有机食品果真贵的有道理？
译者： nickle
发表时间：2011-01-21浏览量：2066评论数：3挑错数：0
美国有机农业在过去的20年里发展迅猛，但是随着食物需求的增长、消费者缩减开支，绿色作物还会一支独秀么？
笔记本cpu性能天梯图Is organic food worth the cost?
有机食品果真贵的有道理？
什么是表现手法U.S. organic farming has grown wildly for the last two decades, but with food demand rising and cash-strapped shoppers pinching pennies, are greener acres still the place to be?
羽毛球拍品牌排名
美国有机农业在过去的20年里发展迅猛，但是随着食物需求的增长、消费者缩减开支，绿色作物还会一支独秀么？
By Rusll McLendonFri, Oct 08 2010 at 10:09 AM EST
罗素-麦克伦登，作于2010年10月8日
孩子几个月会翻身
疑兵The phra "organic farming" was coined in 1940 by Lord Northbourne, a British author and Olympic athlete who helped launch the organic movement. Joined by fellow organic pioneers like J.I. Rodale, Lady Eve Balfour and Albert Howard, he championed farms as natural ecosystems, and railed against chemical fertilizers and pesticides. "The farm itlf must have a biological completeness," he wrote. "It must be a living entity ... which has within itlf a balanced organic life."
“有机农业”的称谓起源于1940年，当时的英国作家兼奥林匹克运动员诺斯伯纳勋爵协助发起了这项活动。同J.I.罗代尔、伊娃-巴尔福女士、阿尔伯特-聊天记录漫游霍华德等有机发烧友们一起，诺斯伯纳勋爵将农田视为天然的生态系统，反对使用化学肥料和农药。他如是写道，“农田本身必定有一整条生物链，必定是一个存活着的整体……在它内部存在着均衡的有机生命。”
While tho words still resonate with many farmers and shoppers today, however, they were drowned out for decades by famine. Earth's human population grew 293 percent in the 20th century — compared with an average of 22 percent each of the previous nine centuries — and farmers couldn't keep up. As hunger spread, an Iowa agronomist named Norman Borlaug came to the rescue in the early '40s, using manmade pesticides, fertilizers and crossbred crops to start the Green Revolution, which saved countless lives and won him the 1970 Nobel Prize.
时至今日仍有很多农场主、消费者们热衷于这些有机食物，然而数十年来它们逐渐被一场场饥荒所淹没。20世纪地球的人类数量增长了293%，此前的9个世纪平均仅为22%，农民数量显然跟不上总人口的增长。40年代初期，饥荒大肆扩散，爱荷华州的一位农学家诺曼-博拉格提倡使用人造农药、肥料和杂交作物来阻止饥馑恶化，由此引出了绿色革命的发端，从而解救了不计其数的生命，诺曼-博拉格也因此获得了1970年的诺贝尔奖。
减肥药的危害
It also highlighted a common critique of organic farming: It's already hard to feed billions of people, even without rules against spraying chemicals or swapping genes. Borlaug's m
ethods often raid yields while reducing acreage, and it emed for years he'd proven the organic movement wrong.
这也强调了关于有机农业的一个普遍的观点——即便是对喷洒化肥或者采用基因物种不加任何限制，要养活数十亿人口已属不易。博拉格的方法能有效提升产量，却降低了可耕地面积，而且看起来他要证明有机农业的做法是错误的还需要数年时间。
But "chemical farming," as Lord Northbourne called it, lost some luster when synthetic pesticides and fertilizers were linked to environmental ills like cancer, blue baby syndrome, dying eagles and dead zones. Ecologists warned of gene pollution from genetically modified organisms, and overu of livestock antibiotics was widely blamed for drug-resistant "superbugs." This created an opening for organic farming in the late 20th century, and today there are an estimated 1.4 million organic farms worldwide, including some 13,000 certified in the U.S. Yet despite the gains, organic farms still struggle to match the output of conventional ones — no small detail since there are now about 6.9 billion people on Earth, three times the 1940 population. And with that number forecast to hit 9 billion by 2050, the future of organic farming remains unclear.
但是当合成农药、化肥逐渐被认为与环境疾病（如癌症、蓝婴综合症、濒死的鹰群、死区等）有关时，被诺斯伯纳勋爵称之为“化学农业”的做法便失去了许多拥趸的支持。生态学家们警告称，具有强烈耐药性的“超级臭虫”主要源自于基因改良物种的基因污染、禽畜饲养滥用抗生素。这就为有机农业在20世纪末创造了良好的开端，目前据估计全世界有140万个有机农场，其中美国就有13000家经认证的有机农场。但是尽管有如此大的进展，有机农业还是需要努力达到传统农业的产出水平，要知道今天全世界共有69亿人，是1940年人口的三倍。这个数据将在2050年达到90亿人口，有机农业的前景依然不容乐观。
ZUMA新闻社：作物喷洒飞机飞过农田
It often ems especially murky during economic dips like the recent recession, when higher-priced products of all kinds tend to suffer. But does organic food's premium price translate into any real health or environmental benefits? Critics like Alex Avery don't think so — the conrvative author and rearcher has compared "organic-food fanatics" to the terrorist group Hezbollah, and wrote a book in 2006 called "The Truth About Organic Foods" that, according to his website, "strips bare organic myths." While supporters say organic farming merely reveals the true cost of food, Avery and other critics say it makes food unaffordable. Aside from supporting synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, they've focud their ire lately on critics of genetically modified organisms. "For nearly a decade the agri-extremists have attempted to totally block agricultural biotechnology," Avery wrote in 2003, calling GMOs "the most important and critically needed agricultural advance in human history."
通常认为像最近的经济衰退阶段，几乎所有价格较高的产品都将承受着前景暗淡的压力。
那么有机食品的高端价格可否带来任何一些身体健康或者环境改善？阿列克斯-埃弗瑞等评论家并不以为然。这位保守的作者兼研究者将“有机食物狂热分子”比作恐怖组织“真主党”，其于2006年出版了一本书，叫《有机食物的真相》，套用他网站上的话，即“剥去有机食物的种种迷思”。尽管支持者们称有机农业仅仅是披露了食物的真实成本，埃弗瑞和其他评论家们则指出它（有机农业）让食物过于昂贵、难以承担。除了支持化学合成农药和化肥之外，他们最近在评论基因改良有机作物时表示了不满。埃弗瑞2003年写到，“将近10年里，这些农业极端主义分子尝试着彻底阻止农业生物技术的发展”，他将基因改良有机作物称赞为“人类历史上最重要、也是最需要的农业进展”。
For more on the backstory, upsides and downsides of organic farming, below is a look at how the field has evolved over the last 70 years, and what might happen next.
欲知有机农业的前世今生、曲折轮回，且看下文对远足感悟70多年里土地演化的过程以及接下来将会发生的事情作一解读。
A brief history of organic farming
一、有机农业简史
Early farmers had no choice but organic farming, and they still achieved some major milestones over the years, like taming the first grains in Mesopotamia or turning a thin grass called teosinte into plump, protein-packed corn.
