2021 was a difficult year for the production of French farmers: tomatoes and potatoes were devastated by various pests. The burden of the damage, however, fell above all on organic crops; which suggests the fragility of the thesis of those who would like all agriculture to be converted to this method, evidently less able to guarantee the safety of the harvest.
There is an aggravating circumstance: the levels of copper, the most widely used pesticide because among the few products authorized in the organic field, are on a dangerous rise, both in the soils and – listen, listen – in the urine of children who eat organic products (at least in France).
To find out more, I asked Donatello Sandroni, who is an expert in agricultural ecotoxicology.
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What he wrote to me below:
In agriculture, every year is a story unto itself: weather and parasitic attacks are in fact independent of the planning skills of producers, who have to face the changing environmental conditions as best they can. And it is precisely on ‘as best they can’ that the concept must be deepened. In this sense, organic farming has self-imposed anachronistic vetoes both in the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and in the adoption of biotechnologies. The result is that everything is fine in normal times, but when the vintages take a bad turn, there is trouble.
[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Italian and has been translated and edited for clarity.]
