Organic food is a dangerous toy

Toothy Mother NatureSergey Sumlyonny, Expert magazine

The mass transfer of agriculture to organic farming will only worsen the problem of hunger, without leading to an improvement in the quality of agricultural products, says Alex Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Problems at the Hudson Institute. The correspondent of the "Expert" met with him in Ludwigshafen, Germany, and found out why fresh vegetables are the most dangerous food, and a misunderstood love of nature can turn into a food catastrophe for humanity.

Six billion cows– You are the author of the book "The Truth about Organic Food".

So what, in your opinion, is the truth about the products that are positioned as the most useful for people and safe for the environment? – In 1999, a commission of the Danish government led by the head of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation Svend Bichel published a study.

It studied the question of what will happen to Danish agriculture if it is completely transferred to the norms of organic farming. The conclusions of this commission, headed by a professional ecologist, were so disappointing for the activists of the "organic" movement that they were smeared on forty pages of the report. I had to bring them together again later. So, based on data from 1997, the commission came to the conclusion that if Danish agriculture is converted to organic standards, the overall decline in agricultural production will be 47 percent.

- why?– Because organic farming is much less efficient.

Only manure can be used as fertilizer in it. As a result, the lion's share of the areas currently occupied for growing crops for human consumption would turn into pastures. The area occupied for cereals would be reduced by 30 percent, and the area occupied for potatoes by 70 percent. And the area under the meadows, on the contrary, would grow by 160 percent. Cows would eat what humans should eat. And only to produce manure.

– This is data for Denmark. – If you look at the data on the world, it will be like this.

To replace all nitrogen fertilizers used in the world with cow manure, we will need about six billion cows. There are only 1.6 billion cows in the world today. Further, if we transfer only 40 percent of the existing agriculture to organic farming standards, then it will already be a nightmare, a catastrophe. We will need so much land that we will have to reduce all the forest available on the planet and turn it into one big farm. And a farm, let me remind wildlife lovers, is an unnatural phenomenon, there are no farms in nature at all.

– That is, in your opinion, organic farming is inefficient. – Not only that.

Many studies show that the so-called organic products, firstly, contain more harmful substances, and, secondly, their cultivation itself causes more damage to nature. The fact is that organic farming uses a very limited amount of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and so on. Most of them are very inefficient. For example, organic farms actively use copper sulfate, which is practically the only pesticide allowed in organic farming. But it is extremely toxic. It is three times more toxic than the "inorganic" kaptan or pyraclostrobin used in conventional farms.

Organic farms also use highly toxic pyrethrin, which is an extract from plants of the Asteraceae family. They use sulfur, they spray plants with technical oils to fight insects. Since all these substances are less effective than modern chemicals, they are used in organic farming more often than conventional pesticides, herbicides and insecticides. And in large quantities. If we calculate the damage caused to nature by organic farming, taking into account the concentration, volume and frequency of use of these substances, it will be three to ten times higher than from a conventional farm. Apples grown on an organic farm may contain 1.6 times more pesticide residues than regular apples. Although, of course, these are still negligible volumes.

The threat is real and fictional– Everything you say is the exact opposite of what we used to think about organic farms.

– Of course.

Agricultural chemicals have a bad reputation. Most citizens are confident that fertilizers and chemicals for pest control began to be actively used after the Second World War. But this is not the case. The chemicalization of agriculture began back in the 1880s, that is, in the blessed old years. My God, back then there were really poisonous ways... to fight insects, the fields were treated with nicotine, a deadly poison for people. If you decided to walk through such a field within five to six hours after treatment, then so much poison would get on your skin from the wet grass that you would be guaranteed to die.

But since then, agricultural chemistry has achieved extraordinary success. People have little idea in what tiny concentrations chemistry is used today. Look at this: I have a dog, and from time to time I treat it with a flea remedy – imidacloprid. It is enough to put a few drops on the coat – and the dog will not have fleas for a whole month. After that, the dog lives at home, she sleeps on the couch, she can come and lie on my pillow. I stroke her, play with her, children play with her. And there is no threat to me or to other people. And this is with direct contact! So, the same drug is actively used as an insecticide in the fields, but only its concentration is ten times less! And there is no human contact there. So what is there to be afraid of?

– You can always be afraid of something. But do you, in turn, believe that modern agricultural products are completely safe? – Humanity has never had such means of analyzing food products before, as it has today.

And food has never been so safe before. The problem is that we started thinking about this problem when it had already been solved.

Here's a look: in the USA there is an excellent system of national monitoring of food security. It appeared after two outbreaks of salmonellosis – in 1997 and 2002. Then the poisoning was caused by hot pepper. The Agency for Food and Drug Supervision then created a new control system that allows you to track a lot of single poisonings that occurred in different parts of the country, analyze the so-called gene prints of the microorganisms that caused poisoning, compare the food that the victims consumed, and thus confidently determine the source of poisoning.

For example, we have two poisonings in Iowa, five in Illinois and another ten in Texas. Previously, we would never have found a connection between them, but now we know what exactly these people were poisoned with. Twenty or thirty years ago, epidemiological services detected only isolated mass poisoning. Let's say the parishioners of the church had a picnic, someone brought a salad - and everyone came down with poisoning. Great, this case is being registered. But individual poisonings in different states could not be combined into a single picture. Now we can do it. In fact, we came to the kitchen at night, turned on the light, and boom! – cockroaches are running in all directions. This does not mean that there were no cockroaches there before. We just haven't seen them before.

– So poisoning with vegetables and fruits was not uncommon before? – Traditionally, it was believed that most food poisoning occurs when eating milk, meat or eggs.

Now we know that this is not the case. The vast majority of poisoning is caused by vegetables and fruits. The point here is that we heat-treat meat, milk and eggs. We eat the greens raw.

Now the most important thing is: do we have the technology to avoid these poisonings? After all, we cannot make sure that wild birds do not shit on the fields where vegetables grow and do not infect these fields with their pathogenic flora. But we have a technology that allows us to sterilize vegetables and fruits, make them harmless. We invented it a century ago when we invented canning. Today you can open canned meat rolled up a hundred and thirty years ago – and this meat can be eaten. We pasteurize milk. Similarly, we can pasteurize all food. We are already using UV lamps to sterilize lettuce. We can use ionizing radiation to pasteurize other vegetables. Or gamma radiation. We can process vegetables with a gas that kills microorganisms on the surface of vegetables, and then roll these vegetables into hermetic packages.

– Wait, how do you imagine selling such vegetables at all? "Buy fresh vegetables treated with gamma radiation sources"?– These methods of pasteurization of vegetables were developed half a century ago.

All this time they are used to process astronauts' food. Because we don't want our astronauts to fall into orbit with poisoning. This is how food is processed for patients with reduced immunity. For HIV carriers, for example. And so far there is no evidence that this method of processing can be dangerous for humans. In other words, the opponents of this method are afraid of the devil, whom we do not know and who, most likely, does not exist at all. And they prefer a very real and very big devil to him.

The same thing used to happen with pasteurization of milk. Everyone said: what a nightmare, what pasteurization! Today we pasteurize almost all the milk produced, and it is much safer than unpasteurized. Dozens of children are poisoned with unpasteurized milk every year, because their parents believe that it is healthier and healthier, and they are specifically looking for and buying it. I will say this: those who want to reunite with Mother Nature constantly forget that Mother Nature is very toothy.

Cows and manure– I like the imagery of your expressions.

But let's look at other popular ideas about agriculture. My parents, for example, actively fertilized their garden with cow manure. Is this also wrong? – Cow manure is a natural, one might say, the main reservoir for pathogenic microorganisms.

In general, too little research has been done in this area. But, for example, research by the University of Minnesota shows that the probability of catching salmonella from vegetables grown in an organic field is three to five times higher than from ordinary vegetables. A series of spinach poisoning that took place in 2006 is also being tracked down to an organic farm, where the microflora was allegedly introduced by a wild boar. But, you see, all cows are carriers of E. coli 0157. This is their normal state. Therefore, in order to catch intestinal poisoning on an organic diet, wild boars are not needed at all.

Or here's a look at flu outbreaks. Until now, supporters of organic agriculture claim that the main evil is large farms containing a large number of similar animals. But we know that the most massive and active outbreaks of avian influenza took place in Southeast Asia, where small farms predominate. On such farms, there are slightly different animals - a few pigs, a few chickens, horses, and so on. The World Health Organization has been trying unsuccessfully for many years to convince these farmers to keep animals separate and minimize their contact with wild animals, believing that this is the main cause of flu outbreaks. And, you know, I believe the WHO much more than some hippie who claims the opposite.

– But buyers tend to believe that animals raised in the fresh air give the best milk and meat. That chickens walking around the yard lay the best eggs. – Buyers most often do not understand how modern technologies have increased agricultural productivity.

According to statistics, cows grazing in a meadow and eating grass require three times more pasture area per unit of meat produced than cows fed with grain. And this, by the way, is data on Iowa, where agriculture is very productive. In addition, grass–fed cows produce 43 percent more methane - a significant contribution to global warming. So, three times more area and 43 percent more methane. No, I seriously don't understand how you can want to transfer cows to grass feed.

– After what you've told me, I'm afraid to even ask about growing rapeseed for biofuels…– And we don't have land for that either.

If we put 25 percent of the world's farmland under biofuel production, we will be able to replace only 10 percent of the oil consumed in the world. You can see for yourself that this is a senseless undertaking, an extremely unreasonable waste of resources. There are much more effective ways to solve the energy problem – coal, nuclear energy. In the future, it may also be wind energy or solar energy, but today these technologies are not yet sufficiently developed. For example, in Denmark, 20 percent of the energy is produced at wind farms, but if the wind subsides, then you have to start backup traditional generators. That is, generating capacities have to be built in double quantity.

Blooming World– If everything you say is true, then why is consumer confidence in the usefulness of organic agriculture so stable?

– The organic food market is an industry with a turnover of billions of dollars.

Of course, retailers engaged in business are holding on to profits. Moreover, the buyer is willing to overpay for the feeling that he is investing money in something useful and good. At the same time, I am not inclined to believe that farmers working in this industry deliberately lie about the quality of their products. These guys, if you look soberly, are generally the best farmers in the world. They manage to get crops by working with inefficient, extremely labor-intensive technologies. Who really takes the foam off of all this is retailers.

Well, as for consumers, people generally do not know the history of farming well. Even our grandparents often died young from malnutrition and the resulting weakening of the body. The American government developed the recommended daily norms of trace elements when, during World War II, it realized that young people from the provinces who were drafted into the army were simply dystrophics. And these were farmers' children! It seems like who else but them to be healthy and well-fed in the days of good old agriculture? But no, they were very frail. So, those good old days that we like to idealize were actually pretty damn unkind.

– Do you think the rejection of biotechnologies can be overcome? – There is too much ideology here so far.

For example, there is a great way to increase the survival and productivity of tomatoes. We add to tomatoes one gene that is already present in the tomato and is responsible for the transfer of substances into the cell, and the plant becomes much more powerful. One gene already present in this tomato! And after this manipulation, we are obliged to label this tomato as "genetically modified". A person eats a tomato with this gene every day, absorbs these genes en masse, nothing happens to him. But if we add the same gene, just duplicate it, then it already requires labeling…

I really don't understand some conservationists. We are fighting with all of humanity to make our cars more efficient. And we rejoice when it turns out. But at the same time we are not trying to make our agriculture more efficient. However, I think that in ten or fifteen years the paranoia will be overcome. And then the era of biotechnology will come. We will be able to produce new vegetables, we will be able to fight insects with the help of fine biotechnologies, we will be able to grow particularly resistant grains and use even less fertilizers to increase yields. It will be a flourishing world. Genetically modified crops that have absorbed all the experience of the last twenty years. Not needing insecticides, herbicides. It will be a celebration of the synergy of the best technologies supporting each other.

Ludwigshafen–BerlinPortal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru

07.10.2009