Why You Shouldn't Eat Organic

I have written about organic and GMO foods a few times, dispelling some common myths and misconceptions.  As a result, I have thought long and hard about some of the consequences of people being fooled into this fad.

The population of the world is steadily increasing.  It is true that in some countries, including the U.S. and China, birthrates have dipped below sustainable levels, which will result in population decline as certain groups start passing away.  The rest of the world is making up for this though, and the estimated world population growth over the next 20 or 30 years is enormous.  Now, contrary to the claims of overpopulation activists from the middle of last century onward, there is still plenty of unused arable land (land that can support crop growth).  In fact, the U.S. government is actually paying some people who own farmland not to farm it, to avoid economic problems related to overproduction.  The U.S. produces 5 times the food that it eats, with 3 parts of that being exported and one part just being wasted.  More population dense areas like China and India are certainly more vulnerable to resource problems related to overpopulation, but there is no sign they are even approaching that, and China is already starting to see a declining population due to regulations on reproduction and certain traditions that have synergized to create a very male-heavy population.  What all of this means is that there is enough land to produce orders of magnitude more food than the current human population consumes.  In short, world overpopulation is unlikely to be an issue any time soon.

That said, there are still problems with food production, and the primary one is getting food where it is needed.  There are places in the world with localized resource problems, notably in Africa, where people live in or near deserts, where conditions are not favorable for traditional food crops.  The dry heat in some areas makes large yield farming almost impossible, and even some of the more humid areas just don't have good enough soil to grow sufficient food to support a significant population.  In some of these areas, we mitigate this by shipping food.  This is incredibly expensive and inefficient.  It would be much better to grow the food locally than to ship it thousands of miles.  Unfortunately, traditional food crops just cannot handle the conditions.

In addition to this, most farming techniques, including both organic farming and industrial farming are environmentally damaging.  Industrial farming tends to put chemicals into the environment in ways that are destructive.  Farm runoff can cause all sorts of disruptions to local environments, and it can even contaminate water tables.  Many people who understand this turn to organic foods, which are fertilized with manure and other natural products and thus don't contribute to this chemical runoff.  This carries its own problems though.  Organic farming still tears up the soil, disrupting surface ground ecosystems for many organisms, and they do it worse than industrial farming, because traditional organic farming requires a lower crop density, which means more land must be damaged to grow the same amounts of food.  Organic farming also tends to be much more labor intensive, which ultimately consumes more energy, and there is still potential for diseased organic fertilizers to contaminate ground water when not composted correctly before use.  The lower yield density of organic farming also means that it is significantly harder and requires much more land to produce enough food for everyone.  There are alternative organic farming techniques with some potential to compete with industrial farming, but they are not mainstream enough to see the necessary automation to actually make it compete.  Even it we did get it to this point though, industrial farming has more room for progress than organic farming.  (I should express my opinion here that the best solution would be to mix the best of industrial farming and organic farming to create a type of farming superior to both in nearly every way.)

The reason you should not eat organic, at least for now, is that it takes away potential research funding from the more promising industrial farming.  Think about people in India, where populations are still growing rapidly, in 20 or 30 years.  Will organic farming even be able to support the population?  What about in Africa, where this is already a problem, due to poor farming conditions?  Purely organic techniques are not going to be able keep up with need in some places where food is already hard to grow.  I agree that modern industrial farming needs reform, but going to pure organic farming is going to make the most pressing problems worse sooner.  The environment can handle a bit more damage at the hands of poor industrial farming techniques.  People are already dying due to lack of food, and industrial farming has better promise for fixing that than organic, at least right now.

I want to add non-GMO foods to that though, and I honestly think this is more pressing.  In certain parts of Africa, there is only so much you can do to improve crop yields.  There are places that are just plain hostile to nearly all known food crops.  There is one exception: Certain GMO foods have been engineered to be able to grow well there.  Now, there is a whole political problem surrounding this, where companies like Monsanto are essentially holding African farmers hostage through gene patents, with a great deal of deliberate help from the U.S. government.  This definitely needs to be fixed.  This article is not about the politics though.  It is about necessity.  Genetic engineering carries great potential for solving most, if not all, of our food problems, at far lower risk than selective breeding methods that have been used for thousands of years to engineer all of the plants that we currently consume.  In theory, we could use selective breeding to create crop varieties that can handle certain harsh conditions.  This would likely take between fifty and hundreds of years.  Honestly, the risk in doing this is already extremely low, but the process is far less predictable and controllable than genetic engineering, which means the risk is still higher, and the process is much slower.  In other words, the risk involved with selective breeding and GMO are both negligible, with the first being slightly higher.  The real question is, how can we produce enough food where it is needed?  Organic farming is not the answer.  In some ways it can help, but if the crop is not suited to the environment, the only solution is to change the environment, and we are talking about places where air conditioned greenhouses are just not feasible right now.  We need crops that are suited to certain harsh environments, and if we wait fifty to a hundred years, tens of thousands of people will starve to death in the mean time.  We don't have time for that!

The solution is genetically engineered food crops that are better suited to harsh conditions.  Genetic engineering does some pretty cool things for us, starting with being able to grow foods in climates that most plants can't survive in and being able to grow food crops in poor soil.  We already have varieties that can grow in some of the harsher African climates and soils.  They are currently being used to create a dependency on imports from Western civilization, but they do exist.  There are also colder climates that could benefit from this though.  While very few plants can grow on tundra, it should not be terribly difficult to genetically engineer crops that can take advantage of the longer days in the Alaskan summer to produce yields many times faster than in more temperate climates, which is important because Alaskan summers are also shorter.  This also applies to southern Canada, the Nordic countries, and the northern parts of Russia.  Otherwise stated, this could dramatically increase the amount of farmable land in the world, as well as allowing more food to be grown locally.  If this does not sound like a great plan, also consider that more locally grown food means less transportation, which currently means lower CO2 emissions from trucks, boats, and planes used in transport, and more sustainable energy usage over the long term.  And this is totally ignoring the potential of using genetic engineering to improve flavor of fruits and vegetables, improve their nutritional value, and so on (Monsanto is already working on these), which could reduce the amount of food needed, further optimizing food production.  It is also ignoring the potential of genetic engineering to create more efficient crops that reduce the need for techniques and chemicals that are environmentally harmful.

The fact is, we need GMO, and we need the high crop densities of industrial farming.  Yeah, there are parts of organic farming that we should integrate into industrial farming, but funding organic farming is not going to encourage the progress we need.  Instead, it will encourage more industrial farmers to convert more efficient lands into lower efficiency organic farms to benefit from the higher prices they can charge, and it will encourage organic farming to stagnate (which it largely has been doing since its inception).  In other words, it will make things worse and encourage regression into less efficient and more harmful farming techniques.  And funding non-GMO food producers will reduce the funding going into improving crops to require less damaging farming techniques and producing the larger yields we need where we need them.

The only valid justification for buying organic and non-GMO is to avoid giving money to manipulative and unethical companies like Monsanto.  When we do that though, we are being environmentally irresponsible and withholding funding needed to improve the ability of agriculture to feed everyone who needs it in the most efficient and sustainable way.  The solution to Monsanto and similar companies is not to buy products from companies that are using inferior farming techniques with no desire for progress.  The solution to the political problems associated with food production is through political means.  If you find Monsanto's business practices to be unethical, vote for representatives that will make them illegal.  Write your current representatives and share your concerns.  Share your position with others, and encourage them to do the same.  People have been buying organic and non-GMO foods for decades now, and it has not made any difference.  Instead it is just trading one evil for another, and it is not even actually getting rid of the first evil.

Organic and non-GMO are not healthier than industrial farming products.  They are not less damaging to the environment.  Buying them does not make companies like Monsanto improve their ethics.  Organic and non-GMO are a step backward in farming technology, and we need to accept that before we can move forward.  When people fund these movements by buying organic and non-GMO foods, they deny needed funding for real progress.  It is true that there are a lot of problems with how food is currently produced, but the solution is not to fund even worse techniques.

Responsible buying habits don't include spending more money on inferior products to make a political statement that could be made more effectively through voting habits and writing letters to our representatives.  The solution is to make sure the funding is available to improve our current best, and then put political pressure on farmers and companies to use that funding to do it!