A Seed Europe Attacks
December 19, 2002
“High-Yield Hogwash: ‘Corporates’ Against Organics”
A Seed Europe, an Amsterdam-based anti-globalization group, is attacking Dr. Norman Borlaug’s new Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry as a corporate effort to greenwash capitalist greed. But which of the founding signers of the Declaration is a corporate puppetmaster?
Find the Corporate Corrupters!
Dr. Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for breeding the “miracle wheat” that helped prevent massive famine from engulfing most of Asia in the 1960s. He has spent his life working for charitable foundations aiming to prevent human misery. His success is legendary; he’s credited with saving at least a billion people from starvation. In addition, his high-yield seeds have also spared millions of square miles of wildlands from being plowed for additional low-yield crops. Dr. Borlaug has never worked for a corporation.
How about Oscar Arias, former president of Costa Rica, the other Nobel Peace Prize winner who has signed the Declaration? Dr. Arias won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a peace settlement of the guerilla conflicts that engulfed Central America in the 1980s. Dr. Arias is president of Foundation Arias, an organization dedicated to peace, and serves as an unpaid ambassador for FutureHarvest, the Third World network of agricultural research institutes. He has received the Prize of La Paz Martin Luther King and the Humanitarian Prize Albert Schweitzer. What wonderful credentials for a corporate pirate!
Then there’s James Lovelock, the British chemist who authored the Gaia Hypothesis. Is he allied with Big Chemical Companies? No such luck, A Seed. Dr. Lovelock ginned up some inventions for the American space program (at U.S. government expense) but he works independently, out of a barn-turned-laboratory in West Devon, England. Incidentally, he was awarded the very first Amsterdam Prize for the Environment in 1990.
Eugene LaPointe is a world-famous conservationist. From 1982 to 1990, he was secretary-general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and currently is president of the IWMC World Conservation Trust. He spends his time trying to save endangered species, not clipping corporate coupons.
Former U.S. Senator George McGovern (Democrat, South Dakota), is the most left-leaning candidate ever nominated to run for President by a major U.S. political party (by the Democrats, in 1972). Before entering politics, he was a professor at tiny Dakota Wesleyan College. He’s recently been the U.S. Ambassador to the UN World Food Program. A corporate raider? Hardly.
Senator Rudy Boschwitz served with Senator McGovern on the Senate Agriculture Committee when he was the Republican Senator from Minnesota. He’s at least a businessman. But it’s a family business (home-improvement stores) that also employs his four sons. Rudy is a rags-to-affluence immigrant whose family fled from Hitler’s Germany just before World War II broke out.
Dennis Avery directs the non-profit Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. He served more than 29 years as a U.S. civil service economist, mainly with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Avery authored Food and Fiber for the Future (1968), the report of President Lyndon Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber. Since joining Hudson, He became the senior agricultural expert in the U.S. Department of State in 1980, before Ronald Reagan was elected President. Avery’s Center has never accepted a restricted grant, and for nine of his 12 Hudson years, he accepted no salary at all. There is no more reason to suspect that Avery’s commentaries have been “bought” than to suspect Greenpeace’s messages are affected by the corporate donations Greenpeace accepts.
Why would A Seed Europe call the Declaration signers a corporate cabal?
Is it possible they’re trying to divert people from looking at the Declaration’s message? At the stark reality that the low-yield farming A Seed’s urban dissidents recommend would mean starvation for the people of the Third World in the 21st century, even as it forced the destruction of the world’s remaining wildlands?
A Seed Europe’s False Claims
A Seed says: “. . . this repeats the popular myth that production must be increased in order to feed the world’s growing population, while the reality is that hunger is caused not because there is not enough food but because of lack of access to it, due to poverty.” (See the attack.)
Certainly poverty is a problem that cannot be solved simply by increasing food production. But before the Green Revolution, India produced less than 60 million tons of grain per year. Today, with high-yield seeds and fertilizers, it produces more than 240 million tons of grain in an average year, and still reportedly has more than 300 million people who cannot afford adequate nutrition. How many more Indians would be hungry (and how high would food prices be) if India was still producing only 60 million tons of grain per year? Clearly, increased food production is important.
Fortunately, the past 50 years have proven that trade and technology generate more real income gains and more nutritional gains for more people in more countries than any other development strategy in all history. Why is A Seed opposed to the high-yield farming and international trade that have rescued billons of people from hunger and poverty?
A Seed Europe says: “The declaration takes no account of the unsustainable overexploitation of natural resources” for farming and forestry. On the contrary, before nitrogen fertilizer and high-yield seeds fostered the Green Revolution, humanity could increase its food supply only by further exploiting Nature. Either humans killed wild animals, or they destroyed wildlands to expand their croplands. By 1950, we were farming half the land on the planet not covered with deserts or glaciers. Since 1950, however, we have roughly tripled the world’s food output with virtually no expansion in cropland.
In addition, the Soil and Water Conservation Society of America says modern high yield farming is the most sustainable in history, especially because of 1) its use of industrial fertilizers to replace the plant nutrients taken from the soil by growing crops; 2) the use of integrated pest management to minimize pest losses while also minimizing pesticide use; and 3) the widening use of no-till farming, which builds topsoil in the midst of high-yield food production, increases soil water retention, and encourages subsoil microbes. (See the Society’s 1995 report, Farming for a Better Environment.)
High-yield forestry is just as important as high-yield farming to saving wildlands. U.S. wild forests produce about 1.4 cubic meters of industrial wood per hectare per year - but well-managed plantation forests can produce ten or even twenty times as much wood per year. Obviously, harvesting high yields of wood from plantation trees can relieve logging pressure on huge tracts of the wild forests that harbor most of the wildlife. Conservation International (based in Amsterdam) goes so far as to demand that only plantation forests should be logged (though this ignores the need for “management logging” to minimze forest fire losses).
Manure: The Critical Shortage
A Seed Europe reveals its awful ignorance of world agriculture most clearly with the statement, “by no means is animal manure in short supply. Most is not utilized in agriculture, and instead leaches phosphorus and nitrogen into waterways, threatening wetlands, river systems and drinking water.”
This statement accurately describes only one tiny country in the world-the Netherlands. The Dutch have chosen to take advantage of the European Union’s ill-considered farm subsidies by turning their little country into a major meat exporter, and incidentally into a manure factory. (Singapore, in contrast, has chosen to import its meat and export the manufactures from clean industries.) The Netherlands imports much of the feed for its livestock, and now finds it has no effective way to cost-effectively deal with the manure surplus.
No other country in the world has such a manure surplus. Both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have estimated that America has about 28 percent of the organic biomass needed to replenish its soil nutrients each year.
A high-level technical committee (appointed by a Danish government sympathetic to organic) concluded in 1999 that an organic mandate would cut the country’s food production by 47 percent-because most Danish farmland would have to be targeted for still more manure production. Most of the land would be planted to forage crops, which would be green-chopped and hauled to feedlot cattle, so their manure could be spread thickly over most of the landscape. It’s hard to believe that the urban Europeans who think they favor organic farming understand this.
India and China would be devastated by organic farming mandates, for lack of plant nutrients. M.S. Randhawa wrote in his History of Agriculture in India (1983) that India’s crops remove about 8 million tons of plant nutrients per year, and its organic biomass resources can replace only about 4.2 million tons. Before the adoption of industrial fertilizers, India’s soils were severely depleted, crop yields were ultra-low and the country suffered frequent famines. India has huge herds of cattle and buffaloes-about 300 million of them-but much of their manure is burned as cooking fuel in the villages and a great deal is also used in making plaster for buildings. Its crop stalks are fed to the cattle. Wood is extremely scarce and valuable.
China’s farmers have for centuries gathered virtually every bit of available organic fertilizer for their rice paddies, including human wastes. China does not even compost these wastes to kill bacteria, because composting allows too much of the vital nitrogen to escape into the air. China under Chairman Mao refused to use industrial fertilizers to feed its expanding population, and instead told its millions of farm workers to harvest biomass from the hillsides to mulch the rice paddies. The result was the worst soil erosion in China’s modern history, and serious malnutrition for at least 200 million Chinese. After Mao’s death, China became (and remains) the world’s largest user of industrial fertilizers.
Dr. Vaclav Smil, author of Enriching the Earth (MIT Press, 2001), notes that humanity currently takes about 80 million tons per year of nitrogen from the atmosphere through an industrial process. (The air around us is 78 percent N.) Replacing this N, he estimates, would require the manure from 7-8 billion additional cattle. (The world currently has about.1.2 billion cattle and buffaloes.) Each of the additional cattle would need from 1 to 5 hectares of forage.
America, which has 850 million hectares of land in its lower 48 States, would need one billion additional cattle; thus it would have no room at all for food production, forests or parks.
Europe uses slightly more N fertilizer than North America, so it would need at least another one billion cattle-and its total land area is about one billion hectares. Europe, like America, would have no room for food production, forests or parks.
What about “green manure crops”? They take even more land than ruminant animals for a given amount of N. Historically, Europe grew off-season cover crops where it could, but produced most of its N with cattle and sheep manure.
Should the world really take its food production policies from urban activists who understand so little about agriculture and history?
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