The London Times-Is Organic Better?

Sunday Times (London)
August 19, 2001Go on, eat up your organic greens

BY: Stuart Wavell

Claims that organic food isn't good for you are nonsense, Lord Melchett
tells Stuart Wavell

Attacks on organic farming and its champion, the Prince of Wales, are a sign
of increasing desperation by the chemical agriculture industry, says Lord
Melchett: "And they're right to feel desperate, because the system they are
trying to defend is in serious trouble."

The former executive director of Greenpeace looks ruddy and relaxed, but he
makes it clear that he believes Professor Anthony Trewavas is talking so
much manure.

Last week in News Review, Trewavas, of the Institute of Cell and Molecular
Biology at Edinburgh University, accused people such as Melchett and Prince
Charles of misleading people over the benefits of organic food. Basically,
Trewavas thinks organic food is a con.

Melchett, who is converting his 800-acre Norfolk farm to organic produce, is
too polite to use the m-word. He uses milder epithets such as "nonsense",
"rubbish" and "incredible ignorance". He offers me a cup of tea -organic,
naturally -as we chat in his house in north London. "I buy organic food for
preference, but I don't claim to eat only organic food," he says. "My
teenage children don't either."

As a vegetarian he does not eat any of the cattle he rears organically,
which he sells for a tidy profit. Their dung, he reminds me, is a vital
component in returning his fields to fertility, while their grazing has made
his marshland a haven for wildlife.

Before answering the specific charges made by Trewavas, he lays out his
stall. His basic premise is that the professor is an apologist for a system
of industrial agriculture that has devastated Britain's farmland and
wildlife during the past 40 years, abetted by iniquitous public subsidies.
He speaks of Britain "losing thousands of miles of hedges, 95% of our chalk
grasslands and half of our ancient woodlands. The early chemicals killed
things directly. You saw dying birds flapping in the fields".

Trewavas and others are still defending that, he says, just as they were
defending DDT 20 years earlier. Trewavas's view is that this is science,
this is progress and if you don't like some of the consequences you should
put up with it. It is said that a great benefit is cheap food, ignoring the
Pounds 3billion of public subsidy that goes into the United Kingdom's
agriculture.

According to the professor, the apostles of organic farming have fostered
the belief that we are "slowly poisoned by pesticides", although the facts
show that we are living longer and cancer rates are falling. Melchett
laughs: "The idea that industrial agriculture has been responsible for
everything good that's happened in the world since the end of the second
world war is rubbish. There's absolutely no evidence to suggest that." He
cites improved public health, better standards of living and healthier
lifestyles as more likely causes.

One of Trewavas's central assertions was that organic farming produces lower
yields per hectare, is more costly and involves ploughing up more wilderness
to meet its extra land requirements. Melchett shakes his head: "This comes
fine from an industry that has destroyed many of the things that made the
English countryside so valued in our culture."

In fact, Melchett contends, organic yields are nearly as good and sometimes
equal to conventional yields, but in a longer crop rotation. He applauds
Charles's organic farm at Highgrove, where an intensive strategy of mixing
planted vegetables produces an output that actually exceeds standard yields.
Last week Trewavas accused Charles of "abusing his status" by encouraging
"organic ideologues". Last year he said Charles was "unfit to be a monarch"
for involving himself in the debate over genetically modified foods.
Melchett says the criticism was unwarranted and unfair, since the prince
could not answer back.

He believes these attacks are a measure of industrial agriculture's anxiety
at the constraints being placed upon it. The pressure is to produce
chemicals that are more specific and shorter acting.

"But nature is getting better and better at fighting back. The whole
industrial agriculture system has become more vulnerable to catastrophic
breakdowns. We've seen it with mad cow disease and foot and mouth. The
answer to this, in the industry's eyes, has been GM crops as a way of giving
further life to what is otherwise a system that is in rapid decline."

Melchett famously trashed a field of GM test crops on a Norfolk farm in 1999
and was later acquitted with 27 other activists of causing criminal damage.
It was the defining moment of this product of Eton and Cambridge whose
great-grandfather, Sir Alfred Mond, founded the chemicals giant ICI.
Unlike his ancestors, he rejoices that industrialised agriculture has good
reason to be worried: "On fairly modest predictions, a third of European
agriculture will be organic in the next 10 to 20 years."

What of Trewavas's point that 70% of organic food comes from abroad? "Yes,
that is an absolute scandal. That is the one thing I agree with him about.
It's due to the unbelievable incompetence of the people running agriculture
in this country over the past 20 to 30 years that we have one of the
smallest organic farming centres in Europe. At the same time, we have one of
the healthiest and fastest-growing organic markets for food."

It is "absurd" to import oats, potatoes and other organic products that
could be grown in this country. The reason is that Britain has one of the
least generous support systems to help farmers convert from conventional to
organic farming: "We are the only country in the European Union that
provides no continuing support for organic farming. We're the worst in
Europe."

Damage to the soil is another charge levelled by Trewavas against organic
farmers, claiming that mechanical weeding disturbs soil structure far more
than herbicides. Melchett snorts: "That is a fundamental lack of
understanding about how organic farming works. It's quite true that we use
mechanical weeding, but it doesn't break or damage the soil. You only scrape
across the surface very sensitively or you damage the crop."
The aim, however, is to discourage weeds by rotating crops and breaking the
growth cycle that normally allows weeds associated with a continual crop to
thrive. He gives equally short shrift to Trewavas's claim that organic
farming depletes the soil of minerals.

"That shows incredible ignorance," he says. "The first task of an organic
farmer is to conduct a chemical test of his land and draw up a plan for
restoring its fertility. Composted farmyard manure is distributed as a safe
fertiliser.

"Then you have fertility building crops. At my farm, we plant something like
mustard in the autumn and in the spring we plough it in. So we've grown a
crop designed purely to do what Professor Trewavas says we can't do."
He is briefly speechless when I mention Trewavas's contention that organic
foods produce an undesirable excess of vitamins.

"It's a gross over-simplification of a complex issue," he replies finally.
"You are not going to get an excess of vitamins by eating vegetables."
But doesn't the professor have a point in asserting that poor people, told
that organic food is superior, will actually buy and consume less? Isn't
organic food a luxury for the rich? Melchett offers the example of his
organically reared beef which, although not fully organic yet, is sold
locally for about Pounds 1,000 per animal, compared to Pounds 350-Pounds
400 if it is sold to a wholesaler.

"But because we're selling direct to the consumer from the farm, the meat is
a lot cheaper than you'd pay in the supermarket. A lot of our customers are
not wealthy, and what Professor Trewavas says is not true in my experience
of people who go to local markets."