AGRICULTURE REPORT
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July 30, 2002: Chemicals on Organic Food
By George Grow
(Photo -Scott Bauer)
This is the VOA Special English AGRICULTURE REPORT.
Farmers who grow organic food do not use chemicals to increase their crops or control insects and disease.
However, a new study shows that chemicals can still be found on organically grown food. The study showed that
organic crops had far fewer chemicals than other fruits and vegetables. The publication Food Additives and
Contaminants reported the findings.
Organic food is one of the fastest growing areas in American agriculture. Industry officials
estimate that American stores sold almost eight-thousand-million dollars worth of such
food in the year two-thousand. That is a twenty-percent increase in sales from the year
before.
Many Americans believe that eating organic food is more healthful than eating food grown
with chemicals. Some people are willing to pay more for such food. Yet several reports
claim that some organic foods have just as many chemicals as other crops.
Scientists with the American group Consumers Union supervised the new study.
Consumers Union publishes Consumer Reports magazine.
The scientists collected and examined information from three earlier reports on chemicals in the American food
supply. Consumers Union, the United States Department of Agriculture and the state of California prepared the
earlier reports. The combined reports studied more than twenty different crops and more than ninety-fourthousand
fruits and vegetables.
The scientists found that chemical pesticides to kill insects were present on almost twenty-five percent of the
organic fruits and vegetables. The chemicals also were found on almost seventy-five percent of other crops.
Two of the reports included foods that were not organically grown. They were grown with reduced use of
chemicals. Foods in this group had chemical levels between those for organic and traditional crops.
The scientists also examined why organic foods contain any chemicals at all. They found that most of the
chemicals in organic foods were unavoidable results of earlier chemical use in the environment. They say other
chemicals may have been blown onto the organic fields from nearby farms. They also say some of the food tested
may have been sold as organic although it was not organically grown.
This VOA Special English AGRICULTURE REPORT was written by George Grow.
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