A worried public turns to organic foods

Research funds, once scarce, may see an upturn

Edie Lau / Sacramento Bee 23feb00

WASHINGTON -- Public backlash against genetically modified organisms is helping fuel a surge in popularity for organic foods, bringing with it new attention to scientific research needs, agricultural analysts said Tuesday.

At the same time, as organic farming goes mainstream some worry that it may lose its soul, with large farms squeezing out small ones, imports and exports increasing, and consumers more frequently buying organically labeled products in the form of processed foods, said Karen Klonsky,an economist in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis.

"Is that really meeting the goals of organic?" she asked at a session on the closing day of the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. "We see more frozen entrees, sophisticated packaging, processed foods, lots of refined sugar -- albeit organic sugar -- (in) this movement to an industry that more mimics conventional agriculture."

Meanwhile, conventional agriculture could stand to adopt more of the philosophy of organic farming, an official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture advocates, with greater attention to maintaining the balance of nature. "We need a fundamental shift of agricultural policy in this country," said Keith Jones, director of the National Organic Program.

The National Organic Program is responsible for writing a federal definition for the term "organic." Its first attempt in late 1997 was heartily slapped down. The USDA received public comment from 290,000 people, a passionate majority of whom objected to allowing organic labels on genetically modified crops, crops grown with sewage sludge, foods containing antibiotics and irradiated foods.

Jones said a revised proposal, to be released within a month, will better reflect the public's wishes for a more stringent definition.

Ironically, the development of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, which has received vastly more attention and funding than organic farming, is helping to boost the popularity of organics. Genetic engineering has created crops that are resistant to pests and herbicides and potentially more nutritious. But consumers, especially in Europe and increasingly in the United States, are wary of the long-term effects on their health and the environment.

"Organics have benefited, in the short run anyway, from GMOs because the only way to verify that you're not eating genetically modified organisms is to buy organic foods," said Klonsky.

Even before the advent of genetically altered foods, shoppers increasingly were going organic. Food sales in this country grew an estimated 14 percent in 1998, and averaged about 20 percent a year for the previous eight years, compared with about 2 percent in the industry overall, Klonsky said.

The farming community is trying to keep pace. A USDA survey soon to be released tallied 1.3 million acres in America devoted to certified organic farming in 1997. California, with about 100,000 acres, was ranked second after Idaho in land used for certified organic crops. (California has more land registered for organic farming; certification is a step beyond.)

While the proportion of certified organic farmland is small -- 0.2 percent of all U.S. farmland -- its rate of growth is high. Crop acreage more than doubled between 1992 and 1997, according to Catherine Greene, the USDA economist who conducted the survey.

Don Lotter, a doctoral student in ecology at UC Davis who organized the organic farming session, traces the organic movement to the 1920s and 1930s, when Britain, Germany and the United States began producing an ammonium form of nitrogen for the manufacture of explosives. The same process was used to make nitrogen fertilizer. The idea was, the more nitrogen was applied to the soil, the better the crop yield.

The problem is, Lotter said, the synthetic nitrogen lacked the matrix of organic, or carbon-containing, materials found in compost. Soil microbes depend on that matrix for energy. In some systems the microbes were starving.

An English lord in 1934 coined the term "organic," referring to the carbon material and the concept of managing a farm as an organic whole. Practices include feeding livestock from the harvest and composting.

Organic agriculture has succeeded over the decades despite a lack of scientific knowledge, said Mark Lipson, policy program director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation in Santa Cruz. "We've only begun to really figure out what its potential is.

"Everything that has ever been achieved with it, which is notable, has been done by farmers, basically, by trial and error. There has been, until the last couple of years, virtually zero institutional scientific support," he said.

Funding figures at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service are telling. About $1 million of the current $800 million research budget is spent on organic projects, compared with $30.7 million on genetic engineering.

Lipson said that for the first time, the president's proposal for the 2001 budget contains items marked specifically for organic research, $5 million worth.

Lipson and his colleagues have ready ideas for using such funds. "There are just so many things we don't begin to know about natural systems in agriculture," he said. "The vast majority of soil organisms haven't even been classified yet, let alone understood in their function, let alone understood in their ecological relationship to other organisms. We've got a long, long way to go."