1. Claims that organic food isn't good for you are nonsense, Lord Melchett
2. Letters to the Sunday Times on Trewavas
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1. Claims that organic food isn't good for you are nonsense, Lord Melchett tells Stuart Wavell
Go on, eat up your organic greens
August 19 2001
The Sunday Times
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 £3 billion 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 £1,000 per animal, compared to £350-£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."
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2. Letters to the Sunday Times
False organic fears
CANCER DATA: Since 1971, the overall incidence of cancer has risen by about 50% (Office of National Statistics).
Pesticide residues in food may be a contributing factor: 160 extensively used pesticides are listed by international authorities as possible human carcinogens.
Alison Craig Pesticide Action Network
PROFESSOR TREWAVAS is correct that there is (among the public) "great antagonism towards experts these days", and who can blame them for here is another example of an academic with a loud opinion but little in the way of hard data (News Review, last week).
Trewavas suggests that a decline in malignant diseases is the result of an increased consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables. Because there will have been a concomitant consumption of agrochemicals, this is proof positive that these chemicals are harmless. This argument illustrates the mistake that can be made in a scientific analysis, exemplified by the correlation, observed in 1947 in Denmark, between an increase in sightings of storks and an increased birth rate. You've heard of fuzzy logic in electronics? Woolly thinking is perhaps appropriate in this context.
The assertion that an increased consumption of fruit and vegetables (if true) is the sole cause for a reduction in cancers is naive. The cause of most cancers involves many factors.
Trewavas also objects to organic foods because they are elitist and that the cost inhibits fruit and vegetable consumption. This is reminiscent of the old socialist dirge that "If everyone can't afford it, no one should have it".
Dr David Burnett
Micropathology, University of Warwick Science Park
SOUND? Trewavas despairs that the public does not swallow the "sound science" of academics. On GM food he is keen to push ahead with the farm scale trials. Yet had he been to one of the first at Watlington he would have seen the GM crop planted on the dry top half of the slope and the non GM on the lower moist slope. This is similar to the "sound science" of testing the first GM variety of maize to chickens when it will be fed to cows.
He told us recently (Letters, July 8) how vitamin A can be put into GM rice, to prevent Bilharzia. What he failed to point out was that each child would need to eat 5lbs of it every day for the correct dose to be administered.
Like Prince Charles I prefer to use a common sense approach sensing that academics and government are mere pawns in the big business of GM foods.
Adrian Foster-Fletcher Newbury, Berkshire
NON-GM WAY: There is nothing sinister about organic food which is just natural food, eaten since the first creatures roamed the earth. It is intensive farming that is the scandal and the danger. Farmers in this country should be given more encouragement to go organic. It would restore the natural ecosystem on which, in the end, we all depend.
Once GM crops are let loose and they ruin the ecosystem, there will be no turning back.
What Third World countries need is basic clean water and living conditions. The money spent on research of GM crops would go a long way to help them with this.
Gillian Russell Aberdeen
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