Approach any serious-looking college student in the Boston area, where I teach, and ask them what kind of food and farming system they would like to see. Most will say they don’t want food from factory farms with a large carbon footprint. They want foods locally grown on small family farms. They don’t want crops grown using synthetic chemical fertilizers or pesticides; they want crops grown “organically.” They want farm animals to be able to range freely. They want “slow” food rather than fast food. And they don’t want “Frankenfoods” – crops developed through genetically engineering.

What might such an idealized food system actually look like? Take a trip to Africa. The small farmers who populate the continent’s impoverished countryside are living out something close to this post-materialist fantasy. Two-thirds of all Africans depend on farming or animal grazing for their food and income, and nearly all of their operations are small-scale.

The UK’s leading authority on organic growing, Garden Organic, is disputing claims made yesterday, Tuesday 26 February, on BBC 2’s Horizon programme, ‘Professor Regan’s Supermarket Secrets’ that there is little scientific evidence of organically produced food having any nutritional differences or benefits compared to non-organic food.

The Midlands based charity, celebrating 50 years at the forefront of organic horticulture this year, also criticises the programme for disregarding the massive environmental benefits that organic methods bring.

Garden Organic’s director of research, Dr Margi Lennartsson, said: “Despite the programme’s assertions, there is a growing body of evidence demonstrating that organic foods contain more desirable components, such as vitamins and minerals, and fewer harmful ones, such as pesticides and additives.

“New evidence that emerged last year, comparing organic and industrially produced crops, indicates higher vitamin C levels and polyphenols in kiwis, higher levels of phenols, flavonoids and vitamin C in apple puree, higher content of vitamin C, B-carotene and flavonoids in tomatoes, and higher polyphenol content in peaches.

“Milk from breastfeeding mothers whose diets contain a large proportion of organic food has also been found to contain a significantly higher level of conjugated linoleic acids (CLA), an antioxidant, than those eating conventional food. A recent study also showed that UK whole organic milk has on average 68% higher levels of the essential fatty acid omega-3 and a healthier omega-3:6 profile than non-organic milk.

Believing that genetically engineered foods are untested for health effects on humans, the Ashland Food Co-op has launched a program to get all such products off its shelves this year — and other area markets, including Shop N Kart and Food For Less, say they are steadily increasing offerings of GMO-free food.

Most genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are found in corn, soy, canola, cottonseed products and Hawaiian papaya, which means they’re in a huge array of foods — estimates range up to 70 percent in processed food — says Co-op Outreach and Owner Services Manager Annie Hoy, who teaches classes on non-GMO shopping.

“They’re made in a lab in ways that nature doesn’t operate. It’s an imprecise science. It may look, act and taste like corn, but it isn’t corn,” says Hoy, noting that science recognizes no species barriers, and will combine genes from fish and strawberries in order to extract a trait, such as long shelf life, color or ability to resist pesticides.

What most aggravates shoppers, she says, is that GMO foods are not required to be labeled as such, so it’s difficult to screen them out of your diet.

The rainbow papaya is pumped-up to be more powerful, genetically modified to resist the destructive ringspot virus.

It’s a stronger fruit, but it looks the same as an organic papaya.

Some said that is the problem.

“I just think it makes sense that people have a choice in what they buy,” said Shelly Wilkinson, a concerned Big Island resident. “Whether we are buying produce that has been grown conventionally, whether it’s been genetically engineered or whether it’s organic.”

A group of concerned residents collected 4,000 signatures from Hawaii residents who want genetically modified foods to be labeled.

It’s required in other countries, like Japan and Australia, but not in the United States. Some DNA altered foods have shown to cause allergies in humans.

Thanks to the International Trade Centre, 15 innovative companies and business networks from five African countries have travelled to Nuremberg, Germany, to take part in the world’s largest organic goods fair, where business worth millions of dollars is done every year.ITC, the UN/WTO agency whose mandate is to help small, developing-country businesses export, invested some $100,000 so that firms and organizations from Rwanda,

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Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Madagascar could take advantage of the unique marketing opportunity offered by the annual four-day BioFach fair, which closes on Sunday.

For the first time, the fair is host to a special Organic Africa Pavilion where some 75 concerns and business networks, mostly sponsored by governments or other international organizations, are displaying organic products ranging from foods, herbs, spices and essential oils to fertilizer made in Madagascar from bat droppings.

Eighty-five percent of Hawaii residents think it’s important that genetically engineered fruit be labeled. That was the shocking statistic that I read in a study by Sabry Shehata, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Hawaii-Hilo. If you’re not familiar, genetic engineering, producing what are known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), is a relatively new technology whereby scientists take the genetic material of one organism — the basic blueprint or building blocks of life — and insert it into the genome of another, different species of plant or animal. According to the latest information available, approximately 70 percent of the processed foods on store shelves contain GE ingredients.

The Polish retail chain Spolem operates 20 stores in Warsaw called Sezam, the majority of which have an attractive organic product range. In 2005, organics were introduced in just three stores, but by now you find them in a dozen or so Sezam outlets, with the number of organic products varying according to the size and location of the stores. The Spolem cooperative (www.spolem.org.pl) was founded 135 years ago.

“In 2007 we included an organic range in another four of our stores,” says Boguslaw Edmund Pienkowski. He is the manager of the biggest Sezam store that has 3000 m² of retail space and is located in Marszalkowska Street near the Palace of Culture. Food, including organic products, is on the ground floor; on the two upper floors you find household and electrical goods and other things for the home. This Sezam store employs 105 people.

Mr Pienkowski also points out that some of their stores only have 30-70 m² of shopping area. A small outlet might have just half a metre of shelf space for organics, while the equivalent in one of the two department stores can be as long as 15 metres.

Germany’s organic food industry enjoyed a boom year in 2007. Turnover rose 15 percent, an increase of 5 billion euros ($7.4 billion). But that’s not good news for everyone in the business. Organic food store owner Ralf Murmann has been running his business in Bonn for 33 years. Profit was never his sole motive. But in the past, he was able to make a living from the shop. Now, with the trend towards organic food booming in Germany, his store is on the brink of closure.

“We are not profiting from this boom. Shops of this size are the losers in this development”, said Murmann. He stocks the same kind of yoghurts as the same organic supermarket two kilometres away. His store also has a big cheese counter, freshly baked bread, fruit and vegetables from local farmers. But Murmann’s customers have been dwindling since ever more conventional supermarkets started to stock organic products.

“Organic is not just about labels,” Murmann said. “When we started out, we wanted to change farming and to change business practices. We didn’t want supermarkets built on greenfield sites.”

IRELAND’S marine and aquaculture sectors are again well represented at this year’s BioFach 2008, the leading organic trade fair, being held in Nuremberg,from February 21st-24th.

Three of Ireland’s pioneering seaweed products manufacturers, as well as a leading producer of Irish organic salmon, and a salmon smokehouse, are participating in the fair with the support of Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM).

“BioFach brings together more than 2,500 international exhibitors and some 45,500 trade visitors from 112 countries of the world in Nuremberg annually,” said Jason Whooley, Chief Executive Officer, BIM. “As such it is a particularly valuable opportunity to showcase these leaders in the Irish seafood and aquaculture sectors. This is our fourth year to attend the fair. Last year’s event was highly successful and we continue to see growth in demand for Irish organic produce internationally, with trade visitors here very interested in organic produce coming from the ideally situated coast of Ireland.”

Applying organic fertilizers, such as those resulting from composting, to agricultural land could increase the amount of carbon stored in these soils and contribute significantly to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, according to new research. Carbon sequestration in soil has been recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the European Commission as one of the possible measures through which greenhouse gas emissions can be mitigated.

One estimate of the potential value of this approach — which assumed that 20% of the surface of agricultural land in the EU could be used as a sink for carbon — suggested it could constitute about 8.6% of the total EU emission-reduction objective.

Andrew Kimbrell described two kinds of farming in his keynote speech Saturday at the Organic Farming Conference.

On one side is industrial agriculture, which Kimbrell has battled in his work as a lawyer and as executive director of both the Center for Food Safety and the International Center for Technology Assessment.

On the other side are farmers like those who filled the La Crosse Center hall where Kimbrell spoke.

“We have seen this industrial model progress further and further, and I’m sure they thought we’d end up like the Jetsons,” Kimbrell said, taking aim at genetically engineered food. “What they never saw coming is you. They thought they had the future. They thought they had successfully taken the culture out of agriculture.”

Traces of an unapproved genetically modified trait were found in U.S. corn planted in 2006 and 2007 but the grain poses no threat to food or feed safety, said the U.S Agriculture Department on Friday. The 2008 corn crop will not be affected when it is planted this spring across the United States, the world’s largest corn exporter.

The unapproved GMO trait, known as Event 32, was found in approximately three seeds per 1,000 in Herculex RW and Herculex XTRA Rootworm Protection corn samples. The Herculex brand is made by Dow AgroSciences LLC, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co.

Dow reported the discovery to the government on January 25, said Cindy Ragin, spokeswoman for USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS).

“We took steps to investigate the information that was submitted to us by Dow,” she said. “We don’t think our trading partners will stop corn trade with the United States. There are no food or feed safety concerns.”

If you look at your food as sustaining your health as well as the environment, the price of organically grown food seems well worth it. Recent studies have shown organic fruits and vegetables contain more vitamins, and a little soil science explains why.

A large, four-year research project in Britain recently reported that organic crops grown adjacent to conventionally grown crops contained as much as 40% more antioxidants, those vitamins heralded by scientists for protecting against heart disease, cancer, strokes and other health problems.

These results from Europe don’t come as a surprise to supporters of organic farming. While the next phase of the UK study will research how the nutritional quality of the food is affected by agricultural methods, organic proponents here in the United States have some answers.

“It comes down to the health of the soil,” explains Bob Schaffer, co-founder of Soil Culture Consulting. We caught Schaffer just after he gave a talk on Whole Farming Systems to 1,200 people at the Acres USA Conference. “If we don’t look after the environment, then we won’t get healthy plants,” he said.

Organic food sales in the U.S. have increased at an average of 18.6 percent a year in the past decade, according to the Organic Trade Association’s 2007 Manufacturer Survey.

Organic Valley last month saw a 17 percent jump in the amount of milk it bottled — in just one week, said Wayne Peters, president of Organic Valley’s board of directors and a local dairy farmer.

But the higher demand has brought a new challenge.

As industries such as organic dairy continue to increase their share of the market, the growth rate of organic feed production has lagged.

“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion…It should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, and a meaningful unity between the two.” – A smart guy who lived a while back

It is difficult to speak of biodynamics without waxing philosophic. Little known to most people, the biodynamic approach to grape growing has become one of the more controversial issues within the wine industry. What began in the early 1990s has developed into a movement whose practitioners include some of the world’s best winemakers, and some of the world’s most unique wines. The skeptics, who are many, see it as an incredible waste of time and money. For some, it is an affront to science and modern thinking.

All consumers and experts would agree that, whenever a person eats organic products, they are also doing something for the environment. But does an organic apple from Argentina protect the climate more or better than a conventional apple from a nearby orchard? This seems to be an area, in which the organic sector still has some catching up to do, if one is to believe the experts that came together last Thursday to discuss issues affecting the organic sector.

At the traditional “Nature & More Dinner”, to which leading figures from the industry and ecological organisations are invited every year during the world’s leading organic trade fair, representatives from Greenpeace, the international organic organisation IFOAM, the environment-orientated Triodos Bank, TÜV Nord and the Nature & More Foundation also called for the organic sector to define clear objectives for climate protection.

“Industrialised agriculture is one of the worst offenders of our time in terms of climate damage”, says world trade expert Jürgen Knirsch from Greenpeace, outlining the problematic context. “The excessive use of fertilisers alone causes climate-damaging emissions equivalent to 2 thousand million tonnes of CO2. At the same time, the majority of climate killers caused by agriculture can be avoided through relatively straightforward measures. The organic sector can be a pioneer in this field, as healthy soils are not only good for plants, they also store large volumes of carbon.”

The demand for organic fruits and vegetables is still ‘booming’. We can conclude that the imago of organic fruits and vegetables has become better, because organic is trendy. More and more organic convenience products are being introduced. The demand for organic fruits and vegetables is even increasing even faster than the availability. Less growers are choosing for organic production, because the yield per acre is lower and it is more difficult to grow organic fruits and vegetables on a large scale.

Perhaps the market for organic fruits and vegetables will change dramatically, because more and more consumers of organic fruits and vegetables become aware of ‘food miles’. In lots of countries organic fruits and vegetables are grown on a small scale and are sold on the local market. Lots of small companies and stands at Biofach showed the fragmentation on the market for organic fruits and vegetables.

The demand for organic fruits and vegetables is increasing more than the availability and this causes a threat for the future. Organic fruits and vegetables are becoming more expensive and because of this it is possible that the demand for organic products will decrease. The difference in price between conventional and organic products is namely becoming larger.

source: www.freshplaza.com

Twenty-seven Brazilian companies will be participating in the Biofach organic product fair, to take place between February 21 and 24 in the city of Nuremberg, Germany. In sectors like food and cosmetics, they are part of the Organics Brazil Project, developed in partnership with the Institute for Promotion of Development (IPD) and the Brazilian Export and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex). Biofach Nuremberg is the largest and most important fair in the sector, with over 2,600 exhibitors and 45,000 visitors from 110 countries. In 2007, the fair generated US$ 5 billion in business.

Brazilian companies are going to occupy a space reserved for the Organics Brazil that is subdivided into individual stands. Most of the companies are going to launch new products at the fair.

The study shows that 30.4 million hectares are currently certified according to organic standards (data as at the end of 2006). Australia continues to account for the largest certified organic surface area, with 12.3 million hectares, followed by China (2.3 million hectares), Argentina (2.2 million hectares) and the USA (1.6 million hectares). The greatest share of global organic surface area is in Oceania/Australia (42%), followed by Europe (24%) and Latin America (16%). In terms of certified land under organic management as a proportion of national agricultural area, the Alpine countries, such as Austria (13%, 361,487 hectares) and Switzerland (12%, 125,596 hectares), top the statistics. Compared to the adjusted data of the previous survey, the global organic area grew by approximately 1.8 million hectares during 2006. Growth was strongest in Oceania/Australia (more than 600,000 hectares) and Europe (more than 500,000 hectares). From the first figures available for 2007, Helga Willer of FiBL expects that the area under organic management has continued to grow.

Exquisite wild mushrooms, served in fine restaurants around the world. Hard to get organic raspberries. Delicate preserves made from wild blueberries, wild strawberries and cornelian cherries. Organic whole wheat, pomegranate vinegar, pumpkin seed oil, sunflower seed butter, those are just some of the wide range of exceptional new organic products Serbia will showcase at Biofach this year.

Well known for its high quality fruit and food products, Serbia is now offering many of those in organic, too. Serbia has one of the largest potential for organic production in Europe: up to 15% of all arable land is agrochemicals-free, ready for organic certification.