When you think of Organic Farming (OF) what comes to mind for you. Is it an image of Man farming in harmony with nature or farming in a low impact way or is it some nebulous image of organic food being something more healthy and wholesome than conventionally grown food. You might have these images in mind if you are a wealthy Westerner who doesn’t have to grow their own food but that’s not what Organic Farming looks like in reality.
For everyone else or rather the rest of humanity who is not a wealthy Westerner, Organic Farming means food shortages because the available land cannot grow enough using OF methods than it can using conventional farming. Organic agriculture means crop yields drop by as much as 50%, it means starvation and it means subsistence agriculture that retards the development of societies and cultures.
Whilst there are some very poor countries that can’t afford to improve their agriculture away from subsistence farming because they can’t afford conventional fertilizers there has recently been a country that has deliberately eschewed the benefits of modern agriculture in favour of organic farming and organic fertilizers such as manure. That country is Sri Lanka and the results have been disastrous.
According to a brilliant and very informative article by Ted Nordhaus over at Foreign Policy Magazine, a decision by the Sri Lankan government to have a nationwide organic farming only policy has had terrible negative affects on the economy, on the agricultural communities and most importantly food supply. In the space of the period from 2019 until now what Sri Lanka seems to have gone through is a process of rapidly turning back the agricultural technology clock to the 19th century, the period before the Haber-Bosch process for creating the Ammonia that is the raw material for many modern fertilizers. The Sri Lankan Government took this decision partly for economic reasons in order to be less reliant on imported supplies of fertilizer at a time when the Sri Lankan economy had been hit by pandemic related tourism drops, however they also appear to have been influenced by lobbyists for organic agriculture including quacks who dubiously claimed that agricultural chemicals cause kidney disease.
The effects of the Sri Lankan fertilizer ban have been terrible according to Mr Nordhaus’s article with domestic rice production dropping by 20% when compared to yields obtained with artificial fertilizers and ‘devastated’ the nation’s tea crop, it’s major export product. But as well as there being a financial cost to the decision to go organic, there’s also been a cost to ordinary Sri Lankans.
Mr Nordhaus said:
Human costs have been even greater. Prior to the pandemic’s outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflation and a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country’s economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.
The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country’s political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture: the former for seizing on the organic agriculture pledge as a shortsighted measure to slash fertilizer subsidies and imports and the latter for suggesting that such a transformation of the nation’s agricultural sector could ever possibly succeed.
When you, as I hope you will, read the entirety of Mr Nordhaus’s article then you will get more detail as to the damage that this pro-organic and organic only policy has done. It’s truly terrible what misery adherence to the cult of organic food and organic farming can do to a country when government’s zealous about the idea of organic farming decide to listen only to the promoters of organic agriculture and, as in the case of Sri Lanka, ignore the warnings from reputable agronomists that organic just is not that efficient a farming method as conventional agriculture.
Isn’t this the way that we in the UK are heading with our ludicrous net zero policy? How do the imbeciles think that we are going to plough fields without diesel tractors? Are we going to do the harvesting with an battery powered combine? How is the produce going to be moved between the farms and the shops?
Quite right, it is only the chatting and wealthy living an out of touch life that would even think such things were reasonable.
From reading around people are starting to realise the shortcomings of net zero and it could result in a big political shock as people start t o understand wht it will cost them not just financially but socially as well.
Having tried so called organic items frankly I find them to be of lower quality than conventional ones. Smaller and often with holes eaten onto them by insects. I accept that if you can afford to pay very very high prices indeed you might find things different.
I think that people have got used to the perfect fruit and veg that they get in supermarkets stuff without blemishes that can only be achieved by conventional farming. I’ve no problem with consumers having choice but I also see it as being something quite evil to deny food to those who need it because of a fetish for organic farming.
BTW I have no problem feeding GMO stuff to my chickens probably because I haven’t bought into the scaremongering of groups like Greenpeace about GMO. Most GMO processes are little different from conventional cross breeding but done more scientifically and at the gene level rather than whole organism level.
Yeah, it’s complicated how we ensure adequate world food production. Quoting one country like Sri Lanka where something apparently went wrong may not be that helpful though except for political reasons.
We need proper unbiased scientific research into what would produce maximum and sustainable yields for every area, organic fertilisers do better in some areas and are more affordable to small farmers, other areas may need the chemicals and even GM. When we get away from agribusinesses making profits at all costs we may be able to approach more practical and realistic approaches.
It’s pretty obvious that organic production has less yield as if it did have the same yield as conventional farming then there would be no incentive to switch to conventional farming. The main reason for countries switching to conventional farming is the increased yield, which is the main consideration.
All businesses need to make profits or there’s no point in being in business. As someone who raises chickens at home and who has had to learn as much as possible about the chicken from beak to vent I’ve seen examples of the worst type of chicken farming and believe me bad practises such as overstocking creates low quality meat which sells at low prices and the farmer can lose money, especially with hybrids like Cornish Crosses or Ross 308 that can suffer from ‘keel over’ due to heart problems if food and housing is not managed properly.
The sad truth and one that affects not just Sri Lanka, is that whilst organic is good for wealthy niche markets it cannot feed large numbers of people reliably