For example, the debate about organic food has been going on for 70 years. Yet organic is an impractical system of food production that is unsustainable, primarily because it is simply incapable of feeding the world.

The problem that lies at the heart of the organic food movement is fertiliser. Most people seem to think that organic arose because of the use of pesticides and was invented in the Sixties in response to Rachel Carson’s claim in her book, Silent Spring, that pesticides were wiping out birds. In fact, the organic movement started much earlier, as a reaction to the use of manmade fertilisers.

Nitrogen is a vital component of food crops. Proponents of organic argue that we should only fertilise land by growing crops that can draw in nitrogen from the atmosphere, like clover, or by spreading manure on fields. The trouble is, those sources simply won’t supply enough nitrogen to feed humanity. We know this for sure because a hundred years ago we were mining bird droppings from Pacific islands off the coast of Peru in order to fertilise land. It was when we exhausted those sources that we invented the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia, the basis of modern fertiliser. Without that process, we’d be up the creek without the proverbial paddle.

Today, the organic movement has added an environmentalist aspect, based on the fact that manmade fertilisers are currently made using fossil fuels. The claim is that fertilisers must be made this way and this inevitably accelerates global warming. That’s just a myth. Fertilisers are currently made using natural gas - not from crude oil, as many people claim - because it is an economical method. We could use a similar process powered by solar or wind energy. Frankly, we could use hydrogen from water and power the process using energy from hippies riding bicycles if we wanted.

Nor is it a case of running out of natural gas. We’ve got 200 to 300 years’ worth of natural gas in methane hydrates that we could use if we so wished.

As for the claim about global warming, I believe it is becoming increasingly clear that the wheels are falling off the global warming bandwagon. There has been a lack of sunspots in recent years for considerably longer than we would expect. Solar scientists who study the correlation between solar-cycle length and the reduced intensity of the sun say that we’re looking at a two-degrees Celsius drop in global temperatures over the next 15 years. That is three times more cooling than we’ve had warming over the last 30 years.

If in doubt, it’s worth bearing in mind that none of the computer models predicted that this year would be so cool and it is not a coincidence that the coolest periods on Earth correlate with the periods when the sun has been less active. This correlation is strengthening, which tends to suggest that there is a causative relationship between sunspot activity and Earth temperatures.

It’s not just the organic movement that has becomed unduly wary of manmade chemicals, but it is a sentiment with direct and dangerous consequences. For example, the European Union (EU) has a sustainability directive that says that whenever feasible you must use non-chemical means in whatever business you’re in, including growing food. Perhaps the EU should call it the ‘unsustainability directive’. It is just about possible to control weeds with mechanical methods, but the problem is that constantly churning the soil will increase soil erosion dramatically and soil erosion is the most plausible sustainability problem we face. Using chemical methods to control pests and weeds has tackled that sustainability concern to a very real extent and yet proponents of organic agriculture still argue that their methods are more sustainable.

A health warning at this point: from time to time, there are claims that organic methods result in less soil erosion. The problem is that this research tends to compare an organic system with old-fashioned methods. For example, Rodale, which is the equivalent in the US of the Soil Association in Britain, has had a long-term comparison going on in Pennsylvania. The comparison is between organic crop rotations and a non-organic crop rotation that uses chisel tillage, which is actually an old plough, a very primitive weed-control method. Unsurprisingly, Rodale are able to claim that the organic method is better.

But three quarters of the corn and soya bean in this country is no longer managed with chisel tillage; it’s expensive, because it takes a lot of fuel to drag a chisel plough through the soil to control the weeds, and it causes soil erosion. US corn and soya bean is managed with some form of what we call ‘reduced tillage’. It’s either no-tillage production, where farmers never plough or till, or it is low-tillage, where farmers plough only very shallowly and occasionally, but use safe and sustainable herbicides to control weeds most of the time. Chisel tillage is only used in very damp conditions where the soil needs to dry out and where soil erosion is not an issue.

If we can get away from such mistaken arguments, I’m optimistic that the application of new technology will enable us to grow a lot more food.

For example, I think that one important new technology for the future will be to go much further in understanding and controlling far more subtle genetic traits than we’ve been able to do so far. So it’s one thing adding a gene to confer herbicide tolerance or to find a natural adaptation for herbicide tolerance. It’s quite another thing when you’re looking at drought tolerance or tolerance to stresses, which we’re finding is often controlled by possibly dozens of genes. Understanding and then successfully breeding these traits is much trickier, but that’s what we’re beginning to see just the first inklings of now.

For example, there are a couple of drought-tolerant crop varieties due to come out in the next couple of years and this is the tip of a very large iceberg in breeding stress tolerance into crops.

Unfortunately, I think we’ve hyped the threat of global warming so much that we are not prepared for the possibility of 30 years of significant cooling. We’ve been breeding for the wrong future. A cooler planet, for example, is going to be a wetter planet not a drier planet. Drought tolerance will be valuable to have, but so will frost tolerance and we haven’t spent a lot of time on that.

Another big issue has been food safety. In the United States we’ve had a real increase in the number of food contamination incidents. It started in 2003-2004 and it really hit national attention in 2006 with a national recall of organically grown spinach infected with E.Coli 0157, which was traced back to cattle on a low-density, grass-only, eco-friendly ranch. Yet the incident is still reported as if it was due to industrial-farming negligence.

Since then we’ve had tomato recalls and, more recently, problems with cookie dough and peanuts. It’s not because our food system’s getting more contaminated, it’s because we have instituted a new, more comprehensive surveillance system in the US. The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control created internet systems and then instituted mandatory reporting. This enabled infections with the same cause to be linked for the first time.

In the past, we only knew that a particular infection had a common cause if it was immediately obvious - for example, if everyone at a particular event became ill. But from 2002, because of genetic fingerprinting and mandatory reporting, we could link a particular infectious agent in Oregon to one in Virginia, then look for common factors. This has led to an increase in the number of reported food contamination incidents, but it is really only that we’re uncovering cases of a kind that was there the whole time. It doesn’t mean our food is less safe than it used to be.

Why is it that the United States doesn’t have massive milk contamination problems and massive contamination problems with canned food? It’s because we treat every batch of milk and every can of food as if there was a deadly pathogen in it. We heat and sterilise every can of food, that’s why canned food lasts up to 140 years. We pasteurise all milk because we know that there are likely to be some pathogens in all milk.

Part of the reason that food-borne illnesses have gotten worse is because the organic fad has also brought with it a new religion that unpasteurised milk is better and every year now we get dozens and dozens of children put in a hospital with kidney failure because of illness they’ve gotten from unpasteurised milk.

I think there has to come a point where society is going to realise that the only rational way to deal with our food is to assume that Mother Nature isn’t our friend and pathogens are everywhere. That means employing the full gamut of technology to prevent infections. For example, we can use radiation to pasteurise things like fresh fruits and vegetables, not just gamma radiation but electron beams, x-rays, ozone packaging, ultra-violet light treatment and so on.

We’re not doing those things as much as we should and that’s got a lot to do with the ‘yuk factor’ response to new technology. Tackling food safety using new technology is the next big struggle with society and food.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Alex Avery is director of research at the Centre for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute.