Meeting the Demands of a Growing Population
August 9, 1999
Presentation at the American Phytopathological Society’s World Food Crisis Symposium
The world agricultural community has focused on fighting hunger and meeting the needs of humanity for decades. It has been the rallying cry of farmers in all lands. The good news is that the world currently experiences the lowest overall hunger and malnutrition rate as a percentage of the population in human history. Per capita average food supplies are at an all-time high. But while the percentage of hungry and malnourished are low, the total number of hungry and undernourished people is still near an all time high. The often cited figure of 800 million hungry or undernourished people offered in 1996 at the World Food Summit in Rome is a troubling figure indeed. That’s 15 percent of the world’s people. It is unacceptable from anyone’s perspective. But what are the root causes of this tragedy? Why do these people go hungry?
The great Irish potato famine of the 19th century, the textbook example of famine due to crop disease, is today but a distant memory. Of course crop disease still takes its share from our fields. But instead of these losses being counted in the numbers of dead, they are tallied mostly in economic losses for farmers. This is because while any region of the planet can suffer a devastating crop disease or yield robbing drought, the world’s overall agricultural production is relatively stable. Global trade in commodities and an active world market in farm products mean that adequate food is available even when crop failures are widespread in an area. Famine and hunger are mostly the result of factors other than food supply.
The vast majority of hunger and malnourishment seen this century has been the result of non-agricultural factors, such as poverty, government policies and civil war. Decidedly human factors.
North Korea has experienced terrible hunger and malnutrition in recent years, according to many accounts. Some have compared it to the great Chinese famine of 1958-62, which killed over 30 million people. But the bitter irony is that North Korea’s direct neighbors, South Korea and the Jilin Province of China, have enjoyed more than adequate harvests in recent years. South Korea has experienced near record food consumption and dietary quality. Before the recent Asian economic crisis, South Koreans were in the midst of the largest increase in high-protein foods consumption in that nation’s history.
The difference between the two obviously wasn’t climate or disease pressures-the country is a peninsula abut the size of the state of Kansas. It was economic and political structure.
All of the major famines of this century-the terrible famines in China between 1914 through 1949, the Soviet famine from 1917-21, the horrifying Chinese famine following Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward, and the African famines in Ethiopia, Chad, Sudan, Mozambique and Somalia, were caused by war or disastrous collective farming policies. In China, for example, it is estimated that over 30 million died between 1958-62. As in the earlier Soviet famine, Communist bureaucrats confiscated too much grain based on the inflated yield statistics of regional party leaders eager to please Chairman Mao. Unfortunately, Mao was deceived by Soviet propaganda about crop improvements and yield increases fostered by the fraudulent science of Trofim Lysenko.
Civil conflict and the use of hunger and famine as tools of war are the root causes of the major African famines. In Somalia, food rotted unharvested in the fields because they were patrolled by snipers from both sides.
We will likely never be able to eradicate human stupidity or viciousness. But the marked trend toward democracy witnessed over the second half of the twentieth century offers hope.
By far the biggest cause of hunger and malnutrition in the world is poverty. There’s plenty of relatively cheap food available in the world today. Unfortunately, too many still haven’t the means to access even these low-cost food sources. This economic poverty is often related to and worsened by the lack of stable political and governmental structures and poor infrastructure support.
But the food challenge ahead is more daunting, requiring contributions from many sectors of society. World population as we all know is expected to increase by an additional 50 percent before it peaks. However, this is likely to account for less than half of the coming food demand increases. Dietary changes in developing countries will add even more to the world’s future food demand than population growth. Animal protein consumption is already increasing at unprecedented rates and reasonable estimates of global farm product demand indicate at least a doubling of overall food demand over the next 50 years. It well may end up being closer to a tripling of world food demand.
Yet agriculture already utilizes 37 percent of the earth’s land area, with 11 percent devoted to crops and pasture, and rangeland taking another 26 percent.
Certainly, with rapidly rising food demand and limited farmland available, there is an increased potential for hunger and malnutrition. Food prices will no doubt rise in the long term above the means of the world’s poorest consumers. Conflicts over irrigation and other agricultural resources may indeed become more commonplace. But instead of hunger and malnutrition, we feel that there is a much more eminent threat from population growth and dietary changes-wildlife habitat destruction.
I’m not trying to downplay or minimize the scope of hunger and malnutrition on the planet today. There is obviously too much. In a world in which the number one diet related disease in America and many other developed countries is overconsumption, any hunger in the world is too much. But as I have already stated, most of the hunger in the world today is due to non-agricultural factors, and I don’t expect that will change drastically in the future.
The fact is, the world is in the midst of the largest increase in food demand in human history. And while population growth will account for a portion of that increase, more than half of it will be due to dietary changes.
Population Growth
Instead of the continuing, exponential population growth forecast by Malthus, and later by Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown among others, it appears that we are seeing a one-time surge. This is first the result of a reduction in death rates in the early 20th century, followed later by a reduction in fertility rates as economic and social stability reduce the need for large families.
Currently, the world’s global population is about six billion people. With the current rate of population growth of 1.5 percent, another 90 million consumers are added each year. That’s the equivalent of an additional Mexico added to world food demand each year. Or another New York city added each month. While this rapid current population growth has led many to predict malthusian disasters in past and no doubt coming years, there is good reason for optimism.
The good news is that this rate of growth will not be long lived. Like a train, population growth has momentum. It changes pace slowly. During the rapid growth of the 70s, it appeared as though the world was headed for 15 or 20 billion people. However, what was not realized at that time was that the brakes were already being set on population growth, partly as a result of the Green Revolution of the 1960s.
Societal and economic forces have led to a dramatic decline in fertility rates in most areas of the world, save for portions of Africa and some Muslim countries.
The most realistic projections of population growth now predict a peak world population of well under 10 billion. Some place the peak at below 8 billion. While this may at first seem unrealistic, consider that only a few years ago the World Bank and United Nations each predicted a peak of 12-15 billion. For 20 years, both the World Bank and UN have had to continually pare down their population predictions. They now predict between 9-10 billion. However, other groups, such as the Winrock Foundation, using the same numbers predict between 7.5 and 8.5 billion. Roughly a 50 percent increase over current levels.
To begin with, the World Bank and UN are not truly forecasting population growth. They conduct “scenario analysis.” This means they set the circumstances and illustrate the outcome. Different circumstances, different outcome. But more than that, their projections are based on a faulty assumption that all countries will stabilize at exactly replacement level fertility (about 2.1 children per couple). Countries above replacement level will make a “soft landing”. As they approach replacement level fertility, the rate of fertility decline will slow until it eventually stops at 2.1. Countries currently below replacement level fertility will increase their fertility rates back up to 2.1. This is because logic says that if a country stabilizes at lower than replacement level, its population will eventually fall to zero. Long-term, that logic is, well, logical. But assuming that this will occur within the next 20 or 30 years, let alone the next five or ten, makes no sense.
The average fertility rate in developed countries is now 1.7 - well below replacement level. And in some developed countries, the fertility rate continues to drop. Italy and Germany, for instance, now have fertility rates of only 1.2 children per couple. This means that without immigration, these countries population will shrink to half its current size over the next 50 years. And many of these countries have averaged below replacement level fertility rates for decades, essentially stabilizing at a below replacement level fertility rate. The developing countries are rapidly reducing their fertility rates further as well, as their economies grow and their populations transition away from an a rural, agrarian base.
Population forecasters have also misjudged the power of the forces affecting fertility rates and this, too, has caused their forecasts to remain on the high side of reality. Hardly anyone but the most ardent optimist predicted that the world would experience the widespread and rapid economic growth it has seen over the last 20 years. The fall of the Soviet Union and the end to the Cold War were a key factor. So was the explosion of new technologies. However, the biggest factor was the explosion of global markets and trade fostered by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), now the World Trade Organization. Since its inception following World War II, world non-farm trade has increased more than 16-fold. This has been the driving force behind the economic growth in much of Asia. It’s unfortunate that the rapid growth of the region is now experiencing substantial growing pains, however, this is as much a sign of success as it anything else. Literally, there were bankers in countries, such as South Korea, who had never seen the consequences of a bad loan. These economies have grown themselves past bad debt for nearly 30 years.
The resulting increase in relative affluence of these countries has resulted in the assumption of more affluent lifestyles as well, including a move toward smaller families. Literally in one generation, these countries have gone from an average of over six children per family, to three. Another way to look at it is that the world has come 75 percent of the way to direct-replacement level fertility in only 30 years. And if Japan and other developed countries are any indication, instead of a soft landing at 2.1, the fertility rates in these countries are likely to continue dropping until they reach 1.8. Thus, the most accurate forecasts of world peak population are now between eight and nine billion.
However, the same forces which are lowering national fertility rates throughout the world, are also increasing the demand for better diets. The first thing that poor people do when they get more income is to bid for better diets. First, they want more rice and wheat. Then, they buy more cooking oil. Then, they buy more eggs, milk and, finally, more meat, fruits, and vegetables. Nearly half of the world’s population lives in Asia. And as Asia continues to grow, both in population and economically, we can look to Japan as a model to see what to expect from the region.
As recently as the late 1950s, Japan was a food aid recipient. Today, Japan is the world’s largest food importer. And the economic growth in Japan brought about a fundamental shift in Japan’s dietary habits. Since 1965, Japanese consumers have reduced their rice calories by 37 percent while they have increased their dairy consumption by 123 percent and their meat calories by 220 percent.
In all, the average Japanese consumer now eats about 55 grams of animal protein per day. And if Japan would reduce its import tariffs, they would probably be eating closer to 65 grams of animal protein per day. For comparison, Americans eat about 75 grams per day. These farm products take three to five times as many farming resources to produce as a calorie of cereals - but there is an innate human hunger for them.
Meat demand in Asia has been skyrocketing alongside the rise in personal incomes:
- In China, meat demand has increased by 10 percent each of the last eight years. China ate 6 million tons more meat in 1996 than it did the year before — and permanently added more than 20 million tons to world annual feed grain demand.
- India’s consumers have been adding 1-2 million tons of milk and dairy products to their national diet each year, despite feed shortages, high prices and poor quality.
- Indonesia expanded its broiler flock by 25 percent (and 150 million birds) in 1995 alone!
And despite these recent trends, Asians still consume an average of less than 20 grams of animal protein per day. By 2030, it is likely that the world will have to supply at least Japan’s current 55 grams of animal protein per day for 4 billion Asians. That’s nearly a 400 percent increase in the region’s total meat consumption!
Thus, the world’s biggest food gap is opening in the region least able to meet that demand — the densely populated nations of Asia. That region will have eight or nine times as many people per acre of cropland as North America.
With such realities, you may be asking yourself why hunger and malnutrition will not increase in the future. They may, especially for poor consumers. But I am obviously optimistic about the economic future for the world’s developing nations and people.
There are several reasons why we feel that habitat destruction is a bigger potential threat than widespread hunger and malnutrition. First off, the dietary changes themselves reduce the likelihood of true famines. When significant percentages of dietary calories come from meat, in times of shortage feed normally fed to livestock becomes an emergency food supply. Second, the world now has a well established international trading system with significant capacity. Japan, the United States largest agricultural importer, insures its food security with one month’s supply of grain reserves on the main island and another month’s supply in ocean transport.
But because of pervasive agricultural trade barriers, there isn’t enough global agricultural trade. Instead, we’re seeing serious habitat destruction to expand farmland. Increasingly, the expansion of farmland is not for subsistence farming for minimal food needs, but for feed production to produce meat, milk and eggs. For example, Indonesia recently completed clearing 1.5 million acres of tropical forest intended mostly for soybean production to support their rapidly expanding domestic chicken and poultry industry.
This doesn’t mean putting third world farmers out of business at the hands of American corporate farmers. With at least a doubling and likely closer to a tripling in global food demand, the world will need all of its good farmers. The question is where we intensify and which technologies are appropriate.
Opposition to Farm Technologies
Despite the concern voiced by some that world food supplies are inadequate, many in the developed world have seen no need for new farm technologies. For decades world market prices for key agricultural commodities have remained low. Food surpluses have been a chronic problem for many Western countries. As a result, the argument is often made that there is no compelling reason to take risks with new food producing technologies. “We already have enough food, so we don’t need biotechnology. The risks outweigh the need.” This is apparently the position taken by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, and many other wildlife and environmental conservation organizations.
But the global need for increased food production capacity is obviously far greater than these groups are willing to admit. In fact, the environmental groups are leading the opposition to the new farm technologies which will be desperately needed to save wildlife habitat. Why does Greenpeace support the use of biotechnology to help save human lives, while opposing the use of biotechnology in food production? Saving human lives will only increase the burden humanity places on the environment, while using biotechnology in food production will likely allow us to lower our impact on the natural world. It makes very little sense to me.
Desperate Regions: The Food Gaps in Africa and Asia
The world’s traditional pattern of agriculture has always featured small farmers supplying nearby consumers with seasonal fresh foods. Unfortunately, tripling the world’s farm output on this model for the 21st century would likely mean sacrificing at least half of the world’s tropical forests to slash-and-burn farming. Such farming is cheap and effective for low levels of population density. But Africa’s population is projected to grow from 200 million to at least 400 million. Asia’s population will rise from 3 billion to 4 billion. Neither region is yet fully providing its consumers with the high-quality diets they increasingly demand and can afford.
India is getting one-third of the fodder for 400 million dairy animals by literally stealing leaves and branches from its richly biodiverse forests.
Africa has already dangerously shortened its bush fallow periods, from the optimal 15-20 years down to as little as 2-3 years in some regions. It cannot support the expanded population and rising dietary expectations.
None of this is environmentally sustainable. The world must have still-higher yields of crops and livestock, and free trade, or it will lose most of its tropical forests, and perhaps three-fourths of its 30 million wildlife species.
If the world could somehow create 5 billion vegans in the next several decades, then there would be no need to increasing farm output. But the prospects of creating all those vegans are poor. The reality is that the world must prepare itself for lots of hamburger and French fry-eating people in the near future.
Thanks to biotechnology, the prospects for tripling the world’s crop yields are much better. In fact, biotechnology may be the only compassionate answer to the world food challenge in the 21st century — for poor people, for children, and for the billions of wild creatures on the planet.
Land Area and Competition Between Opposing Needs
Already, farming occupies fully one-third of the earth’s total land area. Eleven percent of the earth’s land is devoted to crops, another 26 percent is in grazing and pasture. This leaves roughly another third of the land area in forests and woodlands, and roughly one-third is deserts, glaciers, marshlands and “other” land categories. Most of the land devoted to farming has been so since the 1940s, although some additional land has been cleared within the last 20 years. By the way, cities currently occupy only about 1.5 percent of the land.
The increase in productivity ushered in by the Green Revolution was achieved almost entirely through intensification. Essentially the world’s farmers tripled the yields on the best farm acres through increases in irrigation, better crop varieties, and increased use of fertilizers and pesticides. Environmentalists often claim that these gains are illusory - that we have simply exchanged fossil fuels for food. This is valid only in the sense that the vast majority of the world’s cropland is fertilized with nutrients extracted from the atmosphere using energy-intensive methods, mostly using natural gas. However, this accounts for only a small fraction of humanity’s overall energy consumption, and the alternatives (fertilizer from legume crops or animal manure) are land intensive and have a higher ecological price.
In fact, research has clearly demonstrated that the current varieties of crops utilize the nutrients and other inputs more efficiently than older varieties. In essence, our agricultural car is getting much better gas mileage for us, allowing us to produce more food with less resources.
Tripling the Crop Yields Again
The naturalists and ecologists are telling us the big environmental threat is neither population nor pesticides, but the loss of wildlands with their unique species, food webs and contributions to climate patterns.
Moral concerns aside, famine is not an option for saving the environment. Poor people in the newly-emerging countries are clearly willing to chop down forest and kill wildlife to get adequate calories — or even to get high-quality protein.
Forest requirements will rise even more sharply than food needs. Industrial wood demand is likely to rise ten-fold, unless we shift toward more environmentally-damaging wood substitutes such as steel and concrete.
Land is the Scarcest Natural Resource
The world’s population today is 80 percent bigger than in 1960. The environmental wonder of the 20th Century is that today’s farmers are feeding better diets to almost twice as many people from virtually the same cropland base. We used 1,394 million hectares of land for crops in 1961 — and only 1,441 million hectares in 1992 to get twice the grain and oilseeds.
In addition, the average Third World citizen is getting 28 percent more calories, including 59 percent more vegetable oil (twice the resource cost of cereal calories) and 50 percent more animal calories (three times the resource cost of cereals).
Producing today’s world food supply with 1960 crop yields would probably require an additional 10.9 million square miles of land, or more than the total land area of Europe and the U.S. combined! This is no precise estimate — but it underscores the enormous environmental importance of continuing to raise crop and forest yields if we are to have wildlands in the future.
In forestry, Roger Sedjo of Resources for the Future says the world should be able to provide the industrial wood needs for 9 billion people from less than 6 percent of the current wild forest area, planted to high-yield tree plantations. But eco-activists oppose “unnatural” monocultured forests, and we aren’t planting enough tree plantations for the wood we will need when today’s tree seedlings are ready for harvest in 20 years.
The Best Land Has the Fewest Species
For biodiversity, it is even more important to save poor-quality land than prime cropland. Ecologist Michael Huston points out in his book Biological Diversity that the poorest lands harbor the greatest variety of wildlife species, all over the world. Good quality land typically has thriving populations of a few wild species. In rain forests and swamps, the tough conditions force wildlife into narrow niches — producing lots of species.
Huston notes that America cleared about 100,000 square miles of wild forest in Ohio and Indiana during the 19th century, and apparently lost no wildlife species. Neither Ohio nor Indiana today harbor any unique native plant species. In contrast, Florida has 385, Texas 389 and California 1517 — because those states have lots of poor-quality land.
The world’s big reservoir of biodiversity is the tropics, where tropical forests harbor 60-80 percent of the world’s various wild species. (Estimates of tropical species keep rising.) This is hugely important for agricultural policy, because the world’s big food gap is in the fast-growing, densely-populated tropic countries.
Sustainability from Technology
Agricultural research is the most important sustainability component under humanity’s direct control — and we are failing to make the appropriate investments. Remember, we don’t have to keep tripling farm output every 50 years into the future. We only have to do it once more.
Can we realistically expect to triple farm productivity again? The accepted expert on the theoretical crop yield limit is C.T. deWit of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He estimated the limit at about 15-22 metric tons per hectare of cropland. The top U.S. corn yields are already over 20 tons per hectare. However the current world average crop yields are far lower — only about 2.6 tons per hectare of wheat, 3.5 tons per hectare of rice, and 3.7 tons per hectare of maize. Crop yields in the Third World have lately been rising by about 3.5 percent annually and in the U.S. by more than 4 percent per year.
We can expect that biotechnology and other technologies will continue to raise the yield potential of more of the world’s land toward their full potential. Moreover, as more countries become more affluent, we can expect more of the land to be supported with the capital, fertilizer menus and intensive management which have already produced high yields in the U.S., Europe and China.
deWit saw agriculture not as a matter of diminishing returns but as the serial elimination of constraints. When we can plant early in the season, using seeds with high potential, provide the complete roster of nutrients, eliminate weed competition, control insects and diseases, and take fuller advantage of the sunlight and moisture, then a high proportion of the world’s cropland should come far closer to deWit’s maximums.
To show how this plays out in the real world, new U.S. corn hybrids can tolerate being crowded at 50,000 plants per acre, five times as densely as we used to plant. This raises yield potential to 19 tons per hectare (300 bushels per acre). It also helps shade out weeds and reduce soil erosion. The new varieties have shorter stalks that put more of their energy into grain. They also “flex” — in dry years they produce smaller ears instead of barren stalks. At such high yields, researchers are finding they must add more chlorine; the chlorine that normally comes with the phosphate is not enough.
When we can feed the resulting ample supplies of grain and forage to livestock and poultry that have added growth hormone, comfortable surroundings, and protection from diseases, the resulting feed efficiency will have the effect of raising crop yields still further. Bovine growth hormone will safely increase the world’s dairy feed efficiency, making it possible to provide more milk for India without plowing down wildlife. Pork growth hormone will cut feed grain requirements per pound of lean pork by more than 25 percent. This is exactly what a more crowded and affluent planet will need!
Can Biotechnology Permit More Compassion in the 21st Century?
Much of the productive power of nitrogen and hybrid seeds has already been applied to get today’s farm output. Tripling yields again will require us to apply more knowledge, more effectively.
Biotechnology seems to be the most promising way to ease the land conflict between people and wildlife in the 21st century. Biotechnology is the big new knowledge breakthrough that is just beginning to be applied to agriculture. It apparently has more conservation potential than any agricultural technology in human history.
Here are just a few of the exciting new developments in agricultural biotechnology:
§ Two researchers in Mexico have found a way to unlock the productivity of billions of hectares of acid-soil lands in the tropics. The acidity liberates toxic aluminum ions which cut crop yields by up to 80 percent, on 30 to 40 percent of the world’s arable land, most of it in the tropics. Huge tracts of otherwise-good land in Brazil and Zaire have simply been left unused, growing only stunted brush and poor-quality grasses. But a gene from a soil microbe has given crop plants (tobacco, papaya and now rice) the ability to secrete citric acid from their roots. (This is a success strategy used by some of the wild plants growing on the acid soils.) Apparently, the new biotechnological intervention will overcome much of the “tropical disadvantage” which has kept regions like central Africa and South Asia so poor for so long.
§ Genes from wild relatives of our crop plants appear to be one of the most promising avenues for achieving safe, sustainable yield gains for the 21st century. Scientists have gathered hundreds of thousands of such wild relatives for the world’s gene banks. However, these wild relations are too different from the crop plants to cross-breed. The wild-relative genes can only be used through biotechnology. But what promise they contain! Researchers from Cornell University have recently used wild-relative genes to get a 50 percent increase in yields of tomatoes! (Tomato yields in standards cross-breeding programs have recently been rising by only about 1 percent per year.) The implications for phytopathology are obvious and enormous.
§ The same Cornell research team inserted two promising wild-relative genes into the top-yielding Chinese rice hybrids. Each of the new genes produced a 17-percent yield gain. Together, they offer the world’s rice breeders a sudden 20 to 40 percent increase in rice yields. It is no accident that China recently announced a new rice variety that yields 13.5 tons in test plots—more than double that nation’s 6-ton national average yield.
These are all examples of “high-yield conservation.” Since 1950, the rising yields of the Green Revolution have permitted farmers all over the world to triple their yields (and more) on the world’s best farmland. That is permitting the world to feed better diets to twice as many people, without taking any more land for farming (except in Africa).
The challenges ahead, both in humanitarian and environmental terms, are enormous. We must find a way to supply higher quality diets to a 50 percent larger population; preferably without destroying more of the world’s wildlife habitat. Our immediate challenge is convincing the public that this challenge warrants significant public investment. Agricultural researchers have justified their work in humanitarian terms. However, the stakes are much higher. The public seems to place as much if not more importance these days on environmental conservation. Agricultural research in productivity and disease resistance have at least as much conservation value as humanitarian and it’s our job to communicate this to the public.
Because if we don’t, the costs in lost biodiversity and wildlife habitat will be the legacy of our inaction.
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Alex Avery is Director of Research and Education at the Center for Global Food Issues of the Hudson Institute, a think-tank headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry from Old Dominion University. From May of 1992 to December of 1994 he was a McKnight research fellow in plant physiology at Purdue University working on a project to develop drought-resistant sorghum varieties for the Sudan of Africa.
He represented the Center at the 1996 United Nations World Food Summit in Rome and was co-author of Farming to Sustain the Environment, a Hudson Institute briefing paper which addresses issues of agricultural sustainability from a practical and global perspective. This paper is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format at the Center’s web site under “Key Publications” or by contacting the Center for Global Food Issues at (540) 337-6354.
[1] United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization statistic, UN FAO Production yearbook: 1996. And World Bank, World Development Report 1997.
[2] C. J. M. Musters, H. J. de Graaf, and W. J. ter Keurs. Can Protected Areas Be Expanded in Africa? Science Mar 10 2000: 1759-1760.
[3] How Efficient are Modern Cereal Cultivars, CGIAR News Vol. 4, number 2, pgs. 2-3, April 1997. Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, Washington, DC.
[4] Dr. W.R.J. Sutton, Tasman Forestry Ltd., “The Need for Planted Forests and the Example of Radiata Pine,” paper presented at the symposium “Planted Forests — Contributions to Sustainable Societies,” Portland, Oregon, June 28th, 1995.
[5] FAO Production Yearbook, 1976, Table 1, “Land Use.”
[6] FAO Production Yearbook, Vol. 47, 1993, Table 1, “Land Use.” Note: most of the expansion was on productive and sustainable land in places like Canada, Australia, Paraguay, eastern Bolivia and Brazil. Most of the Brazilian expansion was not in the rain forest but in southern and central savanna regions. This is not to excuse the expansion of cropland in some rain forests (Ecuador, Indonesia, Brazil) or other fragile environments which should not have been needed.
[7] FAO Production Yearbook, Vol. 46, 1992, Table 3, “Population;” Table 106, “Calories;” Table 108, “Fat.”
[8] Roger Sedjo, personal interviews, 1992 and 1996.
[9] Dr. Michael Huston, Biological Diversity, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
[10] Gogerty, “More Plants, More Corn,” The Furrow, Deere & Co., Moline, IL, Jan. 1996, pp. 7-8.
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