https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2018/09/29/the_organic_food_industry_gets_fat_on_lies_110755.html
In “The Wealth of Nations,” the 18th century economist and philosopher Adam Smith observed about the chicanery of some businessmen, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Nowhere is that truer than in today’s organic agriculture and food industries.
In an August Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled, “The Organic Industry Is Lying to You,” I described the ways those industries misrepresent the benefits of their products and broadcast spurious concerns about modern genetic engineering of crop plants – in other words, mendaciously trashing the competition.
The Journal published two responses to my op-ed from representatives of the organic industry that perfectly illustrate my thesis: Like tobacco industry executives before them, they have to lie in order to defend a flawed product.
Cameron Harsh, of the rabidly anti-technology NGO, Center for Food Safety, denied that organic farmers use harmful chemicals. In fact, many organic-approved pesticides pose significant environmental and human health risks. They include nicotine sulfate, which his highly toxic to warm-blooded animals; another is copper sulfate, a widely-used broad-spectrum organic pesticide that persists in the soil and is the most common residue found in organic food. The European Union determined that copper sulfate may cause cancer and intended to ban it, but backed off because organic farmers don’t have good alternatives.
More than two dozen synthetic chemical pesticides are permitted in organic agriculture, and organic farmers are demanding more. The reason is revealing. Organic practices are so primitive and inferior that constantly-challenged organic farmers periodically go whining to USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (whose members are from the organic industry), which rubber-stamps their requests for new chemicals to be approved. For example, as described in Food Safety News earlier this year: