he’s “habitat-oriented,” he told me. “What I’m concerned about is releasing more land from agriculture and letting it revert to nature.”
When Ausubel says revert to nature, he mainly means revert to forest. As he put in a 2006 paper, forests have benefits that are obvious to the eye—a forest “harbors biodiversity, beautifies landscape, and bestows solitude”—but also do things the environment desperately needs. For instance, a forest “anchors soil, slows erosion, and tempers stream flow.” A forest’s most important job, though, at least in the face of global warming, is to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it as plant tissue. (As journalist Jim Robbins writes in his splendid new book on forests, The Man Who Planted Trees, “If the right tree...is planted in the right place, it will store four to five thousand pounds of carbon over its life.”) “We need a lot more regrowth in many more parts of the world,” Ausubel continues, “and for that to happen yields need to continue to rise.”
To talk to or read Ausubel is to experience unexpected uplift, at least if you’re used to the depressive affect perceptible in most environmentalist literature. Ausubel and his collaborators—the most frequent are Paul E Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and Iddo K. Wernick, also of Rockefeller--are fond of cheerful catch phrases like “the Great Reversal” and “the Great Restoration.” The Great Reversal refers to their theory that the worst pressures on our overtaxed planet are actually easing up. As they like to point out, world population growth peaked at about 2 percent between 1965-1970, and has dropped steadily since then. Fertility rates in much of the world have fallen. Around 1980s, the United States used more water per person than ever before, but consumption has lessened since then. “By about 1950,” Ausubel, Waggoner, and Wernick write, “by rapidly lifting the specific productivity of land, the world’s farmers stopped plowing up nature, and the worldwide area of cropland per person began dropping steeply”—from about half a hectare, or roughly half the size of a 400-meter running track, in 1950, to about a quarter hectare in 2000.
Meanwhile, forests have been regrowing at a rapid clip across the country, most abundantly in northeastern states such as New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. In Connecticut, for instance, forests expanded from 29 percent of the state in 1860 to 60 percent in 2002. Other parts of the globe in which forests have been rebounding include industrialized nations such as France, Denmark, Switzerland, Russia, Germany, but also industrializing nations in Asia, such as China, Japan, India and Vietnam, and even, counterintuitively, in less industrialized parts of Central America and the Caribbean, such as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. (Its neighbor Haiti, of course, remains one of the most deforested spots on the planet.)
Given the Great Reversal, Ausubel et alia ask, “could we envision a Great Restoration?” Returning acres of farmland to “wilderness or wilder uses,” Ausubel says, will depend on whether farmers around the world get smarter about agriculture—whether they master what he calls “precision farming.” Higher yields will come when they adopt twenty-first-century techniques, such as instantaneous application of rapidly improving weather forecasting, better seeds, and closer spacing of them. (Will denser planting hurt the soil? Ausubel says no. Among other things, the shade of a bumper crop helps keep weeds from growing and insects from flourishing, which means smaller doses of pesticides and herbicides than are required in more sparsely planted plots.) If genetic modification increases output, Ausubel is all for it. “Humanity has been tinkering with the genetics of plants for 3,000 years or so,” he says. “People are making a strange fuss.”
Ausubel argues that we can greatly reduce the use of fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides, even if he doesn’t recommend getting rid of them altogether. “There’s been a tremendous overmedication” of the soil, he says. “It’s just like with humans. If you go to the doctor and he tells you to take two aspirin, a lot of us will take four or six.” The best thing about the organic movement, he says, is that it serves as “a good reminder to people that maybe you could be using a third of what you’re actually using and get the same results.” Artisanal farming elevates agriculture, he adds, by creating consumers with higher standards and more demanding tastes, just as high-end clothing design electrifies consumers and stimulates the garment industry. “Most calories in the world are going to be mass-produced, just as most clothing is going to be mass-produced,” he says. “But life would be poorer, in an ethical and cultural sense, if we didn’t have farmers’ markets or Jersey tomatoes.”
Ausubel’s optimism is infectious. If you want to get depressed all over again, turn to the United Nations 2011 report, Looking Ahead in Food and Agriculture. Its authors also pin their hopes on more efficient farming on less land, but they’re less sanguine about how easy that will be to achieve. Chances of success plummet particularly steeply in very poor countries with high fertility rates, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, that aren’t about to put a lot of money into research or give small farmers a helping hand. On the upside, though, in places where such investments and policy reforms do occur, the report adds to Ausubel’s list a whole slew of neat breakthroughs: better irrigation, better grain storage, more sophisticated plant physiology, informatics, and biometrics.
Despite the decline in the rate of world population growth, U.N. fertility projections still put as many as 10.5 billion people on the globe by the end of the century. (There are nearly 7 billion now.) To feed them all without stripping the earth of forests–Ausubel calls this scenario “Skinhead Earth"–we’ll have to make painful trade-offs between keeping food pure and reducing world hunger. My children roll their eyes when I buy what I know to be overpriced, and they consider underflavored, organic food, but I plan to keep doing it, just because, to be honest about it, I can. I don’t worry too much about my body, which probably won’t pop out any more babies, but I’d just as soon keep those underregulated agricultural chemicals out of theirs. But as public health scholars like to point out, people in rich countries are living longer and are healthier than ever before, so whatever harms these toxins are wreaking upon us, they haven’t reached pandemic levels yet. I guess I’d rather have my children grow up in a cooler, better-fed, more peaceful planet than a totally pristine one.
8 comments
Roger Cohen's editorial shocked me. I hadn't seen that coming. Maybe I should have, from an apologist for the Iranian government. Regardless, overpopulation is going to crush this planet. We need to get a grip. I don't think religious organizations which argue against contraception should be let off the hook either.
- Sophia
September 12, 2012 at 4:55pm
I was raised by fanatical organic gardeners who worshiped organic gardening long before it was cool. As I hated most of my family (especially my parents) it took me a long time to get with the program. Even as a child, I thought there was no serious evidence that organic food has more nutritional value. The main credible argument for it is that it reduces pollutants such as pesticides and herbicides. From an economic/ecological point of view, "factory farming" and "monoculture" has many drawbacks. "Save the earth" is a kind of narcissistic slogan for savethe humans. I have mixed feelings about this. As a human, husband, father, and grandfather I have a sentimental attachment to my family and species. On the other hand, as an (incompetent nihilistic moralistic philosopher), I consider human beings something like walking slimeslugs and the sooner we wipe ourselves off the earth, probably the better. Probably the rats will take over, but I am not sure that would be worse. Oh, well, time for bed and time for the interstellar slugs from Starship Troopers to start landing and consuming.
- skahn
September 13, 2012 at 12:58am
Your description of the Stanford study propagates a misconception about the work repeated by most of the media, which is partially responsible for the response. The study did not, as you write, conclude "that organic foods have no more nutritional value than nonorganic food". Rather, the study (which people can read here http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleID=1355685) concluded that the "published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods". There is a world of difference between the absence of evidence (what the study shows) and evidence of absence (which you state), as the former leaves open the possibility that, with better data, organic foods will indeed be shown to be more nutritious. I should add that I don't think they are more nutritious - I just want to correct the logical flaw you've propagated here.
- mbeisen
September 13, 2012 at 1:37am
I'm not sure where Ms. Shulevitz is going with this article. At first, I'm thinking it's about the market war between 'organic' and 'factory' farming as it relates to toxic run-off, top soil depletion, salinity & VOC increases in fresh water supplies, CAFO effluence, toxic levels of pesticides, herbicides, monoculture invasion of wild lands, the commodification of seed species & GMO trademarking by the likes of Monsanto, Cargill, ADM, and Bayer. But then it goes off and makes a one sentence statement about nutritional value and then spends the remainder talking about reforestation of the east coast and 'Great Restoration' theories put forth by Ausubel as reason to continue concentrated farming practices. For most organic food proponents, it isn't so much about saving the planet (these days) as it is about having food that actually, you know, tastes like food. Restoration of heirloom species that grow well in certain geographic areas, livestock that do better in the heat or cold verses one species. A garden grown, organic tomato actually tastes like a tomato instead of the hot-house variety of red mush grown hydroponically. An heirloom chicken tastes a whole lot better than the water & salt injected 'chicken' that Tyson sells you. The question isn't so much does small-lot organic spinach have more nutrients than factory farm spinach, it's really a question of quality, taste and yes, safety but also looking at land use practices that actually restore the soil qualities that are needed to grow food. One can make the arguments for large scale monoculture farming for corn or wheat, but by the very nature of monoculture farming, the soils in which they are grown become depleted of the nutrients that the soils provide to the plants, as well as maintaining a macrobiotic and microbiotic soil composition that is living soil and not simply dirt. With regards to the re-forestation of the east coast, the majority of that has to do with farming moving further west to the great plains, not because of hydroponic farming and concentrated farming operations. The deforestation of Virginia was related to several factors 1) the use of old growth forest for lumber needs to build the colonies but also because those old growth timbers were cut and shipped back to Europe for use there. The re-forestation of Shenandoah Valley was because the Government used eminent domain to clear the people off the land. Looking at the re-forestation patterns in Southern Maryland and you see where once monoculture tobacco farms caused huge levels of deforestation, erosion and soil loses to such a degree that town of Port Tobacco, MD had to be moved further down stream because the port silted up from the levels of erosion. Surely the reasons, many of the former farm lands that have returned to wild or second growth states of nature are related to several factors that have nothing to do with concentrated farming practices along the east coast. The economics didn't work, certain crops failed, soil erosion issues, deforestation is reduced because slash and burn is no longer practiced, forestry laws and land use laws are put into place, farming is no longer the world of the yeomen, people pick up and move to the city to find work, etc. The issues of land use policies related to farming and livestock production are complicated and require more indepth reporting than an article with a misleading title that does nothing to 'defuse the war of words'.
- singlspeed
September 13, 2012 at 11:06am
singlspeed writes with more expertise and good sense than I do, but I know enough to evaluate his/her comment as excellent. So read it instead of mine. Plant a seed. Plant a garden instead of or beside a lawn. Don't eat pesticides or drink herbicides. Raise chickens instead of dogs; ducks instead of cats; guineau hens instead of fouler birds.
- skahn
September 13, 2012 at 12:22pm
Singlespeed is correct in identifying the complexity of the good/bad elements in "organic" vs "non-organic" foods. For example, by genetic manipulation these days, in months one can insert genes that produce "natural" pesticides in (say) tomatoes or genes that take a tomato with excellent flavor but very thin skin and give it a thicker skin more resistant to mold and physical damage. Both, in fact could be done by natural (thousands of years) or horticultural (many decade) selection. The pesticide insertion has all sorts of known problems, often including cross-binding to mammalian estrogen receptors even if the honey bees are not killed off. The tougher-skin insertion: whats the downside?
- drofnats1
September 13, 2012 at 12:24pm
Sounds like the science is largely settled on organic foods. There will be those that reject the science, but they are the bitter clingers I guess, looking for a glimmer of light that validates their religion, er, fondness of organics. :)
- seattleeng
September 13, 2012 at 6:41pm
Seattleeeng, I guess you miss the points others make coherently and intelligently. I knew 50 years ago as a child of fanatic organic gardening parents that the science was clear on the nutritional value of "organic food"; not much more than ordinary food. These long-obvious " points have only been "refined" a little. The serious issues are economic (how we grow food for the benefit of farmers and consumers); safety (how we protect ourselves against often serious problems such as pesticides, herbicides, contamination (such a e-coli), the likely dangers of Dr. Strangelove-like tinkering with genetic modification, etc.; ecological: dangers of monoculture, dangerous species and breeds invading from places such as China, idiotic use of antiseptics in farm animals (vivid to me after suffering a serious bacterial infection and having problems with dangerous and ineffective antibiotics used on me); and I could go on for 20 pages. You can legitmately argue and debate about these issues, but they are serious issues. The word "organic" has always been an unfortunate slogan word that plays into the hands of people (such as yourself) who want to cry "chicken little" says the sky is falling. It's fine to be a conservative. Please try to be an intelligent conservative.
- skahn
September 13, 2012 at 9:53pm