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Australian magazine Cosmos (via Reason Hit and Run and Fark) says organic foods aren't 'all that and a bag of chips':

The ultimate test of sustainability is whether organic farming could feed the planet. Scott Kinnear, president of Australia's Organic Farmers Federation, believes "it is imperative that the world moves over to organic farming as soon as possible".

Yet many agricultural scientists estimate that if the world were to go completely organic, not only would the remaining forests have to be cleared to provide the organic manure needed for farming, the world's current population would likely starve.

Norman Ernest Borlaug, the American plant geneticist who won a Nobel Peace Prize for breeding the high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties (triggering agriculture's 'Green Revolution'), is despairing of the organic fad. "This shouldn't even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material you have – the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues – and get them back on the soil, you couldn't feed more than four billion people."

That would put about two and one half billion people on a very, very strict diet indeed.