Opportunities and challenges for organic food and agriculture: China and Australia

We cannot poison our way to prosperity. This is the foundational premise of organic agriculture. Organic food is food grown without the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, without genetically modified organisms (GMOs), nanotechnology or irradiation. Such agriculture has a proven track record over millennia. An industrial process demonstrated by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch in 1909 changed the practice of agriculture (and warfare) by producing cheap and abundant synthetic fertiliser (and explosives) (Smil 2001). The Haber-Bosch process captures nitrogen from the air, commonly referred to as ‘fixing nitrogen’, and ushered in an era of high external input chemical agriculture. There soon developed a call to reject the use of synthetic chemical inputs in the production of food.