Organic or not? It all depends on your pocket, new research shows

• Organic crops are not any healthier and that eating them is a lifestyle choice for people who can afford them
• Report: Most fruits and vegetables sold in Nairobi are contaminated with high levels of pesticide residue.
• Koan believes some farmers may grow crops in conventional ways and pass them off as organic.

Grow, buy, cook and eat organic foods for a long and healthy life. This is the latest fad in Kenya, that has seen eateries and other outlets proclaiming to sell “natural” foods springing up every other day.

Researchers, however, have dismissed this is as a load of manure.

A five-year campaign to sell organic foods as healthier has attained a 30 per cent annual market growth rate in Kenya, against the global average of 25 per cent. But are these foods really healthy?

The debate has been fast and furious and heated up last week, with researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark saying that organic produce does not actually contain any more nutrients than food grown using chemicals.

The new findings, published in the Society of Chemical Industry’s Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, concludes that organic crops are not any healthier and that eating them is a lifestyle choice for people who can afford them.

And now they say the term “organic” is often used as an excuse to charge more. The organics in Nairobi are not for people living below the poverty line of about Sh70 a day.

Many Kenyan families can ill afford a bunch of kales for two meals a day at the neighbourhood kiosk due to the spiralling inflation.

According to a leading organic farmer, Ms Sue Kahumbu, who is also the head of Green Dreams Ltd, a company helping farmers to market organic produce, consumer response has been overwhelming.

Ms Kahumbu pioneered the opening of the exclusive organic counter at Nakumatt Westgate and says sales increased by about 30 per cent within the first 45 days.

In an earlier interview with the Business Daily, she said the pricing was 20 per cent to 50 per cent above the conventional food produce.

“For instance, our spinach sells at Sh35 a kilo, while the conventional one sells at Sh15,” she said.

Propelled by radio, TV and billboard advertising pushing people to eat healthy, it is now in vogue to visit establishments that offer only organics - but the food comes at a princely sum.

What drives Ms Carol Odete, a senior administrative secretary with a blue-chip city company, to an expensive organic food restaurant on the other side of town?

“I read somewhere that organic foods have extra properties that protect one against cancer, hypertension and other diseases,” she says. “In any case, any girl who is somebody in town is eating organics.”

Ms Odete has not read a report of a Danish research, led by Dr Susanne Bügel and which presents a strong case against the organic movement, whose global sales hit the £2 billion mark last year.