One of the great accomplishments of the human imagination has been growing more food on less farmland. Today, it takes 70% less land to feed someone than it took 50 years ago – even though the calories the average person consumes have increased dramatically. In India, crop yields have quadrupled since 1961; in Brazil, they’ve quintupled.
In recent years, however, the gains have slowed. For example, the acreage needed to grow the world’s grains, fruits, vegetables, and especially oil crops like soybeans and canola is on the rise, according to recent data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
A major reason for the change is the rise of organic farming. In the U.S., consumption of organic products increased 31% between 2016 and 2019. In Europe, organic sales went from $18 billion to $45 billion in 10 years. Organic food has its enthusiasts, especially in upper-income nations, but there is no evidence that is more nutritious than non-organic.
What is clear, though, is that organic agriculture is highly inefficient, producing roughly 40% less food than conventional farming on the same amount of acreage. One consequence is that food prices are rapidly rising – up 100% in the past 20 years, according to the FAO.
The problem with organic farming, however, isn’t just the cost of food. It’s the damage to the climate – an issue that COP 26, the U.N. climate change conference in Glasgow last year, blithely ignored – even though agriculture is responsible for about 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Stanford University scientists.
Organic farming is agriculture that eschews the latest technology in destroying damaging pests and fungi, which destroy 20% to 40% of global crops. Organic farmers do indeed use enormous quantities of pesticides and fungicides, but they are mainly natural in origin, like copper sulphate and hydrogen peroxide. The U.S. Department of Agriculture does, however, permit “a limited amount of synthetic substances” to be used by farms calling themselves organic.
“Just because something is natural doesn’t make it non-toxic or safe,” a Scientific American article notes. “Many bacteria, fungi and plants produce poisons, toxins and chemicals that you definitely wouldn't want sprayed on your food.” The highly toxic natural pesticide Rotenone was removed in 2019 from the federal list of allowed organic substances.
Organic farmers oppose the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), even though their safety for people and the environment is monitored and approved by the Food & Drug Administration and two other federal agencies. GMOs have created a revolution by increasing yields while reducing the use of chemicals. For example, Bt corn, widely grown throughout the U.S., is engineered to incorporate bacillus thuringiensis genes, which target caterpillars and other insects that attack plants. In the past, Bt was sprayed on crops as an organic pesticide but it broke down quickly in the sun or washed away in the rain.
Still, millions of people, especially in the U.S. and Europe, have a preference for food grown with natural pesticides and fungicides. But in making that choice, they need to recognize that they are threatening the climate.
Because organic agriculture uses more land to grow the same amount of food, it heightens emissions, according to a study published in the journal Nature in 2018. Researchers found that “organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50% bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed peas,” according to Stephan Wirsenius, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, and one of the authors. “For some foodstuffs there is an even bigger difference – for example, with organic Swedish winter wheat, the difference is closer to 70%.”
Land that is used for farming can’t be used for example, to store carbon in forests, so using less land by increasing crop yields is a significant means of reducing emissions.
A 2019 Nature article, by Laurence Smith of the Royal Agricultural University in the U.K. and colleagues, demonstrated that “widespread adoption of organic farming practices would lead to net increases in GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions as a result of lower crop and livestock yields and hence the need for additional production and associated land use changes overseas.”
Unfortunately, the European Union ignored this substitution effect when it set a target of placing “at least 25% of the EU’s agricultural land under organic farming…by 2030. That’s a tripling. about 8.5% of Europe’s farms are organic.
Organic farming isn’t the only reason food prices are rising. Demand for food is increasing – from population pressures and the desire to eat more and better. By 2050, food consumption is expected to increase between 59% to 98%, according to an analysis of 10 economic models. Unless crop yields rise, food shortages are inevitable.
Another reason for rising food prices is, of course, the supply chain problems from the COVID-19 pandemic, a major factor in the FAO index jumping 18% in the past year. But bottlenecks will ease. Meanwhile, the threat to the climate from organic farming will grow. It’s time for environmentalists and anyone who wants a safer, healthier planet to recognize the danger.
James K. Glassman, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, is an advisor to health care companies and non-profits.