I eat organic for 2 reasons, one is I don't want my body filled with the left over amounts of pesticides (in the case of fruit and veg)
You are deluding yourself if you think organic == no pesticides, or if you think pesticides == cancer:
Scientists are unable to test these chemicals directly on humans, so they use rats instead. To establish the maximum dose considered to be safe for humans, they find a dose that's completely safe for rats. Then they divide it by 100. Testing by Australia's national regulator, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, shows that pesticide levels measured in food are either well below the recommended maximum dose or are completely undetectable.
People live about 80 years longer than rats: that's 80 years longer for pesticide cocktails to accumulate and wreak havoc. Even so, it turns out that a lifetime's consumption of synthetic pesticides is a drop in the ocean compared to the natural pesticides we consume from the plants we eat. Plants have evolved a vast pharmacopeia of chemical weapons, and we consume many of these 'weapons' daily: caffeine in coffee, solanine in potatoes and psoralens in celery, to name just three.
From a very lengthy article that probably won't be read or dismissed as casually as this current study.
I'm explaining why there are ratioanal reasons in the UK to favour UK organic farmers.
Read the entire article I linked to, as well as here. There is no rational basis to support organic farming anywhere.
(although they do get higher export prices for export crops)
Which highlights another problem, one in common with the FairTrade line of thinking. Higher export prices means more farmers in poor areas will switch to those crops and export more, leaving local people priced out and hungry.
IF CHEMICAL PESTICIDES ARE hazardous to health, then farm workers should be most affected. The results of a 13-year study of nearly 90,000 farmers and their families in Iowa and North Carolina -- the Agricultural Health Study - suggests we really don't have much to worry about. These people were exposed to higher doses of agricultural chemicals because of their proximity to spraying, and 65 per cent of them had personally spent more than 10 years applying pesticides. If any group of people were going to show a link between pesticide use and cancer, it would be them. They didn't.
A preliminary report published in 2004 showed that, compared to the normal population, their rates of cancer were actually lower. And they did not show any increased rate of brain-damaging diseases like Parkinson's. There was one exception: prostate cancer. This seemed to be linked to farmers using a particular fungicide called methyl bromide, which is now in the process of being phased out. According to James Felton, of the Biosciences Directorate of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who also chairs the study, "The bottom line is the results are coming out surprisingly negative. It's telling us that most of the chemicals we use today are not causing cancer or other disease."
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/print/1567/organic-food-exposed?page=0%2C2
The point behind organic food is that it's better for the environment
Wrong.
...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.
How can that be counted as better?
The report specifically doesn't look into the main reasons why I tend to buy organic - which aren't do to with health issues primarily, but to do with environmental and animal husbandry factors
Do human beings ever come into play while considering these "animal husbandry" factors?
As the Cambridge chemist John Emsley recently concluded, "The greatest catastrophe that the human race could face this century is not global warming but a global conversion to 'organic farming'--an estimated 2 billion people would perish."
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford