Two Nobel Peace Prize Winners Urge Food Abundance
December 19, 2001
WASHINGTON, DC - As the world tries to celebrate peace despite another strife-torn holiday season, two Nobel Peace Prize winners are pleading for high-yield food production to help relieve Third World poverty and land shortages.
Oscar Arias, the former Costa Rican President, won the Peace Prize in 1987 for brokering a truce between Nicaragua and its Central American neighbors in the 1980s. Dr. Norman Borlaug, who led the Green Revolution that saved a billion people from starvation in the 1960s, was named the Peace Prize laureate in 1970.
Arias and Borlaug could hardly be more different. One is from an Iowa farm, the other from a Central American city. One is a scientist, the other a professional politician. Borlaug began his international plant-breeding career in the 1940s, when Arias was still a child.
But both men share a deep and urgent concern: that the continuing rural poverty and land scarcity associated with traditional low-yield farming will keep on yielding political ferment and conflict. The current wave of Moslem extremism, for example, has its roots in the widespread poverty among the Middle East’s millions of subsistence farmers. In 1997, nearly a million Rwandans of the Tutsi tribe were killed in genocidal attacks by the Hutu tribe that shared the same densely populated Central African highlands.
“Despite the successes of the Green Revolution,” Borlaug says, “the battle to ensure food security for hundreds of millions of miserably poor people is far from won.”
The two Nobel Peace Prize winners are equally concerned that continued expansion of low-yield farming, to feed a peak human population of perhaps 10 billion in 2050, will literally plow down much of the world’s biodiversity.
“Poor and hungry rural people have few options” for how they will earn a living and feed themselves, Arias notes. “More than 1.1 billion people live within the 25 most threatened species-rich areas of the world, dubbed ‘biodiversity hotspots’ by scientists. The majority of these hotspots are also areas with very high [human] malnutrition rates. . . . Clearly, the answer to biodiversity conservation cannot be to stop growing food. Nor is it to keep farming the old way.”
The Nobel laureates are endorsing a new concept called “ecoagriculture” put forward recently by the Swiss-based World Conservation Union and FutureHarvest, a network of Third World farm research institutes. The primary emphasis of ecoagriculture is higher, more-sustainable crop yields, so that more of the low-quality land in farming regions can be left to wildlife. This will help interconnect the world’s nature preserves and amplify the preserves’ ability to sustain wild species.
Arias says eco-agriculture is a “new approach, emerging around the world. Instead of working against each other, farmers and environmentalists work together to find farming methods that both produce more food and preserve the environment. From grazing lands to coffee plantations to rice paddies, farmers and scientists are finding ways to preserve biodiversity within largely agricultural landscapes.”
Arias and Borlaug urge that eco-agriculture be a major topic at the World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held next year in Johannesburg, South Africa. The meeting will be the tenth anniversary of the Rio Summit of 1991, which laid out ambitious and still unmet goals for global wildlands conservation.
Unfortunately, the Nobel Peace Prize winners face enormous opposition to their cause—mainly in the well-fed First World. Perhaps the leading opponent of science-based agriculture today is Greenpeace, a group of North American and European activists that derives some $300 million per year through media-attractive protests.
However, hundreds of lesser-known organizations also receive funding to oppose science-based farming. As an example, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy of Minneapolis spends about $3 million per year promoting “natural” food production (despite its low yields) and opposing world trade in farm products. (How will densely- populated Asia feed itself and keep its tropical forests without food imports?)
Like many such groups, the IATP is funded by well-meaning foundations that impossibly want to preserve lots of traditional American small farms in an era of high-paid, high-tech urban jobs. The IATP gets substantial funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (inherited General Motors stock), and the McKnight Foundation (hi-tech money made in 3-M).
Another group opposed to science-based farming is the Center for Science in the Public Interest. It gets money from the Barbara Streisand Fund, the Helena Rubenstein Foundation (cosmetics) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (ironically, dedicated to saving lives through modern medicine).
Should we preserve yesterday’s farms or tomorrow’s food and wildlife habitat? The environmental movement told us to “think globally, and act locally.” The two Nobel Peace Prize winners recommending higher-yielding ecoagriculture are clearly thinking globally.
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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