In Praise of Pesticides
December 13, 2004
Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues at Hudson Institute, US, doesn’t believe that organic farming can meet the world’s food needs. Avery tells Chandrika Mago of The Times of India that the environment movement is feeding off new scares.
Question: Can we do without pesticides?
The environment movement is opposed to all aspects of modern farming — irrigation, fertiliser, pesticides, confinement feeding. My estimate is that high-yield crops and confinement lifestyle have saved more than 16 million square miles of wildlife habitat. The population is expected to rise from 6.3 billion to nine billion before it peaks, 1.5 billion affluent consumers will increase to between seven-eight billion. My guesstimate is that China will have 1.5 billion pets by 2050, Brazil has seen a 30 per cent increase in cat and dog numbers in five years. With all this, we will need more than twice the farming resources in 2050 as we use today. If we issue an organic farming mandate, there will be a 20 per cent decrease in yields, a 50 per cent loss due to global shortage of organic nitrogen fertiliser. You’ll have to get rid of either two-thirds of the people or all the wildlife habitat. It’s an ugly choice.
Question: An ICAR article estimated that nearly 90 per cent of pesticides don’t hit pests, instead contaminate the soil, water and air.
There is no question that farmers have sprayed pesticides which haven’t killed pests. I’m not trying to sell pesticides. But if we develop disease-resistant seeds, control weeds and give plants a complete menu of soil nutrients, we would have created a haven for pests — like a cotton field. If we don’t protect it, we would have wasted it all. Global monitoring has shown that withdrawing pesticides makes pest losses significantly worse. If this isn’t true, why are public tests of organic farming showing yields 10-40 per cent lower, after stealing nitrogen from somewhere else?
Question: What about the health effects of pesticide residues?
The dose makes the poison. The only thing we’ve tested and not found a threshhold for is lead. Low levels of chemicals have been found to be as often beneficial as harmful. Nobody has found them hugely impacting.
Question: What strategy do you recommend to increase production?
We should produce as much as we can sustainably from the good land because most of the biodiversity is on poor land. If we do this, I don’t think we would need to sacrifice any species to get large amounts of food production. The real problem is a billion people trying to subsist in the bio- diversity hotspots of the planet, where farming systems are not good enough. We should do agricultural research on high sustainable yields and encourage liberalisation of farm trade. The research budget for the international consultative group on agricultural research has been about $300 million a year — it’s tiny, and shrinking.
Question: Is this changing?
The pendulum is probably beginning to stop, but not swing the other way. I think it’s all related very strongly to a perception that the population surge is ending. Within the last year, high-yield conservation has been recommended, among others, in The New York Times and in Science magazine. This includes biotechnology and use of pesticides among the strategies for sustainable high yields. It was really affluent children of the well-fed leading the environment movement. They seemed to feel that if China or India got rich, they would take resources away from them. I think we would be creating resources through knowledge.
Question: You seem to blame many of the problems on the environment movement.
They said DDT caused cancer, studies have shown it doesn’t. They say human emissions are raising temperatures, the temperature history of 200 years shows no impact from CO2. The environmental movement has deliberately offered mis-information in some cases to stop the world on things they consider important.
Question: You don’t think the movement has done any good at all?
We’re all environmentalists, and should be. I think they may have started with very legitimate concerns but were overwhelmed by their own success, and realised this success depended on coming up with new scares. I think they also had a bias against population growth and affluence. We now realise the rich actually have smaller families, use better technology to protect the environment, try to restore the water quality in rivers — all pretty good things. Contrast it with Congo or Zambia, with slash and burn farming, hunting for meat, and large families. They thought we needed to turn the Third World into a gene museum. We have an enormously complex biology and we manage to thrive amid it with enormously complex societies. To sit in New York and offer solutions to problems you haven’t even seen isn’t just ignorance, it’s arrogance.
Question: Do you think India should go in for GM crops?
It has to be your call. The debate is on the testing, the environment movement is proposing tests which go beyond anything ever done. The European Commission recently said biotech crops are safer than non-biotech crops — they are tested, the transformation in a lab is more precise, they are regulated much more. So far, tests and the real world experience indicate that it works fine. The lurking danger is that each of these transformations has to be looked at individually.
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