The “Greens” Have Gone Too Far. Farmers Must Let The Public Know
The Benefits of High-Tech Agriculture
CHURCHVILLE, Va.-Commenting on the recent furor over biotech foods, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman noted the success of the wheat gene Norin 10, which has helped developing countries like India, Pakistan and Mexico increase their wheat harvests by 60 percent.
The Norin 10 gene, which yields short, stiff wheat stalks, was bred into wheat varieties during the Green Revolution of the 1960s. It’s helped save 100 million people from starvation.
Glickman then went on to defend biotechnology, another form of gene manipulation. “In a world of growing populations and shrinking farmland and forests, biotechnology becomes that much more important. Sound science has demonstrated time and again that many biotechnological advances are safe and reliable. But if consumers at home and abroad don’t share our confidence, they will reject genetically treated products.”
In fact, the danger to modern agriculture is even broader and more urgent than Glickman thinks.
Some American school systems have shifted to organic foods in their cafeterias. Missouri is suing to shut down well-managed hog farms. The Clinton administration is apparently about to recommend a huge cut in fertilizer use-without any evidence of economic or environmental damage from fertilizer.
Affluent city folks think they don’t like modern farming. But they are getting most of their information about modern farming from hysterical opponents like the environmental groups Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.
Few urbanites understand that high-yield farming is not only helping restabilize the world’s population, but that it’s the only way to save room for wildlands in the 21st century.
First World governments are responding to urban disapproval of modern farming by dragging their feet on biotechnology, heightening the regulatory hurdles for pesticides and raising livestock indoors, even trying to stifle plant-food applications.
City folks are apparently willing to fear biotech food because they have plenty of food, while welcoming biotech medical research because they’re still worried about their health.
But the Third World is still not eating well, and its millions of wildlife species are still at risk from low-yield, slash-and-burn farming.
City folks have been told to fear pesticides. They’re rarely reminded that nonsmoking cancer risks have been declining virtually since the 1950s, exactly when the First World began to spray pesticides.
They don’t understand that wildlife is protected most effectively in the countries that use pesticides and chemical fertilizers to get high farm yields.
Glickman says, “What we need is some kind of public information and consumer education effort, domestically and internationally, that will separate the myths from the realities and reassure people that our regulatory process is sound.” I couldn’t agree more.
Unfortunately, Glickman is in no position to reassure consumers. His Agriculture Department has become the junior partner of Carol Browner’s Environmental Protection Agency in the drive to support unnecessary regulations of large hog and poultry farms.
America’s land-grant universities can’t help persuade consumers, even though they pioneered the Green Revolution. They’re political institutions now, beholden to city voters. That’s why they duck farming’s environmental issues and pander to the activists.
In Europe, the governments are leading the farmer-bashing. They subsidize organic foods, claiming that they are safer, ban meat-growth hormones as dangerous and refuse to approve safety-tested products of genetic engineering.
The European governments have absolutely no scientific evidence to support their actions, but their wrongheaded insistence on high price supports has continued to produce massive farm surpluses most countries won’t buy.
Farmers will have to tell the public the good news of high-tech farming themselves.
The American Plastics Council spends $20 million a year on television ads that have convinced the American public that it wants plastic helmets for kids on bikes and plastic oxygen tents for heart-attack victims. The eco-campaign against plastics has virtually disappeared.
That’s why the eco-activists have lately focused even more of their efforts against farmers.
Instead of taking action, farmers are still whining about unfair attacks. Television ads praising high-yield farming would cost far less than the billions of dollars in overregulation being aimed at farmers today.
Many agribusiness firms are already talking to consumers. They should do more. Messages about protecting little kids from malnutrition, say, would help the images of both companies and farmers. Farm cooperatives like Land O’Lakes of Arden Hills, Minn., could make their products even more attractive to consumers.
It may seem unfair that farmers have to justify themselves to the very people who are receiving the safest, most abundant food supply in the history of the world. But those are the breaks.
City folks have never known less about the high-tech ways their food is produced. If what they do learn comes solely from farming’s opponents, then farming will suffer.
Let’s advance Glickman’s good idea, and spread the word about the benefits of modern farming.
DENNIS T. AVERY is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. His views are not necessarily those of Bridge News, whose ventures include the Internet site www.bridge.com.
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Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
