Organic foods beyond the buzz

(Ecns.cn) -- The extra money paid for so-called organic foods can't pay off in nutrition or safety back to consumers, and it is not even in line with a low-carbon lifestyle, according to a report in Southern Metropolis Weekly.

Many Chinese parents buy for their children organic foods, which are sold at eight-to-10-times higher prices than their conventionally grown counterparts, with a vague sense that they are somehow better for their health, while they won't themselves indulge in the consumption.

Wei Xiaoqing, an organic-foods consumer in Beijing, usually spends more than 1,000 yuan on each shopping trip. "I can't control the air pollution outside, but I could make sure the food is the healthiest," she said, adding that it is an investment in health.

But consumers aren't sure precisely what direct benefit the body will get from that extra money.

Recent studies have suggested the answer, as best we can tell, is: Not much.

A research team led by two Stanford University scholars selected and analyzed 237 studies examining the benefits of organic foods and published their results in the Annals of Internal Medicine last September, saying they haven't found to date "strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods."

Although conventional produce carries a higher risk of pesticide contamination, researchers are still uncertain whether this has a significant impact on human health. What's more, organic foods that are fertilized with manure instead of pesticides are found to be exposed to germ contamination.

Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues under the Hudson Institute, said, "People who eat organic and 'natural' foods are eight times as likely as the rest of the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria,"citing figures compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States.

However, organic agriculture has grown rapidly thanks to the global food security crisis, and now it has a market of more than $80 billion, with an annual 20- to-30-percent increase, according to one research.

Enterprises label their organic products with "zero pollution" and advertise through various online and social media channels, while consumers are attracted after being fed up with food security scares.

Wei says she prefers organic foods only because she wants non-polluted foods and she doesn't care whether the food is grown and produced organically. With organic products, consumers are buying a sense of security with higher prices, said Li Shuguang, a professor at Fudan University.

Insiders have been skeptical about organic production for a long time.

Guo Chunmin, of the China Organic Food Certification Center, said that organic certification is approved if the farmer doesn't add pesticides, herbicides, petroleum-based fertilizer, metals or synthetic chemicals to the crop. It in fact only certifies a process of how food is grown, not pesticide detection, he added.

Guo admitted it can't be guaranteed that all the organic foods in the market can meet the organic requirements, due to the lack of real-time supervision.

Farm owner Sun Dewei even said that organic food fraud in Beijing is common and nearly all the farms are far away from a truly organic system. Some organic farms that provide delivery service only grow three or four types of vegetables and will buy fruits from others or markets to meet demand, Sun added.

Du Xiangge, an expert in organic agriculture, said the public in China only pays attention to what's related to their health, regardless of the notion behind the process, like environmental protection.

American writer and author of "Whole Earth Catalog" Stewart Brand said he pays the extra money on expensive organic foods to help society, but consumers like him will feel disappointed at hearing the truth.

Ken Green, a professor of environmental management at Manchester Business School of the United Kingdom, conducted a comprehensive study on the environmental impact of food production with colleagues and said, "You cannot say that all organic food is better for the environment than all food grown conventionally. If you look carefully at the amount of energy required to produce these foods, you get a complicated picture. In some cases, the carbon footprint for organics is larger."

As former Secretary of Agriculture of the United States Dan Glickman said, organic products, employed only as a notion in marketing, don't mean safer or more nutritious than conventional products.