Food's minority seeking main course

The organic food industry has successfully hijacked the clean and green image of conventional Australian farming.

Industry advocates make assertions such as Macro Whole Foods telling us organic "is better for you than anything else you can buy".

Greenline Organic Direct attacks mainstream consumers as sticking with "old, inferior buying habits of processed or conventional food".

These attacks on non-organic food appear with monotonous regularity despite the proven safety of conventionally produced food.

Less than 1 per cent of Australian food produced last year was certified organic.  Only 2500 farms, less than 2 per cent of total farms, produce organic food.  Most are minuscule;  more than 60 per cent of Australia's certified organic land is held by one beef producing network whose chief export is hamburger mince to the US.

Hardly the image most consumers have of organic producers.

The organic industry is growing very quickly as increasing numbers of consumers believe the organic industry's public relations that organic food is better for them, better for the environment and is a personal way of shunning the multinational agribusiness food chain.

Organics are a profitable niche market for some producers and valued by a subset of consumers willing to pay the hefty price premiums.

But the claims for organic food don't all stack up.  Last month in the US three people died from eating spinach contaminated with E.coli.  This week the US Food and Drug Administration announced that the source of the deadly spinach was an organic farm.

Some organic processes hark back to the primitive conditions of an era before pesticides and science were recruited to create the safe products we now take for granted.

Organic food claims to be kinder to the environment than other farming practices because it uses no manufactured fertilisers and no antibiotics or animal chemical treatments.

Yet the trade-off is a substantial reduction in yield.  This is why organic food is more expensive.

To produce the same quantity of food using organic methods uses more land than other farming methods, leaving less for environmental conservation.  For farmers with smaller holdings or drought affected land, just hanging on with conventional farming methods, organic is not an option.

In the case of grain crops, organic methods require extensive ploughing to control weeds.

The importance to Australia's economy of conventional agriculture is $67 billion per year.  Australia is a world leader in the production of safe, clean and low-cost food.

Despite severe drought blanketing much of Australia's farmland, the long-term future for agriculture here remains bright.  It is vital the economic benefits of conventional agriculture are not drowned out by a noisy minority from the organic industry.

Organic food is just that, food.  The efforts of thousands of conventional farmers in producing healthy, cheap food should not be belittled by marketing spin of an elite organic niche.

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