Organic food itself is a fraud as it doesn't actually mean anything. If anything they should just ban the label entirely.
Non-organic vineyards in our area had barren earth or gravel under the stalks as they used weedkillers regularly. In contrast, we practiced “turf flipping” where we would, with clever machine and hard work, turn the soil over to smother weeds. The soil was alive and rich with the longest earthworms I’ve ever seen. This took incomparably more time than spraying chemicals but we believed in the mission. And the extra money from labeling it organic didn’t come close to covering the extra effort.
In some cases at least, the label means something.
Case in point is Sri Lanka's current economic meltdown (1) - which is to a significant extent attributed to the government going all in on organic, banning fertilizers resulting in yields plummeting - less food to go around and no longer self sufficient, exports plumetting so less hard cash to buy oil, medicines no way to provide power, transport etc
(1) https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farmi...
Switching suddenly, and by means of a ban -- what could go wrong?
A free-market gradualistic solution would be to cap pesticide and fertilizer imports and auction licenses to buy them.
For instance, if without inorganic fertilizers, yields plummet 20-30%, does that mean we need more forest land converted to farming tonkeep people fed? Do 20-30% more people have to work in agriculture vs today and stop working in cities? What would that do to urban services? What similarly are the trade offs from using fertilizers for land? What happens over time?
If there are good research papers that explore the total system costs and economic impacts?
And this right here is why people are skeptical about organic produce.
There seems to be two kinds:
- The kind that doesn't scale (so any would be environmental benefits would stop existing if it became more than a niche)
- The kind that scales because they're abusing loose definitions of "organic" to charge the end customer more money.
Organic farming has external benefits as well, or rather the absence of negative externalities like harmful chemical run off and less water usage. These aren’t as easily noticed by just looking at market dynamics currently.
All that being said, my understanding is that organic farming isn’t the right choice in all cases. It’s definitely more labor and sometimes resource or land intensive. It takes a certain wealthy consumer base to support it.
> Citations needed.
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food#Health_and_safety
Quote for you:
There is little scientific evidence of benefit or harm to human health from a diet high in organic food, and conducting any sort of rigorous experiment on the subject is very difficult.
And personal health was never the point of organic farming.
Many people who buy organic food expect a reduced pesticide load (particularly in secondary products like eggs and dairy), but the main point is to support the organic farms and organic farmers, with the hope that the practice will spread.
While the label "organic" may have been hijacked and rendered largely meaningless by government agencies like the FDA and their corporate masters, there is indeed a difference between food produced using chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics and growth hormones (among other things), and food that is produced naturally without these drugs, poisons and other additives. That some people dispute the fact that there is a measurable difference in health outcomes when consuming food produced "naturally" vs food produced with a host of drugs, chemicals and poisons is irrelevant to the fact that the word "organic" actually has a meaning, and people who choose to consume food produced without drugs, chemicals and poisons should be free to do so (even if this is considered silly by those who believe that the drugs, chemicals and poisons used to produce their food have no measurable effects).
AOED definition of chemical: a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, especially artificially: _never mix disinfectant with other chemicals | controversy arose over treatment of apples with this chemical._
Even if that was his point, it is still completely wrong.
>It is impossible to produce food without chemicals.
If you live in the northern hemisphere, it is only June. Go plant a handful of pumpkin and watermelon seeds in a patch of fertile earth. Add no "chemicals" of any kind - man made or otherwise. Return in 4 months and you will very likely see food that has been grown with absolutely no chemicals at all.
It is impossible to grow food without chemicals.
In this particular thread, my first contribution was too flippant to be constructive, so I deserved the down-vote. But I wasn't being intellectually dishonest.
Discussing individual chemicals by name is inefficient, confusing and almost certainly requires scientific citations to be remotely worthy of discussion.
Going by groups of chemicals is a bit better, but then citations are largely not applicable.
There are no synonyms or near synonyms. The dictionary definition of ”chemical” (noun), however, is explicitly clear:
1 : a substance obtained by a chemical process or producing a chemical effect
2 : a drug
I posit that the person saying ”chemical” is not being lazy, they are being scientifically accurate while enabling rational discussion.
It’s anyone saying ”but EVERYTHING is chemicals” that needs to check the dictionary.
What they decided was to ignore every detail of well understood methods to manage transition from one system to another. Their failure is wholly a product of that choice.