November 29, 2007
Anchorage Daily News, Page: B4
Byline: Alex Sheshunoff
Organic Farming: An Un-Green Land Grab
Paying more for an organic tomato may be good for the soul, but it's bad for the environment. Turns out, organically grown food requires up to three times more land than the pesticide-intensive stuff. If the whole world went organic, the rainforest would be lost. As would most open space in temperate climates. (Worst of all, Carrs and Fred Meyer would have to cover their entire floors with that fake wood, not just their "natural food" sections.)
Not buying it? Consider why organic food is more expensive. Buying organic, like filling up an SUV or leaving the lights on, costs more because it uses more resources. In this case, more land. Not convinced? Since 1950 the world's population has increased from 2.5 billion to 6.6 billion, while land under cultivation has increased by only 10 per cent. Irrigation and better plant varieties have helped. A lot of the credit, however, goes to pesticides and fertilizers. And Norman Borlaug.
For those who don't follow modern agronomy, Professor Borlaug is known as the father of the "Green Revolution." His research into crop yields is credited with saving over a billion lives. He's also one of only five people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal. In other words, he's twice as cool as you'll ever be. And he happens to think that large-scale organic farming is hooey (a technical agriculture term meaning, "a very bad idea.")
Organic food is more expensive because it produces 20 percent to 70 percent fewer calories per acre than non-organically grown food. It's especially inefficient for grains, the source of most of the world's nutrition.
But let's be optimistic and assume growing the all world's food organically would only be 20 percent less productive. That would mean farming an additional 2,400,000,000 acres of land.
For perspective, that's equal to the Lower 48 plus all of the parking lots in downtown Anchorage. Where would those extra 2.4 billion acres come from? Not here -- it's too cold and too dark, plus greenhouses require too much electricity. And not the Lower 48 -- all of the good farmland is spoken for. Most likely, it would come from places with lots of sun and rain -- i.e. rainforests. Plowing under what's left of the Amazon rainforest would get about a third of the land you'd need. Clearing the Congo River Basin another 10 per cent. Borneo: 4 percent.
As for the other 1.3 billion acres needed, well, we'd have to either scrounge around a bit or show some ingenuity -- the kind of spunky ingenuity it takes to convert all 1.1 billion acres of the Sahara desert into soybean fields.
Organic advocates say hold on; pesticide-free food uses less fertilizer, and, therefore, less petroleum. If only it were so. Organic crops need to be tilled more often. That additional tilling requires more fuel than what goes into fertilizer. (Buying food locally doesn't help the environment much either. Big semitrailers carrying lots of lettuce emit fewer emissions than fleets of small pickups running hither and thither.)
The biggest problem with organic food, however, is the opportunity cost. People have a limited reservoir of goodwill they're willing to expend for the environment. Buying organic depletes that reservoir for something that, best case, has marginal benefits.
Instead, that environmental goodwill would be better used: Encouraging lawmakers to pass "polluter pays" taxes on carbon emissions. Driving smaller cars less often. Signing up with www.catalogchoice.org to stop receiving unnecessary catalogs -- potentially saving 8 million trees and the same amount of energy used by 3 million cars.
All that said, I have an awkward confession to make: My wife and I buy organic. We don't do it for the planet. We do it to feel smug. That, and we don't want those chemicals in our son's body. (You know you live in a special time when overpaying for zucchini and putting pressure on the planet makes you feel like a good parent.)
Fortunately for the environment, most of the world doesn't do as we do.
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Alex Sheshunoff is a writer living in Anchorage.
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