Today, Europeans surrounded by plentiful food fear, not nature, but science. In this context, the less touched by the human hand something is, the more virtue we see in it. A dominant contemporary fear is that people are wrecking nature. This is the real significance of the NOP poll. That there exists this general, rather backward-looking, attachment to organic farming is one thing.
European agriculture is among the safest in the world.
This livestock disease is endemic in countries unable to afford intensive agriculture, yet has been absent from Europe for three decades. But Europe does not need the number of farms it has in order to produce the food it needs, whether for domestic consumption or trade abroad. In this context, encouraging organic farming makes some sense. Subsidising desperate, bankrupt farmers to convert their farms to a system that, because of its inherent inefficiency, will mop up surplus farmworkers, produce less food, and keep the countryside suitably bucolic for the rest of us to play in, has a political rationale. Organic farming is a gentle way of retiring farmland.