Sunday Times 2
The ‘toxin-free’ food panic: Blunders, truths and myths
Reading the interesting and informative article by Randima Atygalle that appeared in the Sunday Times of October 14th titled ‘Getting to the roots of going organic in SL’, I was saddened by plight of Surangi who travels every weekend to the Colombo City from the suburb she lives for procuring organic fruits and vegetables from an organic food outlet in the hope she is giving her little son ‘toxin-free’ food; and of Ama, pregnant with her first child who has similar concerns about toxins in the conventional food and would not settle for anything less than ‘organic-labelled food’! The people are not given a balanced view of the facts of the matter by the media which blindly support organic agriculture; and the government, too, is partly responsible for its highly biased and unrealistic vision of the future of agriculture of the country!
Wasa Wisa Nethi or toxin-free: But how sure are we?
Be that as it may, what crossed my mind immediately when reading Randima Atigalle is the ‘Locavore’ movement in the United States that just does the opposite of Ama and Surangi, buying only local farm shop fruits and vegetables and rejecting supermarkets, not only to support the local farmers, but also as a challenge to the corporate and global capitalism, apart from mitigating the associated costs of transport both physical and environmental! Calculations reveal that in the US, food travels 1,500 miles to get from farm to plate! Ours should be even higher given that, except for rice, some fruits and vegetables, we import most of our other food items — temperate fruits, wheat flour, dhal and other pulses, milk, soya and corn products. How can the mother and mother-to-be rest assured that those products are toxin-free as nearly all of them are conventionally produced with pesticides and fertilizers liberally applied to gain optimum yields! Some of them are sure to be genetically modified as well, if the two ladies have concerns about that too.
Incidentally, if Surangi and Ama had, by some chance, heard about the ‘Moms across US’ movement’s outcry about residues of the herbicide glyphosate being present in mother’s milk (later, however, proven to be wrong by authentic research), they would be in a total quandary feeding their babies toxin-free!
Perhaps Surangi and Ama were also enticed to go ‘toxin-free’ having learnt that one of the key initiatives of the Yahapalana government, was to make our motherland ‘toxin free’ in a matter of years, moving away from conventional farming towards organic (toxin-free) agriculture. The Strategic Enterprises Management Agency (SEMA) was totally deployed for the purpose, bypassing the Ministry and Department of Agriculture, and spending millions over the past three years. The Ven. Ratana Thera, though with no formal knowledge of science or agriculture, was its chief architect. Apart from his frequent ‘preaching’ on ‘toxin-free’ agriculture over several prejudiced TV channels that preferentially supported his programme against any of conventional agriculture, he even proceeded to make organic fertilizer labelled ‘Pivithuru Pohora’ that was sold to farmers in the Mahaweli System B for a start.
A team of us, including a retired Director General of Agriculture, visited the area in 2016 and met with the farmers who showed us their fields, which looked luxuriant. On questioning in depth the farmers were rather shaken and one of them, however, whispered to us that despite application of the Pivithuru fertilizer concoction, their crops turned yellow after three weeks, a clear sign of nitrogen deficiency, and hence they surreptitiously applied urea! Asked why they were so secretive about it, we were told that they sold the produce as organic paddy at Rs 48/kg, Rs 10 higher than conventionally grown paddy; and it was procured by an agent of the daughter of a renowned politician from Polonnaruwa! Last year, farmers were also compensated for crop loss following ‘Pivithuru Pohora’ use! The toxin-free project, however, has now been disbanded consequent on a cabinet decision following its mismanagement and abject failure! That much for our local organic or toxin-free agriculture!
Organic to conventional agriculture
Organic farming, after all, accounts only for 1% of the global cropland of which 0.66% is in pasture (for the ‘filthy rich’ to eat organic steakes!) and the balance is about equally divided between food crops and horticulture. Despite all rhetoric about organic agriculture, its expansion globally is at a snail’s pace, being only 0.1% or less per annum. It can never feed the world unless there are major future technological innovations such as microbial fertilizers. Monsanto, for example, in 2015, tested 2,000 microbial formulations across the US in some 500,000 sites. The results are, however, not known to us.
The transition from traditional agriculture, where fertilizer comprised essentially farmyard manure (FYM) and green manures, to conventional agriculture (CF), as we know it today, took place in the mid 19th century with two ground breaking inventions — the synthesis of soluble (super) phosphate and chemical nitrogenous fertilizer — by British scientist Lawes and German scientist Liebig respectively. These inventions and the rapidly growing knowledge then in plant chemistry led to the substitution of natural dung with chemical fertilizer.
The third important element, potassium, was provided largely by potash, a substance that had been known from antiquity. It has been said that without these inventions, the industrial countries of Western Europe could not have supported the dense population growth of the 19th century. It is the same reason, rapid global population growth, that later led to the Green Revolution.
Sir John Russell (1942), a reputed soil scientist, in an article titled ‘British Agriculture’ states: “it is difficult for us in this distance in time to recapture the feelings with which the farmers received the information that a powder made in a factory and applied out of a bag at the rate of only a few hundredweights per acre could possibly act as well as farmyard manure put on the land as dressings of tons per acre”. This is ironically the fundamental question that we should ask: Is there adequate organic matter or alternative technologies to provide the nutrient demands of crops, on a global scale today, if it was inadequate then?
The green revolution
In the mid-20th century, one hundred years later, came the ‘Green Revolution’ where emphasis shifted from crop nutrition to crop breeding – the synthesis of high yielding, short-statured, fertilizer-responsive cereals, without which the world food demand could not have been met today. The pioneering efforts of breeders such as the Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug, described as the father of the green revolution and ‘the man who saved a billion lives’ stand out in this regard.
In Sri Lanka, too, rice breeding and other research took great strides increasing yields by more than seven fold and production by 14-fold from the 1940s to date, the increase in land extent under rice, especially from the Mahaweli project, also contributing to production and eventual attainment of self-sufficiency (See table). This achievement clearly would not have been possible without chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Norman Borlaug addressing the Nobel Prize Forum in 2000, 30 years after he received the Nobel price, commented that had the global cereal yields of 1950 still prevailed in 1999, we would have needed nearly 1.8 billion ha of additional land of the same quality – instead of the 600 million that was used, to equal the current global harvest. And it is estimated that 40 percent of today’s population is alive, thanks to the Haber-Bosch process of synthesizing ammonia (Vaclav Smil, Distinguished Professor, University of Manitoba). It was the shift from organic farming to conventional agriculture via the green revolution that enabled feeding the world.
In 2006, a team of Michigan University scientists examined the theoretical feasibility of supplementing global nitrogen demand for crops by biological nitrogen fixation in legumes. Using published data on legume nitrogen fixation rates, they argued that the entire nitrogen requirement to produce the global food demand via organic farming could be met that way. However, many other findings indicated that because of lower yields, organic farming requires extra land to meet global food demand, one estimate being 25 to 82 percent and the other 65 to 200 percent extra land. The Rodale Institute, which is dedicated to organic agriculture, in an eight-year experiment realised yields for organic crops 20 to 50% lower.
Conventional vs organic farming: environmental pollution and human toxins
There is no argument that conventional farming (CF) is causing substantial environmental pollution, not that organic farming is innocent! Greenhouse gas emissions are substantially higher in organic farming situations because of the large dumps of farmyard manure. As regards nutrient leaching losses, a serious environmental threat, contrary to expectations, a 1990 Swedish study reveals that nutrient leaching losses can be higher under organic farming than conventional. Under controlled conditions, 65 percent of applied nitrogen in organic plots went into crops and 35 percent leached in comparison to conventional plots, the ratio being 81 percent and 19 percent respectively. The overwhelming issue in conventional farming is the indiscriminate and profligate use of agrochemicals.
The case of serious phosphate pollution of water bodies in the Rajarata, due to profligate and wanton use of phosphate fertilizer in the upcountry vegetable farms is a classic example. The risk of chemical pesticides, too, is of serious concern, but it is sometimes overstated by the organic advocates. Organic pesticide risks are vastly understated to perpetuate a marketable image.
Let us consider a few examples of compounds used in organic farming. Sodium nitrate mined in South America is one. It is used as a nitrogen fertilizer source in organic farming. It contains sodium perchloride, a toxin, from caliche mud mined with sodium nitrate; and sodium perchloride can leach into neighbouring water bodies. Organic farmers are allowed the use of copper, sulphur and copper sulphate as natural fungicides. However, copper sulphate is a Class 1 toxin and is also known to bioaccumulate.
Rotenone and pyrethrins are natural insecticides widely used in organic farming but pose health and environmental risks. Rotenone is also linked to Parkinson’s disease and pyrethrin is classified as a likely human carcinogen. Thus botanicals/natural insecticides can be as harmful to mammals as the synthetic ones. Further simple calculations based on heavy metal, especially cadmium, contents in farmyard manure and phosphate fertilizers reveal the former generally adds far more cadmium than the latter.
In conclusion, conventional agriculture has a dark underside, the larger environmental costs compared to organic farming. The dilemma is that organic farming may save the earth but only conventional farming can feed the world! As Norman Borlaug stated in his 2000 presentation to the Nobel Prize forum ‘Some critics have said that the green revolution has created more problems than it has solved. This, I cannot accept, for I believe it is far better for mankind to be struggling with new problems caused by abundance rather than with the old problem of famine’!
(The writer is former chairman of the Coconut Research Board.)