Center for
Global Food
Issues

All of which raises a question. Contrary to widespread belief, organic farming is not cost free. Organic foods cost more, they are more difficult to cultivate, they are usually of lower quality and they come with their own set of environmental problems. So what sort of price are Europeans willing to pay to "return to nature"?

Currently, Europeans are merely playing at being organic. Between 2% and 3% of Western Europe's cropland is being farmed organically, mostly to supply upscale young urbanites. But that may change. The environmental movement claims organic farming is the only way to feed the world sustainably. Organic food sales are expanding more rapidly than any other segment of the European food market. Regulators, sensitive to public opinion, are now looking for excuses to ban politically incorrect pesticides, chemical fertilizers, confinement livestock feeding and antibiotics from the farms.

Yields per acre

But is this wise? Study after study has found that organic farmers get lower yields per acre. Alistair Leake, research director for one of the largest organic-farming operations in Europe, says the yields from organic farms are "generally much lower." His Cooperative Wholesale Association, which farms 32,000 hectares of land in Britain, gets 44% less wheat per acre from its organically farmed fields than from its conventionally farmed ones.

The lower yields are partly a result of the fact that organically permitted pesticides, such as sulfur and copper sulfate, are less effective in warding off weeds, insects, diseases and fungi. Mr. Leake says weeds are a particular problem, sometimes forcing whole fields of organic grain to be plowed down to keep them from contaminating the next year's crop with an intolerable number of weed seeds. Yet the plowdown does not incur financial penalties since the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy compensates farmers for "failed crops."

The biggest yield problem for organic farmers, however, is that they refuse to replenish the nitrogen in their soils with chemical nitrogen (which is taken from the air). Instead, they produce their nitrogen by using extra land for green manure crops or fallow. That's why the average European organic farm may be "wasting" about one-third of its cropland at any given time. That land is producing organic nitrogen instead of food. Yet, as far as plants are concerned, there is absolutely no difference whatever between chemical and "organic" nitrogen.

Yield problems lead to other complications. Some 90 million hectares of land are currently farmed in the EU today. If all its fields produced 44% less foood, it would take another 40 million hectares to produce the EU's current farm output. True, the EU currently runs a (heavily subsidized) farm surplus, reportedly equal to about 20% of its farm production. But a move to all-organic cropland would do more than erase the surplus: It would create a food deficit that could only be rectified by putting an additional 22 million hectares under plow.

Where would that land come from? Europe's good-quality land has been farmed for centuries. What's left is unfarmed for a reason: too steep, too wet, too dry, too acid, or too cold. Much of it is actually mountain, swamp, tundra, or semi-desert. At best, big chunks of "new" farmland in Western Europe could produce 75% as much as the land already in production, requiring an additional 6 million hectares to compensate for the lower yields.

Then there are the forests. EU countries have about 105 million hectares of forest, but nearly half is in northern Sweden and Finland, with too short a growing season. Much of Spain's forest land is too dry for crops. Ireland's may be too wet. Farming the 10 million hectares of mountainous forests in Greece and Italy would mean massive soil erosion and not much added food production.

The most likely forests for clearing would seem to be in France (10 million hectares), Germany, (10 million hectares), Denmark (2.5 million hectares) and Great Britain (2.3 million hectares). Yet even in those temperate, well-watered countries, however, much of the forestland is too rough to farm under any conceivable circumstances. A mandate for low-yield organic farming would put enormous pressure on all of Europe's wildlands.

An Organic Mandate