It’s the agriculture secretary being very clear that organic food has no more nutrients and conventional food isn’t harmful.
Near as I can tell this quote is provided with no context in an article by a Henry I. Miller, a man who also claimed that nicotine is harmless and was called a key supporter by the tobacco industry. He’s a member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank that also promotes climate denial.
His article is here: https://www.hoover.org/research/organic-food-hoax - it’s a very slimy polemic against labeling GMO food. Incidentally, Daniel Glickman was strongly in favor of labeling, so I strongly suspect that Miller is intentionally being misleading with his quote.
He’s intentionally misleading several times in that piece:
“Many of those organic pesticides are more toxic than the synthetic ones used in ordinary farming.” - toxic how? To pests or to humans? Which ones? How many? What volumes of toxins are organic vs conventional farms putting into the ecosystem?
"His findings were extraordinary. In 59 of the 68 crops surveyed, there was a yield gap, which means that, controlling for other variables, organic farms were producing less than conventional farms. ” that’s not extraordinary, everyone knows synthetic fertilizer+pesticide increases yield. Claiming that organic is worse for the environment because if our entire food system was organic it would require more land is a crazy argument that ignores the amount of poisons like round up that conventional agribusiness pumps into the environment.
He conflates the entire organic food industry, government regulatory apparatus and GMO labelling proponents, using an Adam Smith quote to imply that labeling GMOs is part of a vast conspiracy against the public to raise prices. 🙄
It’s the agriculture secretary being very clear that organic food has no more nutrients and conventional food isn’t harmful.
Near as I can tell this quote is provided with no context in an article by a Henry I. Miller, a man who also claimed that nicotine is harmless and was called a key supporter by the tobacco industry. He’s a member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank that also promotes climate denial.
His article is here: https://www.hoover.org/research/organic-food-hoax - it’s a very slimy polemic against labeling GMO food. Incidentally, Daniel Glickman was strongly in favor of labeling, so I strongly suspect that Miller is intentionally being misleading with his quote.
He’s intentionally misleading several times in that piece:
“Many of those organic pesticides are more toxic than the synthetic ones used in ordinary farming.” - toxic how? To pests or to humans? Which ones? How many? What volumes of toxins are organic vs conventional farms putting into the ecosystem?
"His findings were extraordinary. In 59 of the 68 crops surveyed, there was a yield gap, which means that, controlling for other variables, organic farms were producing less than conventional farms. ” that’s not extraordinary, everyone knows synthetic fertilizer+pesticide increases yield. Claiming that organic is worse for the environment because if our entire food system was organic it would require more land is a crazy argument that ignores the amount of poisons like round up that conventional agribusiness pumps into the environment.
He conflates the entire organic food industry, government regulatory apparatus and GMO labelling proponents, using an Adam Smith quote to imply that labeling GMOs is part of a vast conspiracy against the public to raise prices. 🙄
This is just standard industry lobbyist tactics.