Why Not A Declaration for Sustainable Farming And Forestry?
May 22, 2002
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The Hudson Institute is hosting a new web-based “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature With High-Yield Farming and Forestry”. It’s already been signed by two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, former Democratic Senator George McGovern, the 2001 World Food Prize winner (Per Pinstrup-Anderson) and dozens of top-ranked agricultural and forestry experts. We hope it will eventually be signed by thousands of agriculturists, foresters and conservationists from around the world.
An ecologist friend says he can’t sign it, because we didn’t make it a Declaration for Sustainable High Yields.
There is one big reason why we didn’t do that. Sustainable yields aren’t the key to saving the world’s wildlands in the next 50 years. With a 50-percent rise in population and a huge increase in Third World meat consumption under way, we can only sustain the wildlands with higher yields.
Our High-Yield Declaration is trying to remind everyone of the reality that’s been lost in the endless debates over sustainability: Humanity is farming nearly half of the global land area not covered by glaciers and deserts. Without higher yields, still more of the wild forests and meadows will be replaced by croplands that have only a tiny fraction of their wild biodiversity, no matter how “sustainable” the farming system.
Africa’s bush fallow has been sustainable for thousands of years—because there was low population density, and room for both crops and trees. But Africa is now an emerging eco-catastrophe because lower death rates are increasing the population pressure, and outstripping bush fallow’s ability to replenish soil nutrients. Fallow periods have been shortened from 15 to 20 years to as little as two or three years. Much of African farming is locked into a downward spiral of declining soil fertility, declining yields and still-shorter fallow periods.
America’s organic farming is sustainable—so long as all the other farmers (who comprise the vast majority) fertilize their plants with industrial nitrogen, leaving lots of nitrogen-rich manure for the organic fields. Studies by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency agree that the United States has only about one-fourth of the manure and crop biomass to supply the nitrogen for current farm output, let alone the two-fold increase needed for the 21st Century.
Currently, manure is readily available to organic farmers because mainstream farmers use about 11 million tons per year of natural nitrogen taken from the air. (The air is fourth-fifths N, and the nitrogen from the fertilizer ultimately cycles back up.) If we mandated fully organic farming, we’d need three times as much manure and crop residue.
Where would we get it? Compulsory collection of everyone’s grass clippings at great expense and enforcement costs would add little biomass. Open sewers and “night soil collectors” as in China certainly isn’t what New Yorkers, or anyone else envisions. Processed sewage sludge is a possibility, but there isn’t enough of it, and it contains heavy metals that must be removed at great expense.
Agronomist Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba says America would need the manure from another 1 billion cattle to provide enough nitrogen if we gave up the industrial N. How would we sustainably pasture 1 billion extra cattle on 2 billion acres of the lower 48 states? Each cow would need two acres of the best land, and 30 acres of the poor land. We’d have no room for food production, let alone national forests and parks.
Most of the other countries in the world are even shorter of organic nitrogen than the United States. (India gets one-third of its dairy fodder from trees, and feeds its crop biomass to cattle or burns it for cooking.
The best solution to the eco-challenge of the next 50 years would be sustainably higher yields. But the importance of higher yields may even force long-term sustainability to take a back seat to immediate production demands. We hope not, but much of our research on high-yield farming and forestry has been stalled by political correctness. Some urbanites say they’d like farms without chemical inputs, and urge de-funding of their land grant agricultural experiment stations. Regulators are pushing for the reduction and/or elimination of farm inputs, responding to the wish-dreams of vocal, if farming¾ ignorant urbanites.
Europe is even rejecting knowledge inputs in farming. (That’s essentially what biotechnology is.) Since Europe has its own little farm surplus, the Europeans are willing to risk famine and wildlands destruction for everybody else. Never mind that their own forests would be destroyed if they depended on the low-yield farming systems they demand of everybody else.
It’s too easy for rich-country residents to forget that the world’s current farm production falls about 25 percent short of meeting the full nutritional needs of 6 billion people—and we may need three times today’s farm output to provide high-quality diets for the people and pets of 2050.
In the long term, of course, farming systems must be sustainable. But the Soil and Water Conservation Society of America says our current high-yield farms are the most sustainable in history—particularly due to high-yielding seeds, chemical fertilizers and herbicide-assisted conservation tillage.
We’ve not forgotten the sustainability. But we cannot conserve the wildlife if we forget the high yields.
Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute of Indianapolis and the Director of the Center For Global Food Issues. He was formerly a senior policy analyst for the U.S. Department of State. Readers may write him at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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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