Pesky organic pesticides
Dogma aside, organic food isn't safer for us, and it isn't better for the environment
John Luik - March 26, 2007
Most of us don't think of the routine supermarket expedition as an opportunity for sophisticated moral reasoning. But according to those of the organic faith, the weekly trip to the food store is one of the major ways in which ordinary people can make a moral difference--by buying organic. As New York University's Marion Nestle recently put it, "When you choose organics, you are voting for a planet with fewer pesticides, richer soil and cleaner water supplies." Organics occupy the moral high ground, not just because they are said to be more nutritious than ordinary fare, but also because they are believed to be safer and better for the environment.
Laura Telford, executive director of Canadian Organic Growers, for instance, suggests the great advantage of organics is their safety, since "the latest reports on food contamination show that 22 per cent of fruits and vegetables have a detectable level of pesticides."
As with claims that organic food is more nutritious, the weight of the evidence is against these organic boasts. First, it is simply not true that organic farmers don't use pesticides; in fact, organic farming uses a range of organic pesticides, about 60 per cent of which are known to be rodent carcinogens. These include copper sulphate, reported to have caused liver damage to farm workers; rotenone, linked to Parkinson's; and bacillus thuringiensis, which some claim causes lung infections in rodents, and is the most heavily used organic pesticide.
Are these organic pesticides less risky to our health than the synthetic pesticides used to grow non-organic food? Of course, it is, as always, the dose that makes the poison, and the levels of non-organic pesticides found in most foods do not exceed safe doses. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, for example, found that only about 2.4 per cent of domestic foods exceeded acceptable pesticide levels.
Importantly, we consume far more natural chemicals that are known to cause cancer in animals than we do synthetic pesticides. As biochemist Bruce Ames points out, "The natural chemicals that are known rodent carcinogens in a single cup of coffee are about equal in weight to a year's worth of synthetic pesticide residues that are rodent carcinogens." In other words, the risks we readily accept from organic chemicals in our food are far greater than those already small ones from non-organic pesticides.
Enough about us--what about the Earth? Does eating organic really translate into a vote for the planet?
Since organic farming is much less intensive, with lower yields, we'd need to devote much more land to farming to produce the same amount of organic food as non-organic. Even then, it's not clear that enough food could be produced.
Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize winner and father of the green revolution that tripled food yields in much of the world, says, "Even if you could use all the organic material that you have . . . and get [it] back on the soil, you couldn't feed more than four billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests." Hardly a planet-friendly exercise.
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