Food challenges - Our food security may be at risk

EVEN in the best of times organic food was an expensive option, especially if you wanted to buy beef or poultry. The €20 chicken was a Celtic Tigerism too far — even if you could afford it. Getting one ethically produced and supposedly-happier chicken for the price of four supermarket birds never seemed a good deal for the consumer, whatever about the fancy bird.

Like so many trends it was fuelled, like it or not, by more than a soupcon of ostentation. The corn-fed, herb butter-rubbed, organic chicken was indeed the €10,000 Chanel handbag in the flaunt-it-if-you-have-it parade of supermarket trollies.

This week’s report from Britain’s Food Standards Agency, which found that organic food is nutritionally no better than conventional farm produce, may do little to convince more of us to buy organic food.

In the most comprehensive study yet into the nutritional content of organic food compared to ordinary fare, scientists found no significant difference in vitamins or minerals. Another study found there are no extra health benefits to eating organic food rather than meat, fruits or vegetables grown on intensive farms.

However disappointed advocates of organic food will be with these findings they will be a lot less disappointed than the millions and millions of animals reared in appalling and plainly cruel conditions needed to satisfy an ever-hungrier world. That is, of course, if you suspend the assumption that domestic animals don’t have feelings of any kind, the assumption at the very heart of the philosophy that makes industrial meat production possible.

The study focussed on nutritional value and did not consider any other issues. And, if we are to recognise even one of today’s truths, organic farming is about all the other issues. It is about the proper use of land and animals, energy and water and the world we imagine we own but merely hold in trust.

Organic farming is not the answer to our frightening food problems but it, and more importantly, the ethos behind it, ask the right questions. In contrast, industrial farming presents the great challenges. Organic farming is not efficient enough, but industrial farming is far too destructive though essential. The answer is probably, hopefully, somewhere in the middle.

The United Nations says world population will hit 9.1 billion by 2050. Today’s population is 6.8 billion, but international agencies are already pessimistic about maintaining adequate food, safe fresh water and other critical resources for this number. Put another 2.3 billion mouths into stressed ecosystems where agricultural productivity is static or falling and, barring even more forest clearances, there will be no new land to farm.

To keep pace with population and increasing meat consumption “agriculture needs to double its food production, using less water than today”, according to Britain’s chief scientific adviser. So, the challenge is about having enough to eat rather than how we produce it.

In this context it is very difficult to watch as Ireland’s farmers fight off bankruptcy. Is it the scale of their operations? Is it the grip food processors and supermarkets hold over the sector? Whatever the problem is, the time has come to resolve it because we cannot allow a whole culture of land usage and food production disappear as challenges to our food security seem imminent. This may mean fewer farmers, but the alternative could be food shortages.

If very expensive organic chickens do no more than stimulate this debate they will indeed have done the State some service.