America Needs Organic Farming - and Pesticides; J. Hood

57 America Needs Organic Farming And Pesticides by John Hood O rganic farming is all the rage these days. After a spring of food scares and a sum mer boomlet of environmentalism, a re port issued last September by the National Acade my of Sciences (NAS) has quicklybecome revealed truth to legions of editorial writers, public officials, and farming mavericks. Synthetic drugs for live stock are out. Synthetic pesticides are out. Synthet ic fertilizers are out. Synthesizing itself is out. And what is in? Natural fertilizers, crop rota tion, careful breeding-basic farming practices making a comeback after some 50 years of neglect. The report says that such practices can be as pro ductive, and in some cases even more so, than the standard synthetic chemical approach. This finding has been greeted with almost hys terical glee. Many view the popularity of organic farming as the start of America's "Green Revolu tion." There is no question that the public's ap petite for natural foods, for foods free of danger ous chemicals and cancer-causing preservatives, is large and as yet unsatiated. When reports surfaced earlier this year about Alar, a cancer-causing preservative used on apples, supermarkets with organic food sections found themselves making a bundle off concerned shoppers (such foods are typically much more expensive than chemical tainted wares). Grocery chains across the country have jumped on the bandwagon by issuing "pesti cide-free" pledges.

All this hype has occurred despite the efforts of many scientists to communicate a basic message to a fearful public: the food supply is safe. Agricultur al chemicals, they say, pose little if any risk of can cer to consumers. Bruce Ames, the noted chair man of the Department of Biochemistry at John Hood is a contributing editor of Reason magazine. Berkeley who developed the standard "Ames" test of cancer risk, estimates that the number of cases of cancer or birth defects caused by man made pesticide residues in food or water is "close to zero." Even so, the NAS report does make a significant point. American farmers have used synthetic chemicals and machinery reflexively, despite evi dence that organic methods can in some cases be more cost effective and maximize long-term prof its. The real problem is not health but economic ef ficiency. And the report correctly identifies the culprit: Federal commodity programs which en courage overproduction and punish farmers who rotate their crops.

The Federal programs, which cover about 70 percent of farm acreage, are crop-specific, paying farmers subsidies to plant the same crop year after year. If a farmer reduces his acreage, say to leave fields fallow for a year, he gets less money. If a farmer plants alfalfa or another crop designed to replenish his soil's nutrients, he gets less money. So farmers have an incentive to keep the same amount of land planted each year in the same crop, replacing crop rotation with heavy doses of syn thetic fertilizers and pesticides. As the NAS report points out, the Federal subsidies insulate farmers from the true costs of the synthetic approach: soil erosion, loss of nutrients, and increased use of ex pensive agricultural chemicals. James Bovard of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has identified other Federal farm pro grams that distort the costs and benefits of farming practices. In dry areas, Bovard writes in his book The Farm Fiasco, Federal irrigation projects sus tain crops that otherwise would be replaced with dry-weather crops more suited to soil conditions.

Federal disaster payments and drought insurance 58 THE FREEMAN· FEBRUARY 1990 reduce the financial risk to farmers who plant in low-yield or highly erosive soils, since catastrophe becomes a government problem rather than a pri vate one. Insurance programs also relieve farmers of the need to diversify, thus placing the entire op eration in greater risk when pests, weather, or dis ease wipe out a particular crop. All these government programs are defended with the argument that the free market, which op erates most of the American economy, simply does not work in agriculture. But the fact is market forces have not been allowed to impose the costs of farming methods on those who practice them. Farmers are making their decisions based on sig nals from Washington rather than signals from their own fields. In this way,government has estab lished a bias toward synthetic approaches and away from organic farming, distorting agricultural markets and costing taxpayers $25 billion a year in Federal subsidies.

Unfortunately, the economics behind organic farming are being overshadowed by its supposed health benefits. Instead of recognizing agricultural chemicals as tools that have been overused, many policymakers and environmental groups are treat ing them as poisons to be discarded. Instead of end ing the current bias toward synthetic chemicals, they would replace it with a bias against them. Groups such as the National Toxics Campaign and National Resource Defense Council (they started the Alar scare) have long pushed for a ban on many pesticides deemed carcinogenic, and they hope the new impetus toward organic farming will increase support for such measures in Congress. Many sympathizers look to farm programs as leverage for enacting the environmentalist agenda by making "nature-conscious" practices a condi tion for receiving subsidy checks. Even John Pesek, the Iowa State University agronomist who headed up the NAS research effort, says that "the growing demand for safer food and a cleaner environment suggests the time is ripe" for organic farming.

But the fact is that foods grown without agricul tural chemicals are rarely more safe, and sometimes are less so, than foods grown with chemicals. "All plants produce their own natural pesticides to pro tect themselves against fungi, insects, and predators such as man," says Ames of Berkeley. Tests of these natural pesticides have revealed that about the same percentage cause cancer in laboratory animals (30percent) as do synthetic pesticides. Cancer-causing agents occur naturally in such foods as mush rooms, cabbage, broccoli, pineapples, and carrots. Ames and other scientists are not saying that Americans are at high risk of cancer. Both natural ly occurring and synthetic pesticides pose a negli gible risk of cancer in the doses found in foods. What they are saying is that man-made chemicals are no more dangerous than those produced by the plants themselves. In fact, breeding plants to be highly resistant to pests or diseasean approach favored by environ mentalists and the NAS report to reduce the need for synthetic chemicals-doesn't always make the plants more healthful. In one case, a new variety of celery that was highly insect-resistant was intro duced in California. When people handling the veg etable began to complain of severe rashes, re searchers found out that it had 10 times the level of a natural carcinogen found in regular celery. "Many more such cases are likely to crop up," says Ames, "because there is a fundamental trade-off between nature's pesticides and man-made pesticides."

Nevertheless, organic farming proponents are basing their case chiefly on the specious food safe ty issue, when the focus should be on productivity and efficiency.Merely changing Federal farm pro grams to encourage crop rotation instead of syn thetic chemicals, on environmental or food safety grounds, would be as big a mistake as the previous policy has been. Each farmer's case is different. Growing one crop in one region may require use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. Farming another crop in another field might be done cheaply and produc tively with purely organic methods. Even then, when pests or diseases suddenly strike, chemicals still may be the only effective response. Heavy-handed government involvement, no matter how well-intended, cannot reflect these case-by-case concerns as well as can individual farmers operating in a free market. The best solu tion to America's farming woes is to stop treating farmers like wards of the state and start treating them like business people. Eliminate the subsidies.

Let farmers decide how to plant their crops with out interference from Washington bureaucrats or phobic environmentalists. Besides ending our silly bias against organic farming, we could save $25 bil lion from the Federal budget to invest in more worthwhile pursuits, of which there is, indeed, a bumper crop. D 59 Crop Controls and Indian Raids in Colonial Virginia by Gary M. Pecquet T he British colonized Virginia in 1607, and by 1612they were growing tobacco. It soon became the colony's major export. But heavy reliance upon tobacco proved troublesome for the Virginians. Small changes in the supply could produce large changes in tobacco's price. The tugs of demand and supply altered the price of tobacco and produced the "trade cycle" of the Chesapeake Bay colonies. Under British mercan tilist law, all tobacco had to be shipped directly to England. English merchants marketed the tobacco products to the rest of the world. As new markets were opened and new uses for tobacco were dis covered, the demand for tobacco increased and so did the price. A "tobacco boom" in Virginia would be followed by increased migration to the colony.