Dominic Lawson: A lesson in how to dig yourself into a hole

When is organic food not organic food? When it's not British. That seems to be the message from the Soil Association, the country's most venerable advocate of organic farming methods.

This week the association will issue a "consultation document" suggesting a range of responses to the apparently embarrassing fact that a significant proportion of the food which it certifies as organic is air-freighted into our shops - and hence adds to greenhouse gases. According to the BBC, one of the plans being considered by the Soil Association is "an outright ban". Since the organisation has no legal powers of any sort, I presume this means that it will withdraw its certification from any imported foods, regardless of whether they have been grown in accordance with its regulations.

The director of the Soil Association, Patrick Holden, is one of the hardliners: he believes that almost all food exports worldwide should be ended. I say "almost" because I can't believe that he would ban the export of food to famine zones. Yet the consequence of such a policy, if the world was mad enough to listen, would be famine on a vast scale: most notably in Japan, which could never generate enough food to feed its own people.

Some in the organic movement might say that this would serve the Japanese right: they should not have bred so far in excess of their ability to feed themselves. In a sense this callousness is at the heart of their ideology. Earl Butz, a former US Secretary of Agriculture, argued almost 40 years ago that if America switched entirely to organic methods, "someone must decide which 50 million of our people will starve!".

It's not necessary to have been in Richard Nixon's cabinet to have taken such an attitude. Norman Borlaug, a former winner of the Nobel Peace Prize as the father of the "green revolution", is a leading advocate of synthetic fertilisers to increase the yield of crops; he points out that in the last half of the 20th century, worldwide cereal production tripled, while using only 10 per cent more land. In essence, Borlaug's argument boils down to this: a hungry world can keep the rainforests away from farmers, or it can abandon synthetic fertilisers. It cannot do both.

It is not as if organic food is actually better for the health of the consumer, as our own Environment Secretary pointed out last month. David Miliband argued that organic food was, instead "more of a lifestyle choice". He is surely right. The neurotic English middle classes have increasingly deluded themselves that their children are less likely to get cancer if they are fed only organic food. There are many other consumers whose motives are more broadly altruistic in a muddle-headed sort of way: they think that their food was happier to be farmed organically - although so far Gallup has not worked out a way of polling the opinions of animals, still less those of vegetables.

In mooting a ban on the air-freighting of fresh produce, the Soil Association is not thinking either of the health of British children, or indeed the opinions of British vegetables. It believes in the theory that increased carbon emissions will lead to a dramatic surge in global temperatures. This would be good news for farmers and consumers in this part of the world, as the corn belt moves northwards: but it would make the climate in Africa even more hostile than it is already. If there is one, this is the moral argument behind the Soil Association's half-baked new policy.

Perhaps we should ask the Africans themselves before we start boycotting their produce for their own good. In February, Tesco, without any warning, declared that it was cutting by two-thirds the amount of fresh food and flowers that it air-freights from East Africa. I don't know if that will have the desired effect of making the British middle classes less antipathetic towards our most successful retailer; but I do know that it caused outrage among the farmers of East Africa.

As Claire Melamed of ActionAid protested at the time: "Developing countries stand to lose billions from our new-found concern for the planet ... In Africa alone more than one million people depend on selling fruit and vegetables to British shoppers. Cutting African farmers off from international trade will cause devastation which far outweighs the tiny reduction in the UK's carbon emissions."

Perhaps we should not be too surprised that the Soil Association - and its followers in the British organic movement - are so careless of the real interests of those in the wider world. A fascinating article in The New Yorker recently traced their origins to the works of Sir Albert Howard, who in 1940 published An Agricultural Testament. Howard, who gloried in the title of "Imperial Economic Botanist" to the British Raj, did not care for the scientific agricultural revolution . It was - horror! - a German invention: shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch had invented a way of synthesising ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, thus making possible the production of almost unlimited quantities of nitrogenous fertiliser.

Sir Albert believed that this Hunnish invention would ultimately destroy our precious British soil, if it were to be practiced here. "Soil," he wrote "is the capital of nations," and Britain should "go back to nature" to "safeguard the land of the Empire from the operations of finance". Patrick Holden and the Soil Association are intellectually indistinguishable from Sir Albert Howard, without the excuse he had of not having witnessed the extraordinary success of modern farming methods in eradicating famine.

The inescapable logic of their position is that we should not just be banning international trade in food: the same argument would also demand that we should end all imports and exports - even ships use prodigious amounts of oil in their engines. We would return to an age in which British landowners - notably the Prince of Wales, patron of the Soil Association - would be able to charge a monopoly rent. It was against such profoundly selfish and reactionary forces that Adam Smith inveighed so brilliantly in the 18th century.

As that great Scot wrote in The Wealth of Nations: "By means of glasses, hotbeds and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about 30 times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of Claret and Burgundy in Scotland?"

Somehow I don't think Patrick Holden CBE has ever quite understood what Adam Smith was on about. Thank goodness the rest of the world got the message.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk

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