The big problem with organic farming is it cannot produce enough food to feed the world’s population

Conventional agriculture uses synthetic chemicals to boost plant growth and control weeds, genetic engineering to improve yields/quality and antibiotics to treat livestock. Organic agriculture refers to the farming without the use of synthetic chemicals or genetic engineering.

Many environmentalists lobby for widespread replacement of conventional agriculture by organic agriculture, claiming the former damages the environment and the latter produces more nutritious food. However, it seems that widespread replacement of conventional by organic agriculture is just not feasible because organic yields could not feed the world’s population. And there is no convincing evidence that organic agriculture produces more nutritious food than conventional agriculture.

Fertilisers replenish nutrients (eg nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium) that crops remove from the soil as they grow. In conventional agriculture these elements are reintroduced to the soil in artificially synthesised compounds, whereas organic farming uses natural fertilisers such as manure and compost.

Complications associated with switching from conventional to organic agriculture are illustrated by Sri Lanka’s current economic crisis. Some 70 per cent of Sri Lankans are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture, especially tea production, in support of which the country spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually importing synthetic fertilisers.

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In 2019, its president Gotabaya Rajapaksa pledged to transition Sri Lanka to organic farming over 10 years. He expedited this plan suddenly in 2021, banning synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. More than 90 per cent of Sri Lanka’s farmers were using chemical fertilisers and 85 per cent experienced crop losses after the ban. Rice production fell by 20 per cent, forcing Sri Lanka to import $450 million worth of rice. Tea exports crashed, Sri Lanka’s primary export and source of foreign exchange.

Taking the rarity of starvation in our modern world for granted is dangerous, as would quickly become apparent if we returned to large-scale organic farming

Over the past year Sri Lanka suffered an annual inflation rate of more than 50 per cent and food price increases of 80 per cent. Public protests forced the Sri Lankan government to declare a state of emergency and deploy troops to maintain public order.

Although the synthetic fertiliser ban was not the sole cause of Sri Lanka’s economic crash, it was a significant factor. Much damage was also caused by the difficulty of obtaining organic alternatives, caused by the suddenness of the ban. Covid-19 lockdowns also devastated income from the tourist trade.

The big problem with organic farming is that it cannot produce enough food to feed the world’s population — 8 billion at present. Indeed, prior to the 20th century when world population was only a small fraction of its present size and all food was produced by organic farming, malnutrition was widespread. The global decline in undernourishment since the 1950s is a major achievement of conventional agriculture. No major agricultural nation has successfully transformed into full organic production.

Conventional agriculture also allows much more intensive farming — growing more food on less land. Trying to feed the world with the mainly-organic food yields of 1960 would mean farming twice as much land as we do today under conventional agriculture (Matt Ridley in Human Progress). Use of land for conventional agriculture has peaked and is now declining, allowing increasingly more land to be returned to natural ecosystems.

Environmentalists who promote organic farming claim conventional agriculture is environmentally harmful. But conventional agriculture is better for the environment than organic farming in many ways, according to a huge meta-analysis published in 2017 by ecologists M Clark and D Tilman in Environmental Research Letters. Also, Hannah Ritchie states in Our World in Data, also in 2017: “Across several metrics, organic agriculture actually proves to be more harmful for the world’s environment than conventional agricultural”. And this includes climate change, according to a study reported by L Smith and others in Nature Communications in 2019.

Why then do many environmentalists still proclaim the superiority of organic farming and ignore the problem of low productivity? Perhaps many are influenced by the naturalistic fallacy that anything modern produced by human ingenuity must be inferior to the all-natural precursor.

Apart from low yields I have no problem with organic farming. But taking the rarity of starvation in our modern world for granted is dangerous, as would quickly become apparent if we returned to large-scale organic farming. And hungry people are desperate people as the American writer Alfred Henry Lewis (1855–1914) memorably observed: “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy”.

William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC