Issues > January/February 2001 (#86-87) > Defending Organic (And the Reasons Behind 20/20's False Attack)

Defending Organic (And the Reasons Behind 20/20's False Attack)

"I try to buy organic bananas since my young boys love them, and I've heard the regular ones are heavily treated with sprays," says Joanne Camas, a freelance editor and mother of four in New York City. "I have to confess that I don't buy all organic food - price is an issue, so I focus on what my children eat the most!" Joanne needn't apologize; when she does choose organic, she is contributing to a healthy trend: Organic food sales in the U.S. have grown between 20 and 30 percent a year over the last decade.

Many parents, like Joanne, choose organic in order to reduce their children's exposure to toxic pesticide residues. In a study published last year, Consumer Reports found residues of dangerous pesticides on many fruits and vegetables and advised parents to choose organic, instead. In addition, fifty-seven percent of Americans believe that organic production is better for the environment, according to a February 2000 poll by ABC News. They're right - organic farming methods protect and conserve our drinking water, soil and other natural resources.

As organic's popularity has grown, however, some attacks have sprouted, most notably a now-discredited segment by the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 that aired in February 2000. Based on inaccurate information, correspondent John Stossel announced that people who buy organic food are actually endangering their health and the environment. A rebroadcast in July was followed, in August, by an on-air apology from Mr. Stossel. So concluded this particular comedy of errors, but not before the harm had been done. After two airings, millions had heard that organic was more likely to expose them to deadly E.coli bacteria, while cleaner, cheaper, non-organic food was just as pesticide-free. At the end of the segment, Barbara Walters said she "may cry" because she's been buying organic food.

In fact, Stossel's scare was much ado about nothing. Traces of common E.coli were found on both conventional and organic produce samples. But tests for life-threatening E.coli strains were not done. And, as Stossel later admitted, no pesticide residue tests were done on either the organic or conventional produce. Interestingly, ABC did have scientists test for pesticides in poultry, where they found residues in the conventional, but not the organic - a fact that Stossel ignored.

Finally, the segment claimed that despite popular belief, organic food is not more nutritious than conventional food, although 80% of Americans in the ABC poll thought that organic food was both more nutritious and safer. Actually, the Organic Trade Association (OTA) notes, the organic industry doesn't make nutrition claims, emphasizing instead organic's environmental soundness and lower pesticide residues. Some evidence that nutritional value may be enhanced by healthier organic soil remains inconclusive, due to woefully inadequate government (U.S. Department of Agriculture) funding for organic research. According to Bob Scowcroft, director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, organic got $500,000 out of a total $1.5 billion USDA research budget in 2000, most of which went to genetic engineering, he says.

What is motivating these attacks?

Even though organic's $6 billion yearly sales represent only a small portion of the over $460 billion Americans spend on conventional processed food, its growth - the fastest of any food sector - apparently makes the conventional food industry very nervous. Peter Cleary, public policy communications manager with the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA), says, "All that organic means is that it was grown in a certain way. It's not better than biotech food, but the USDA organic seal implies otherwise." GMA pressed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to include genetically engineered ingredients in the definition of organic. But 270,000 citizen comments to the USDA overwhelmingly rejected the "big 3" - genetic engineering, irradiation and use of sewage sludge. Strong national organic standards, based on current certification rules that exclude the "big 3," will begin to take effect early in 2001.

In 1998, as the National Organic Standards were being drafted, Stossel's main anti-organic source, Dennis T. Avery, declared that consumers of organic and "natural" foods were eight times more likely to be exposed to killer E.coli bacteria. This was because, he said, organic was grown in bacteria-laden manure. Avery cited the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as his source, but the CDC denies that their data show anything of the sort.

In February 1999, in the New York Times, Marian Burros criticized Avery's equating of the terms "natural," "organic," "unpasteurized," and "free range." Burros noted that some of the contaminated foods that Avery called organic were in fact not (such as the unpasteurized Odwalla apple juice that killed a child, and salmonella-tainted "premium" chicken). Burros also pointed out that, according to the OTA, animal manure is not the major source of fertilizer for organic farmers, who rely mostly on compost made from the inedible portions of crops. When they do use manure, it's with strict composting procedures that kill all harmful bacteria - a regulation that does not apply to conventional food crops, where animal manure is used on a much greater scale.

Avery's work, including Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic, is published by his employer, the Hudson Institute, a conservative research group that has received funding from producers of pesticides and genetically engineered seeds. The danger posed by anti-organic misinformation is that it's well-funded and persistent. Avery's organic bacterial scare was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, the Tampa Tribune and industry publications. Even scientific journals like Nature, in an opinion piece on November 18, 1999, argued that biotechnology is our only hope to feed the world without toxic pesticides, because organic could never produce enough, and carried risks of bacterial contamination - information the journal attributed to Dennis Avery. In fact, organic farming often produces as much per acre as chemical-intensive farming. In times of drought or other abnormal conditions, research has repeatedly shown that organic crop yields tend to be higher. The latest attack is a Hudson Institute report by Alex Avery (Dennis's son) and others, alleging that the organic food industry has engaged in decades-long fear-mongering about pesticides and now genetic engineering, in order to get people to pay more for its products.

What does this barrage of anti-organic propaganda mean for the average consumer? We can do our part to defend and preserve organic by demanding that the truth be printed and aired, and by choosing organic whenever we can, in support of the environment and our health.