Growing organic demand indulgent

What does the future really hold for Australia's enthusiastic organic farmers?

Last week former NSW Democrat MP, Richard Jones, from Possum Creek complained in a letter to The Land (It's not our future, March 2, p12) that a new Federal Government report featured a whole section on why the State Government bans on genetically modified (GM) crops should be lifted, yet no discussion of the fast-growing organic food market.

I agree with Mr Jones.  The report, Creating Our Future, should have included information about organic farming and this growing niche market.

But in the end, and despite the emotional attachment to organics, it is only modern high yield agriculture that can secure the world's future food needs.

Thirty years ago, concerned about the exponential increase in the world's population, Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University wrote in a best selling book that the battle to feed all of humanity was over.

He predicted that by the late 1970s the world would undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people would starve to death.  He also predicted that life expectancy in the United States would drop to 42 years as a consequence of the use of pesticides.

Interestingly, life expectancy has continued to increase.  In fact we now live to more than twice the age we did just 100 years ago.

Technological innovation -- including the use of pesticides, high yielding crop varieties and irrigation -- has enabled the world's farmers to produce about double the amount of food from essentially the same area of land.

Australian producers -- including rice, cotton and sugar growers -- are amongst the most efficient in the world on a tonnes per hectare basis.

In the early 1980s, about 30 percent of people in developing countries were malnourished.  By the year 2000 this figure had reduced to 18 percent, even though the world's population continued to increase, passing the 6 billion mark in 1999.

This massive population increase is not due to women having more babies, but rather to a dramatic fall in the death rate as a result of improved access to food, medicine and clean water.

So, people are in general better off than they were 20 years ago, but more people places more stress on the environment, and still many people go hungry every day.

Against this reality, I find it hard to reconcile the increasingly strong demand for organic food and even harder to accept the claim that the organic market if for the "intelligent consumer".

As the founder of a new chain of organic supermarkets in Sydney and Melbourne recently explained, organic food is more expensive because organic farmers have smaller yields.  Typically organic agriculture yields around 30 to 50 percent less than crops grown on conventional farms.

This new organic supermarket chain even sells organic toilet paper.

Given over 6 billion people wake each morning needing to be fed, and given the pressure this already places on the world's limited natural resources, I find the growing demand for organic food in places like Sydney and Melbourne extremely indulgent.

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