I’ve had some organic food that tastes good, including one or two of Charles’s products. We’ll stipulate that it’s all very lovely that he can craft tasty artisanal food products on his estate, and sell them at premium prices.
But that’s kind of the point – the combination of smugness and moral superiority that seems to ooze from him and others who can’t seem to understand why anyone could be so troglodytic as not to prefer organic food is a conceit available only to those with a surplus of money.
The implication I am sure is that non-organic farming is motivated by . . . what, hatred of Gaia? Greed? When in realiity, the original “Green Revolution” was the technology-driven quantum increases in crop productivity driven by, yes, chemical fertilizers and insecticides, which is what averted centuries of Malthusian doomsday scenarios wherein increasing populations experienced mass die-offs due to lack of food.
It’s great that a bunch of yuppies and foodies can enjoy Charles’s delicacies at elite cocktail parties, or congratulate themselves on their green purchases at Whole Foods. But the implication that everyone could and should be equally organic-friendly is ridiculous. I don’t see a lot of poor people shopping at Whole Foods. I don’t know how you’d supply school lunches to millions of American kids without the dreaded “factory farming.” I don’t know what you’d say to the several hundred million Indians and Africans who’d probably be dead or never been born if they had hewed to their “traditional” (i.e., inefficient and famine-inducing) farming methods instead of availing of modern agricultural technology.
Also – have Charles and his acolytes given any thought to just how much forest and swamp and other undeveloped land would have to be clearcut for additional agricultural planting if everyone adopted low-intensity (that is, low yield) feel-good organic farming? Gee, there are trade-offs involved in this?
The article rightly paints Charles as a pioneer in the organics-as-religion movement. It’s precisely because he, an idle, wealthy, self-indulgent twit, was ahead of the curve that has now spread to an increasingly twittish upper middle class populace in search of a new feel-good creed.
Um, what is it exactly that you were hoping to debate?
I mean, if you have a specific thesis about organic vs. conventional agriculture that you’d like to see discussed, feel free to point it out. If you just want to rant about how annoying you find Prince Charles, you might be better off in the BBQ Pit forum.
Oh, I’m not that mad. And while I could have made this plainer, my implicit point of debate was: Is there any coherent rationale for how organic farming could be scalable to a large portion of the world’s non-wealthy population, without mass die-offs and clearcutting of virgin land? And if not, isn’t the “organic movement” just self-congratulation among a bien pensant elite with more money than they know what to do with?
I concede I’ve never done the math to prove that these techniques just would never allow us to feed close to all the people on Earth. Maybe someone else has argued for how they could? Or, is the organic movement a crypto population-control movement on the theory that it’s just not natural for us to have six billion people on a planet whose organic carrying capacity would have to be significantly lower?
There are some people that it’s just best to ignore. Prince Charles is one of those people. He was visiting some country a while back and suggested that it would be a good idea to ban McDonald’s. The Daily Mail of all papers gave him a roasting over that. His own range of food is incredibly unhealthy, it did not compare favourably to the evil McDonald’s selection.
Anyway… Looks around nervously … Got to run… The Grey Goo is after me.
I just wanted to dart in real quick with a basic cite to get things moving in the direction the OP seems to want (i.e. to discuss Organic vs conventional farming techniques, and then discuss whether Organic methods are scalable…as opposed to discussing Charles being a bonehead :p).
Here is a Wiki cite on Organic Farming that may be helpful:
Very good question; thanks for clearing up the confusion about the OP. AFAIK, it’s currently held that strictly organic agriculture as currently practiced couldn’t feed as many people as conventional agriculture now does. A recent article (no free access) in the Economist quoted claims to that effect from Norman Borlaug, one of the architects of the 60’s “Green Revolution” for increasing agricultural productivity. [In preview: I see that xtisme has already cited Borlaug from another source.] But these claims have been challenged:
I think the bigger problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any form of agriculture which can be universally practiced on the scale required to feed today’s global population without causing some severe environmental problems in the long term.
I don’t see how that follows. You seem to be implying that there’s no middle ground between a movement being universal (or at least scalable to universality) and being just a useless exercise in self-congratulation.
But surely there are many environmental/lifestyle choices, from veganism to energy self-sufficiency to bicycle commuting, which aren’t feasible for everybody to practice but which nonetheless can have a significant beneficial environmental effect. Seems to me that organic agriculture can be reasonably argued to qualify for that category.
I’m not familiar with this issue or Prince Charles’ role in it. Huerta88, can you clarify how it is that Charles has injected a spiritual element into it?
I think any cause can be easily ridiculed on the basis of some know-nothing celeb that is among its advocates. But you haven’t proven anything by doing so.
Huh, I thought all participants in a GD thread were supposed to read the OP’s linked cite, if any. I guess I need to re-read the syllabus.
In any case, I think the remarks by Prince Charles that got the OP riled up were probably these:
I too am not seeing exactly how that translates into demands for the entire elimination of conventional agriculture worldwide in favor of universal organic agriculture, but you’re right, that does seem to be what the OP is inferring from it.
Yes and no. Before I plunge into reading a link, I want the OP to quote the section that he thinks supports his thesis. Once he does that, I’m happy to do the assigned reading.
What exactly does “twit” mean in British slang? Somehow I get the impression it expresses a concept slightly more complex than “fool.” It only ever seems to be applied to upper-class persons.
Eh. Sure, strict organic farming on a world-wide scale probably isn’t workable. But we can surely do a whole lot better if we take things on a practical level, rather than a moral one. Organic farming isn’t good because it’s morally superior, it’s good because (or rather to the extent that) it conserves soil, it produces better food, it requires less energy, it doesn’t dump toxic material into the soil, and so forth.
Organic farming doesn’t mean low-intensity farming. Organic farming isn’t some mysterious hippie fad, it’s simply the way farming was done until the 20th century.
It seems to me that we want to prevent conversion of wilderness to agricultural land, we want to increase yields, we want to increase food safety, we want to minimize externalities like pollution, we want sustainability. These goals are not incompatible with organic or semi-organic techniques. Industrial farming isn’t sustainable, it has tremendous externalities.
What we really should do here in the US is get rid of agricultural policies that encourage vast subsidized plantings of pesticide-drenched corn, wheat, cotton and soybeans. Stop giving money to Archer Daniels Midland to produce commodity crops nobody wants. The world today has no shortage of food, famines are not caused because we can’t grow enough food. The US could grow 10 times the food we grow now, except there’s no market for it. Which means subsidies for these crops is ridiculous. Small scale farmers CAN compete, but not by growing these commodity crops. There’s a libertarian solution here, people! Good for the environment, good for small farmers, good for the taxpayers, good for people who eat food from time to time.
It’s implicit (or I’m inferring it) from those remarks, from the goofy stuff he’s said about talking to plants, and from this sort of talk:
By identifying Chas.'s gentleman-farmer hobby with “humanitarianism” and “forward-thinking[ness],” she is implicitly positing a dichotomy with anyone who doesn’t embrace his idle-twit hobbyist approach to agriculture as being not “humanitarian” or not “forward-thinking,” and is implying that other approaches to agriculture are inconsistent with “responsible stewardship of the land.” That’s the part that I think needlessly casts this as a morality play.
When someone is praising someone else as a “humanitarian” or “forward thinking,” I often find that the praising of the praisee is as much an invitation to the audience to admire the praiser for sharing the values of the praisee as it is anything else.
I suppose it all depends on how you define “responsible stewardship”. I don’t think anybody denies that there are non-trivial environmental problems linked with intensive chemical fertilizer and pesticide use on the scale of modern agribusiness. So I can’t get too riled about somebody feeling that that approach to agriculture is in some respects “irresponsible”.
The big question, and the question that I don’t think anybody has a definitive answer to so far, is (as you noted in the clarification of your OP): Does a different approach to agriculture exist that can provide all or most of our current food supply without producing equally serious environmental problems?
I do think that the sustainable food movement needs to pay more attention to this issue, but I don’t think that makes them automatically wrong in pointing out some of the ways that organic agriculture (at least on its current small scale) has advantages for the environment over conventional agriculture.
And I confess I still don’t see why the fact that Charles likes to talk to plants—or the fact that a California restaurateur and environmental advocate likes his views—necessarily implies that Charles is actually demanding the entire elimination of conventional agriculture worldwide in favor of universal organic agriculture.
I disagree. They may just be talking about how we, who can afford these practices, should look at them more seriously. I find it hard to believe that Charles and Waters don’t understand that making people starve in 3rd world countries is worthwhile just so they can spread their “hobby” around the globe.
There’s a lot to be said about the fact that we don’t pay the full price of our globalized agricultural practices, especially in light of the fossil fuels used to ship stuff all over the globe just so we rich folks can eat perfectly shaped and colored oranges all year long. That doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t ship them, but we should be sure we’re not making future generations pay for the way we like indulge ourselves.
For some reason I’m reminded of Hillary Clinton being bashed for supposedly (or “implicitly”) bashing housewives by saying she “didn’t want to stay home and bake cookies and have teas”.
I had that in mind and should have cited it in support of an inference that Charles doesn’t (as many people who think they’ve found The Answer don’t) necessarily shy from thinking his personal preferences are or ought to be interchangable with mandatory normative public policy.
