Lomborg: Organic Fad Worsens Hunger

At the American Institute for Economic Research, Bjorn Lomborg explains why the "organic" food fad of the West now poses a global food supply threat:

Image by Robert Wiedemann, via Unsplash, license.

Long simply a fashionable trend for the world's 1 percent, environmentalists have increasingly peddled the beguiling idea that organic farming can solve hunger. The European Union is actively pushing for a tripling of organic farming on the continent by 2030, while a majority of Germans actually think organic farming can help feed the world.

However, research conclusively shows that organic farming produces much less food than conventional farming per acre. Moreover, organic farming requires farmers to rotate soil out of production for pasture, fallow or cover crops, reducing its effectiveness. In total, organic approaches produce between a quarter and half less food than conventional, scientific-driven agriculture.

This not only makes organic food more expensive, but it means that organic farmers would need much more land to feed the same number of people as today -- possibly almost twice the area. Given that agriculture currently uses 40 percent of Earth's ice-free land, switching to organics would mean destroying large swathes of nature for less effective production.

The catastrophe unfolding in Sri Lanka provides a sobering lesson. The government last year enforced a full transition to organic farming, appointing organics gurus as agricultural advisers, including some who claimed dubious links between agricultural chemicals and health problems. Despite extravagant claims that organic methods could produce comparable yields to conventional farming, within months the policy produced nothing but misery, with some food prices quintupling. [bold added]

Please consider reading the whole thing and passing it along: Lomborg further elaborates Sri Lanka's plight, and notes that, without input from synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, "going organic globally can only feed about half the current world population."

This is a timely warning, given that Putin's war has endangered agricultural supplies from Ukraine and Russia, which together account for a quarter of the world's grain, not to mention other necessities.

-- CAV