Wherever I shop for food these days, I find an ever-widening array of food products labeled “organic” and “natural.” But are consumers getting the health benefits they pay a premium for?
Until the 20th century … all farming was “organic,” with manure and compost used as fertilizer and “natural” compounds of arsenic, mercury and lead used as pesticides.
Might manure used today on organic farms contain disease-causing micro-organisms? Might organic produce unprotected by insecticides harbor cancer-causing molds? It’s a possibility … But consumers aren’t looking beyond the organic sales pitch.
Would It Kill Olivier De Schutter to Consider Incentives?
Overfishing is becoming increasingly recognized for the ecological disaster that it is. The capacity of the global aggregate fishing fleet is at least double of what is needed to exploit the oceans sustainably, and fishing methods such as industrial bottom trawling have proved particularly destructive. Add to this the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, leading to increased sea temperatures and ocean acidification, oil spills, agricultural and industrial run-off, pollution from aquaculture, and the enormous accumulation of plastic debris in water, and the critical situation for marine wildlife becomes clear.
That’s UN special rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter writing in — where else? —The Guardian last week.
Not once in his op-ed does De Schutter even remotely consider the idea that we already have a good mechanism in place to regulate overfishing and the depletion of the world’s stock of fish.