For the past half century, society has been repeatedly misled by activist-orchestrated campaigns on the supposed environmental impact of chemicals in general and pesticides in particular. Starting with erroneous accusations against DDT leveled by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book Silent Spring and continuing today with claims that the herbicide atrazine harms frogs or that minute traces of chemicals pose significant health risks, the news media have demonstrated an astonishing resistance to facts and science in favor of the grand simplistic narratives advanced by groups whose primary goal is the banning of chemicals.

The lamentable result of this toxic journalism can be counted in the millions of needless malaria dead, billions of preventable illnesses, and untold increases in consumer costs that society has incurred over the past half century.

The Pesticide Activism: Fifty Years of Panic and Propaganda report details the long history of toxic journalism, the new and historical facts and science the media ignore in propping up “the grand narrative”[1], and why this problem is likely to get worse. That is why this issue needs to be addressed as society grapples with the growing human health and welfare challenges in a more crowded and resource-limited world of the 21^st century.

This report was prompted by several recent developments:

• The move to/toward “precaution-based” regulatory regimes in several key economic regions, especially Europe
• Increasing political agitation for enacting such “precaution-based” regulations here in the U.S., often based on the “grand narrative” advanced by activist groups
• The ongoing, accelerated re-review of atrazine’s safety by the U.S. EPA that appears to be politically, rather than scientifically driven
• The recent publication of a thorough and compelling history of DDT and the toxic journalism that convinced the public it was a dire threat to wildlife (and, possibly mankind) in spite of facts and reality[2]
• The discovery of a revealing 1945 letter by Rachel Carson that exposes her inclination to believe the worst about pesticides.

Full report is available here.

[1] The Grand Narrative is: Manmade chemical harms wildlife, chemical banned, wildlife recover = proof chemical was bad.

[2] Roberts, D and Tren, R. 2010. The Excellent Powder: DDT’s Political and Scientific History. Dog Ear Publishing, Indianapolis, IN.

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The great river valleys have always been the key cradles of civilization, and the great river valleys may always be at the heart of human societies. The great river valleys had the world’s richest hunting grounds. They gave birth to the world’s first farms and then to the cities that produced the doctors and technicians who have doubled our life spans and expanded our lifestyle choices
beyond hunting, farming and herding.

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As I write these words Scientific American has as yet not given me a chance to put my side of the argument before their readers. The four critiques and accompanying editorial will be the only
statement that readers of SA will receive as the basis on which to judge the cogency of my arguments.

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A devastating and detailed review of four highly publicized case studies showing the deep anti-pesticide bias of ecologists. The report asks why ecologists continually chase chemical phantoms despite the scientific evidence and when ecology will become a science again instead of an antipesticide activist cheerleading squad.

Dr. David Pimentel’s response to our letter in Science(2005, vol. 307:1410-1411) misconstrues some of our points and is simply wrong in other areas.

First, Pimentel incorrectly claims that we equated herbicide tolerant crops (HT) with no-till cultivation systems. We clearly stated that HT crops facilitate both low- and no-till cropping systems, not just no-till. Low-tillage cropping encompasses a large spectrum of conservation tillage cropping, all of which significantly lower soil erosion compared to organic agriculture’s inherent heavy reliance on tillage for weed control.

The inaccurate focus on only no-till cropping results in a major underestimate of the beneficial impacts of HT crops, as demonstrated when Pimentel incorrectly states that “75% of U.S. soybean plantings include HT, but only 30% of them are planted with no-till.”

According to Dan Towery, just-retired director of the Conservation Technology Information Center located at Purdue University and funded by the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, fully 85% of U.S. soybean acres were planted to HT crops in 2004 and 61% of U.S. soybean acres were in low- or no-till cropping systems—more than double the percentage claimed by Pimentel.

Pimentel states that “herbicides are the most serious pesticide pollutants in streams and groundwater in the United States.” More accurately, herbicides are the most common pesticide pollutant. This is mostly in the form of seasonal triazine herbicide contamination of surface waters. Characterizing this contamination as “serious” is debatable, given the relatively benign risk profile of triazine herbicides. Nor does this have much relevance to the spectrum of herbicides commonly used in biotech HT crops, such as glyphosateGlyphosate is rarely a significant contaminant of ground or surface waters owing to its rapid breakdown in the environment. As noted by Fernandez-Cornejo and McBride (1), the “substitution caused by the use of herbicide-tolerant soybeans results in glyphosate replacing other synthetic herbicides that are at least three times as toxic and that persist in the environment nearly twice as long.”

They further note that “Glyphosate binds to the soil rapidly, preventing leaching, and is biodegraded by soil bacteria. In fact, glyphosate has a half-life in the environment of 47 days, compared with 60-90 days for the herbicides it commonly replaces. In addition, glyphosate has extremely low toxicity to mammals, birds, and fish. The herbicides that glyphosate replaces are 3.4 to 16.8 times more toxic, according to a chronic risk indicator based on EPA reference dose for humans.” (1)

The World Health Organization, in its comprehensive study of pesticides and chemical contaminants in water (2), places glyphosate in a category where “it is unnecessary to recommend a health-based guideline value for these compounds because they are not hazardous to human health at concentrations normally found in drinking water.”

Pimentel cites a completely outdated statistic from 1994—prior to the introduction of biotech HT crops—when he claims that “95% of corn production acreage in Iowa receives herbicides, and 70% of this land is also cultivated for weed control.” This statistic is no longer relevant, given the significantly increased spectrum of herbicides and HT corn combinations available to Iowa farmers today, nearly ten years after the introduction of HT biotech crops. As Iowa State University weed scientist Dr. Mike Owen states, “tillage practices in Iowa corn production have changed considerably since 1994.” (Owen, personal communication, 2005)

Pimentel claims that “soil erosion is a serious problem in the United States” and states that “agricultural soil is being lost at about 10 times faster than soil reformation and sustainability.” While Pimentel may or may not have accurately cited what is claimed in the 2003 National Academy of Sciences publication, a nearly identical claim by Dr. Pimentel was extensively debated in the pages of Science in 1999 between Dr. Pimentel and soil geomorphologist and erosion specialist Dr. Stanley Trimble of the University of California, Los Angeles. (Science, vol. 286:1477) http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/286/5444/1477c

In their 1999 exchange in Science, Pimentel and Skidmore cited a USDA report (3) in which U.S. soil erosion rates were estimated at 13 Mg per hectare per year (13 tons per hectare per year), as well as another paper (4) where erosion rates were estimated at slightly less than 12 Mg per hectare per year. Pimentel and Skidmore then cited Troeh et al. (5) when claiming that “this erosion rate is a factor of 12 higher than soil sustainability, on the basis of the average rate of soil formation.”

Dr. Trimble responded to these claims first by noting that, in fact, the 13 tons per hectare per year figure is not an actual measurement of soil loss, but is an estimate “from models, and they do not predict movement of sediment to streams. If U.S. soils have indeed been eroding at such rates over the last two or so decades, where are the detritus and efflux?”
Trimble further noted that “Troeh et al., on the basis of USDA information, state that the soil-loss tolerances for U.S. soils range from 2.2 to 11.0 Mg ha-1 year-1 (2, p. 115). U.S. agriculture is mostly on soils with a soil-loss tolerance of 11 Mg ha-1 year-1 or more (3, p. 678). Hence, there appears to be little disparity between soil-loss tolerance and what Pimentel and Skidmore say is the rate of erosion. Even according to the USDA study cited by Pimentel and Skidmore, only one-third of U.S. agricultural land is eroding faster than the sustainable rate—a statement that remains to be proven. Although erosion rates may be periodically high in some regions, U.S. soil erosion remains a problem but does not seem to be a crisis.”

In other words, Pimentel’s past claims that agricultural soil is being lost 10+ times faster than soil reformation and sustainability is not supported by the papers he himself cites. It is important to note that this exchange came in response to an extensive, 20+ year physical analysis of actual soil loss for one entire highly-erodible basin in Wisconsin (Coon Creek) conducted by Dr. Trimble and published in Science. (Science, vol. 285:1244-1246, 1999) This exhaustive study found rates of soil loss to be far lower than those estimated by the USDA models cited by Dr. Pimentel and Skidmore. As such, U.S. soil losses are likely well below tolerable soil loss rates and are sustainable.

Moreover, there is simply no denying that genetic engineering has and will make possible even further reductions in soil loss from cropland, far below those possible through the tillage-dependent organic farming propagandized by Dr. Pimentel.

Finally, Dr. Pimentel mistakes our statement that “Humanity already farms more than one-third of the Earth’s total land area” as referring only to cropland, which Pimentel correctly notes is 11% of the earth’s total land area. Farmed land is both cropland and land in pasture and rangeland (26%), making the total estimated farmed area 37% of the total global land area. Accounting for pasture and rangeland is clearly relevant when the primary organic fertilizer is animal manure.

Alex Avery
Tom DeGregori

References:
1. Fernandez-Cornejo, Jorge and William D. McBride. 2004. ‘Adoption and Pesticide Use’, pp. 26-29 in Adoption of Bioengineered Crops By Jorge Fernandez-Cornejo and William D. McBride. ERS/USDA (Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture) Agricultural Economic Report No. AER810. 67 pp, May 2002. http://ers.usda.gov/publications/aer810/aer810h.pdf.
2. WHO (World Health Organization). 1998. Guidelines for Drinking-Water Quality, 2nd edition, Volume 1 – Recommendations – Addendum – Health Criteria and Other Supporting Information, Annex 2. Tables of Guideline Values – Table A 2.2 – Chemicals Not of Health Significance at Concentrations Normally Found in Drinking Water. Geneva: World Health Organization.
3. Summary Report: 1992 National Resource Inventory (USDA, Soil Conservation Service, Washington, DC, 1994).
4. N. D. Uri and J. A. Lewis, J. Sustainable Agric. 14, 63 (1999)
5. F. R. Troeh, J. A. Hobbs, R. L. Donahue, Soil and Water Conservation (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle, NJ, 1999)

Alex Avery

The short and the sweet of it is that the world is in the midst of the largest increase in global food demand in human history. At least a doubling of food demand will unfold in the next 30-40 years, primarily as a result of economic growth in Asia, but also in Eastern Europe and parts of South America and Mexico. That economic growth is driving a greater demand for protein and improved diets throughout the developing world. In Asia, the incredible demand growth is outpacing their agricultural capacity in terms of both land and other resources.

In the next 30-40 years, Asia will have half of the world’s food and fiber consumers, but less than one third of the world’s arable land and less than one fourth of the world’s pasture. In short, Asia will be unable to feed and clothe itself entirely on its own.

WORLD FOOD CHALLENGES-POPULATION

The two factors affecting world food needs and farm product demand are population growth and individual income growth.

The world passed the six billion mark in 1999. The world’s overall population growth rate is currently about 1.5 percent per year—adding an additional 80-85 million consumers each year to the global population. That’s another Mexico added to the world’s consumer base each year, or an additional New York City every month. While an additional 85 million people per year may seem daunting, we are far from heading toward a population disaster.

In fact, we’re now for the first time at the point that adding the next billion people will take longer than the previous billion, indicating that the global population train has its brakes on hard. But it has taken a while for the train to scrub off momentum.

Since the 1960s when the alarm over “over-population” was first raised, we have learned that while poor farmers mostly have large families, affluent urban people have small families. The world is moving rapidly toward urban affluence, and its birth rates are plummeting. Europe is now down to a fertility rate of about 1.6-1.7 children per couple, with Germany, Italy, and Spain as low as 1.2 children per couple. Italy has been offering a $1,200 subsidy for 2nd Italian children to ensure the country is not totally abandoned to Albanian and North African immigrants.

In the former Third World, birth rates have fallen 80 percent of the way to stability, from about 6.2 births per couple in 1960 to about 3 births today with birth rates continuing to decline rapidly. Stability is 2.1. The UN Population Division has now lowered its peak projection for the global human population—again—to between 8 and 9 billion people. That still means a substantial increase of about 50% over the world’s current population over the next 45 years or so.

WORLD FOOD NEEDS-AFFLUENCE

This leaves income gains in countries not yet well fed as the farmers’ best friend, and such gains are continuing. The good news for the pork industry is that this is occurring in cultures where pork is the preferred food. The flip side is that the protein competition will get more intense as the wealthier consumers diversify their diets.

The GATT, now the World Trade Organization (WTO), has clearly shown itself to be the most successful international institution in human experience. It replaced tariff wars with economic growth. World non-farm trade has increased nearly 20-fold since 1950, and is still rising.

As a result of the explosion in world trade, nearly 3 billion people in Asia are now living in market-oriented economies that have been increasing their national economic output by nearly 10 percent per year, compounded, since 1980. This economic growth is headlined by Japan, but also includes Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan, Mauritius, and southern China. India and Indonesia have come a long way as well.

Nearly half of the world’s population lives in Asia. And as Asia continues to grow, both in population and economically, we can look to Japan as a model of what to expect from the region as a whole.

SURGING DEMAND FOR BETTER DIETS

The first thing that less affluent people do when they get more income is to bid for better diets. First, they want more rice and wheat. Then, they buy more cooking oil. Then, they buy more eggs, milk and, finally, more meat, fruits, and vegetables.

Meat demand in Asia has been skyrocketing alongside the rise in personal incomes:

Japan was the first of the Asian tigers, and it has become the first of the Asian meat consumers as well. A country that once consumed less than 15 grams per day of animal protein and felt urgent concern about having fish on the plate, is now nearing 60 grams per day of meat and dairy products. If Japan did not still have such high tariffs on beef imports, the average Japanese might already eat more than 70 grams of animal protein. The Japanese meat consumption pattern is being emulated in Taiwan.

China, of course, is the huge Asian food challenge, with 1.25 billion people raising their incomes at a speed never before seen in a large country. China has been raising its meat consumption at 10 percent annually for the past decade, more than doubling its national meat consumption in the 1990s. Most of the expansion to date has been pork, but the demand for both beef and poultry have more than doubled and are still growing. Chinese pork consumption increased nearly 70 percent in the 1990s and is currently expanding by more than one million tons per year.

Moslem countries, also, are joining in the meat demand, even though they forego pork due to their majority Muslem populations.

Indonesia, which is both Moslem and Asian, has increased its poultry consumption dramatically. The broiler flock rose 25 percent in 1995 alone, to 600 million birds. The demand for corn in poultry feeds has been rising by 4 million tons per year as the feed industry expanded by 13 percent annually.

NEW CLOTHES, BEER AND DOGS

But just because you’re involved in pork, doesn’t mean you should ignore the rest of the agricultural economy, because it will have an enormous impact on the pork industry as well.

The growing global affluence means that once we have fed the 8.5 billion people the way they prefer, we’ll have to satisfy their other growing farm product appetites because these consumers will drink and dress better, too. China’s beer consumption has more than tripled in the last decade. Imagine how much additional grain would be required if every one of the 700 million Chinese men drank just one extra beer per month. That’s 8 billion bottles of beer in a year!

Huge populations of people are moving from societies where everyone owned only two cotton outfits apiece, to a dozen and more—just like any other modern society.

There will even be a pet food challenge. The U.S. has 113 million pet cats and dogs for 270 million people. All over the world, ownership of companion animals and pet food sales rise with incomes. Already, China’s small-family policy is stimulating increased pet ownership. It is reasonable to project that China in 2050 will have more than 500 million cats and dogs, translating into significantly increased demand for pet food, including more meat, fishmeal and protein meal.

Combining the expected 50% increase in global population with the fact that most of these additional people will live in countries that are radically increasing individual consumption of high-protein foods—foods that take 3-5 times more farm resources per calorie than cereal calories—it is easy to see how overall farm resource demand will at least double, and will more likely triple over the next 45 years.

AG BIOTECHNOLOGY TODAY AND TOMORROW

Biotechnology is already playing a huge and growing role in transforming agriculture in the 21st century. It is making farming more environmentally friendly and more sustainable, despite the fact that we’re still in the comparative “biplane” stage of agricultural genetic engineering. We’re years away from the equivalent “jet age,” when the promise of agricultural biotechnology will produce self-fertilizing (nitrogen-fixing) crops that produce an appropriate array of insect protectants and are able to better withstand drought, salinity, and other adverse growing conditions. They may one day even produce their own natural herbicides to fight off weeds.

This will mean quantum reductions in fossil fuel use, pesticide and herbicide use, and far greater environmental sensitivity. Soils in our fields will improve, with less compaction from tractor traffic, higher organic matter levels, and greater water holding capacity. Topsoil loss will drop even further even as crop yields increase. Off farm impacts from sediment and nutrient runoff will decline further still.

This promise is already being realized.

First and foremost, herbicide tolerant crops—the largest single category of biotech crops currently planted, with 73% of the global biotech total—have made soil-conserving low- and no-tillage cropping possible on more farmland acres and made it more attractive to farmers to use these methods. And because of better and more timely weed control, herbicide-tolerant biotech crops have increased yields modestly while drastically reducing costs.

Low- and no-till farming is when weeds are killed with herbicides rather than killing them mechanically by plowing, disking, scraping, etc. Since the introduction of biotech herbicide tolerant crops, no-till crop acreage has increased nearly 40 percent in the United States. Two thirds of U.S. soybean growers who reduced their tillage since 1996 cited herbicide tolerant crops as a key factor. In addition, biotechnology tools to streamline conventional breeding have resulted in several non-genetically engineered herbicide tolerant crops that are already on the market. These approaches are becoming important to overcoming consumer resistance to these novel crop technologies.

In the United States, no till and conservation tillage farming annually save an estimated $3.5 billion in water treatment, waterway maintenance, navigation, flooding, and recreation costs. Fuel use is also drastically cut, as pulling tillage implements through the soil burns lots of tractor fuel. The savings total over 300 million gallons of diesel fuel each year in the U.S.

All of this results in better crop soil quality, with increased soil carbon, increased water infiltration and water holding capacity, greater soil tilth, 3 to 6 times larger earth worm populations, and better in-field wildlife benefits. Quail are estimated to find their food in one-fifth of the time in a no-till field compared to a plowed field—as the plant residues and soil structure have more beetles, insects and other food for wildlife.

Importantly, biotech has given us crops tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, or Roundup, one of the most environmentally safe farm chemicals because it has low toxicity and breaks down rapidly into harmless byproducts.

These crops have become well established in several key animal feed export countries, including the U.S., and Argentina and Brazil—who together are the number one producer and exporter of soybeans, mostly for livestock production.

Nor are the benefits of herbicide tolerant crops limited to farmers in the developed countries. One of Subsaharan Africa’s worst pests is witchweed, a parasitic weed that can devastate corn and sorghum yields, the key food grains in the region. A new strategy is preparing for field trials, which will plant herbicide-tolerant corn seeds, soaked in a systemic herbicide which can kill the witchweed as it attempts to invade the plants’ roots. That could protect food yields on millions of small African farms.

Insect protected crops are the second largest biotech crop in acreage terms, with18% of the global biotech total. Currently, these incorporate a protein toxic to plant-eating caterpillars from the natural soil bacteria Bacillus thurengiensis, or Bt. This drastically reduces the amount of insecticides used in growing crops, especially corn and cotton. In the U.S., biotech Bt crops reduced insecticide use in 2003 by nearly 7 million pounds, reducing potential pollution and ecological impacts.

Organic farmers have been spraying aqueous solutions of Bt bacteria on crops for decades as a pesticide and Bt is extremely safe. After seven years of widespread planting on millions of acres, there is still no evidence of pest resistance to biotech Bt. , In fact, the only documented case of pest resistance to Bt was from over-reliance on sprayed Bt.

The results of biotech insect protected crops are increased productivity, less pest damage, higher quality, and increased profitability. All of these benefits are scale neutral, and farmers from the subsistence level to the largest have rapidly adopted biotech crops. For livestock production, one key benefit of insect-protected crops besides lower cost is a marked reduction in mycotoxins, which can adversely affect animal performance and health.

One third of biotech crops are now grown in developing countries. Farmers in South Africa and the Philippines are growing Bt corn for food and feed. Indian and Chinese smallholder farmers are growing large amounts of Bt cotton, increasing yields and incomes and reducing pesticide deaths. China is growing Bt cotton on 7 million of its 12 million acres of cotton, or 58%. This affects potential cotton meal and oil export sales to some degree, but the benefits are clear and overwhelming.

Indian farmers are officially growing only 250,000 acres of Bt cotton crops, or about 1% of the total Indian cotton area of 22 million acres. But there are literally thousands of acres of illegal Bt cotton—the result of fraud by an Indian seed company and the impatience of Indian farmers. But it tells you that when farmers in developing countries have the opportunity to see for themselves the benefits of biotech, they rapidly adopt it. The productivity, pollution, and sustainability benefits are significant.

In the near future there will hopefully be biotech revolutions in even more crops. How about a super-eco-potato, a biotech potato that is resistant to the Colorado Potato Beetle, a devastating virus spread by aphids, and the ruinous potato blight. The insect and viral protection are already realities and were even grown in the U.S. for a couple of years until the fast food companies found out and refused to purchase them. The blight-resistance could be in farmers fields within 5 years. Combining the blight-proof trait with the already proven and approved insect and virus resistance could cut global fungicide and insecticide use by tens of millions of pounds per year, with less spraying, fuel use, soil compaction.

Scientists have also already produced salt and aluminum tolerant crops through genetic engineering. Dr. Eduardo Blumwald at UC Davis has developed salt tolerant tomatoes and canola by inserting more copies of natural tomato salt pump genes into the genome. This has resulted in tomatoes that can grow in nearly 40% seawater.

Not only that, but this may be a way to deal with the salinization of the world’s irrigated croplands—the problem that killed the hanging gardens of Babylon. Irrigated fields are our most productive croplands and salts are in all water used for irrigation. The canola plants store up to 18 grams of salt in their leaves during the growing season. Their oilseeds have no more salts than conventional canola (same for the tomatoes). After the canola is harvested, the farmer can harvest the leaves, and dispose of the salts. Sustainability wise, this is nearly as big an advance as synthetic fertilizers.

NON-TRANSGENIC BIOTECH IMPROVEMENTS

We can now fully explore and exploit the yield-enhancing genes from wild crop relatives as well, which will help keep feed costs down as global farmland competition heats up in the coming decades. Two researchers from Cornell University scanned the genomes of wild rice and tomatoes and identified superior gene variants that human breeding had inadvertently eliminated.

Using biotechnology, they swapped the inferior genes for the superior ones—natural genes from the crops’ own wild relatives—and increased yields considerably. In rice, each of the gene variants increased the yields of the best Chinese rice hybrids by nearly 20 percent. In tomatoes, they increased solids yield by an incredible 50 percent.

BIOTECH ANIMAL NUTRITION ADVANCES

We’re now at the point where we’re able to significantly alter nutritional characteristics of major food and feed staples, and this will soon have a major impact on livestock production around the world.

While most have heard about Golden Rice that contains beta-carotene to prevent blindness and disease in developing countries where malnutrition is currently quite high, the potential to tailor feed crops for specific animal production characteristics is still largely unexploited. However, this will change dramatically over the next decade.

Phytate/Phytase: Biotechnology has already given us the ability to identify crop mutants that have lower phytate levels and increased available phosphorus. However, these varieties also have had lower yields, discouraging their use. That is why feed makers have added bacterially-derived phytase to animal feed rations. Yet here too there are increased expenses and problems in maintaining enzyme activity through the manufacturing and transport process, which has also limited their use.

Biotechnology will soon allow us to produce transgenic crops with heat-resistant, stable forms of phytase in the grain itself, drastically reducing costs while increasing performance and reliability. Initial studies have found no adverse effects from these phytase-enhanced transgenic crop feeds on animal health. Moreover, crop performance should be able to be maintained because the phytase production can be targeted to the grain itself and therefore should not hinder crop performance.

Amino Acid/Protein Balance: Biotechnology is also allowing us to more easily and cheaply tailor the amino acid balance of the feeds for optimal animal nutrition and efficient protein synthesis in livestock. Cereal proteins are deficient in lysine and tryptophan. Breeding with opaque-2 mutants has produced “quality protein maize” with improvements in the lysine and tryptophan contents of the seed proteins. Legume proteins are often deficient in methionine, cysteine and lysine. Wild soybean germplasm with improved contents of methionine and cysteine may be used to introgress this trait into the cultivated soybeans, just as the researchers have done to increase rice and tomato yields. Biotechnology may also be useful through expression of foreign proteins that are rich in the amino acids that are limiting in the crop plant.

Energy/Oil Traits: High oil corn developed via breeding is on the market. These varieties have seeds with larger embryos, producing increased content of oil, essential amino acids and vitamins in the seed. Feeds containing this energy-dense corn improve animal performance. These are sold as single cross hybrids or as blends. Blends are composed of a pollinator variety having a very high oil content together with a conventional corn variety. The hybrid seeds produced in the field have oil content midway between that of the parents. High oil grain developed via biotechnology may reach the marketplace within 5 years.

Vaccination via feed. Edible vaccines delivered via feeds may also help to maintain the health of livestock in the future. Animals have been immunized against diseases through feeding of transgenic plants expressing antigens (i.e. subunit vaccines) from various microbes. These edible vaccines have been successful against diseases caused by transmissible gastroenteritis coronavirus, foot-and-mouth disease virus, rabies virus, swine diarrhea, avian influenza, bovine viral diarrhea virus, swine fever virus and rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus. Some of these are now being entered into veterinary trials, but it will be some time before any edible vaccine products are licensed for marketing. Nevertheless, this biotechnology strategy has great potential for providing benefits that could not be achieved through plant breeding approaches.

Biotech plants have also been used to produce chimeric plant virus particles expressing antigens from various animal pathogens. These chimeric plant virus particles have been purified from host plant tissue and used as vaccine injections. Antigen structures displayed on the surface of these virus particles are very effective in stimulation of immune responses in animals. These plant-derived vaccines have been successful for protection of animals against infectious diseases such as canine parvovirus, mink enteritis virus, feline panleucopenia virus and Staphylococcus aureus.

BARRIERS TO THE BIOTECH BONANZA

In short, the promise of agricultural genetic engineering is enormous. It will allow us to grow more food from less land and far fewer inputs. Our production will be safer, more efficient, and far more cost effective.

However, there are still significant barriers to biotechnology acceptance. The key barrier is consumer unease. Biotechnology is new and in many consumers eyes, it is untested, despite the enormous experience gained over the past decade of biotech crop production and use.

This unease and unfamiliarity—amplified by the generally poor scientific literacy of the vast majority of consumers—has meant that acceptance has been slow and uneven. While U.S. consumers have more or less accepted biotechnology in agriculture fairly readily, this is certainly not true of many countries, notably Europe and the more affluent sectors of Asia.

Part of this can be laid at the hands of activist groups and others who have a philosophical opposition to the use of biotechnology in food and fiber production. Groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other anti-biotech activists are now global actors and have made opposition to ag biotechnology a centerpiece of their efforts.

However, I believe that this opposition will soon wane. In fact, I think that the biotech “war”, so to speak, has already been won and only the final battles remain to be fought.

Part of this can be attributed to the enormous success and “GE diplomacy” of biotech cotton. It’s not a food crop, and no amount of fearmongering has served to frighten farmers or consumers about the cotton it produces. Instead, farmers and governments have been enormously impressed by the ability of biotech cotton to resist the voracious pests that had always made cotton the most intensively pesticide-sprayed crop in agriculture.

China, India, and South Africa now feel heavily dependent on biotech cotton to preserve not only their cotton farmers’ livelihoods but also the millions of industrial jobs that depend on their cotton production.

Famine has been another winning issue for biotech. The activist efforts to bar American food aid corn from the famine stricken regions of southern Africa seem to have backfired. When the president of Zambia said he would not distribute U.S. food aid corn to starving people who’d already been reduced to boiling poisonous roots, the world shuddered. The reality that no harm has been linked to biotech crops was extended to many more people. The inhumanity of the eco-activists was exposed in a new way.

This year, Brazil has decided to permit the planting of biotech soybeans. According to that country’s major soybean growers, this is likely to stimulate another expansion of soy production there, because it will sharply reduce growers’ costs.

In the future, if Europe wants to continue importing non-biotech soybeans, it may actually have to pay a premium to get them. Will Europe do this? If so, that will put EU hog producers at a further disadvantage in world competition.

Will the WTO uphold the EU constraints of biotech development and trade? That will be highly interesting as well.

In almost any case, it seems likely that the rest of the world will proceed with genetically modified crops, and eventually even biotech animal developments.

HIGH YIELD CONSERVATION: A WINNING STRATEGY

Someone must tell the urban public about the environmental benefits of high-yield modern farming and why we should be carefully but deliberately embracing these technologies because of the growing maw of affluent consumers who will NOT be satisfied with a vegetarian future. I submit that it will have to be agriculture.

Agriculture and agricultural researchers must talk about saving wildlands and wild species with better seeds. We must talk about conquering soil erosion with high yields (so there’s less farmland to erode) and conservation tillage (which radically reduces erosion per acre of farmland). We must talk about preventing forest losses to slash-and-burn farming (the cause of destruction for two-thirds of the tropical forest we’ve lost). We must point out that where high-yield farming is practiced, the amount of forest is expanding. We must point out that the losses in wildlife habitat overwhelmingly occur where the farmers get low yields.

Agriculture already uses about 37 percent of the earth’s land surface, and any land not already in a city or a farm is wildlife habitat. And if the world has 30 million wildlife species, (a reasonable biologist’s “guesstimate”) then 25-27 million of them are probably in the tropical rain forests, with most of the remainder in such critical habitats as wetlands, coral reefs and mountain microclimates. These are places we have not farmed, and should not farm.

Through the higher yields per acre afforded by the use of pesticides, fertilizers, confinement meat and dairy production and modern food processing, modern high-yield farming has already saved millions of square miles of wildlife habitat from conversion to agricultural use.

Our peer-reviewed estimate is that the modern food system is currently saving something on the order of 15-20 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield food production. That makes it the greatest conservation triumph in modern history.

Thus the key to conserving the natural world in the 21st century will be what the Hudson Institute calls “high-yield conservation.” Meeting both the food and forestry challenges of the 21st century, while leaving room for nature, will depend on our ability to continue increasing the food and fiber yields per acre of land and per unit of input from plants, animals and trees on our best land, and transporting the products to where the people are demanding it.

Two years ago, we were joined by nearly 1,000 scientists and conservationists in signing the High Yield Conservation Declaration. The keynote signers were Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias (former President of Costa Rica), Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, and GAIA hypothesis creator James Lovelock. They recognize the challenge we face in the 21st century of feeding and clothing humanity without taking any more land from nature. (www.highyieldconservation.org)

Please visit this site and sign your names to this global petition. And while you take home the news of the coming advances in pork and feed production, please also take with you the message of high yield conservation. This concept is gaining increased acceptance and will be a key aspect of future acceptance of even more radical changes in livestock and feed crop production that will maintain pork’s share of the global food market.

Pork is an amazingly widely accepted food. But if consumers become falsely convinced that it contributes to environmental degradation or burden, then pork will see its share of the consumer protein diet decline needlessly.

I thank you for your time and your attention.

Dennis Avery

The short answer to the title question is: Yes, Britain’s farmland—including Lincolnshire—should be farmed.

Indeed, it must be farmed, to:

1. Help save the world’s remaining wildlands and wild species, especially those in the tropics, from being plowed for low-yield crops as world population attains its peak of 8-9 billion mostly-affluent people.
2. Minimize soil erosion, the most important threat to the sustainability of human society;
3. Preserve Britain’s rural economy and its picturesque villages;
4. Save Britain’s charming rural landscape, beloved of both native Britons and Britain’s overseas visitors. Without farming, the landscape would quickly become overgrown with the sort of deep, unbroken, species-poor climax forests that take over unfarmed land anywhere.

Why Farm Britain to Save the Environment?

The farmers of today are feeding 6.3 billion people (mostly with more calories and protein) from virtually the same farming acres that were inadequate to feed 1 billion people in 1900. They have used powerful seed varieties, irrigation, industrial fertilizer, and integrated pest management to triple the yields on the world’s best soils since 1960.

Some people blame modern farming for that population increase. In truth, however, the population growth began before the Green Revolution. It was originally triggered by the lower death rates of modern medicine. Vaccinations, sulfa drugs, antibiotics, and such public health interventions as clean water and sewage treatment dramatically decreased the death risks in much of the world.

If we’d had modern medicine without high-yield farming; the whole world would have been stripped as bare of forests and wildlife as Easter Island in the Pacific.

Instead, high-yield farming and forestry is primarily responsible for saving room for 16 million square miles of forest on the planet today, nearly one-third of the planet’s area, despite the larger human population.

The United Nations’ Environmental Program says we lost only half as many mammal, bird and fish species in the last one-third of the 20th century as we did in the last one-third of the 19th century. Indeed, UNEP says the rate of extinction in major species today is the lowest it’s been in 500 years. That’s mainly due to the high-yield farmers, and nowhere has that success been greater than in the temperate farming regions like Britain. In the United States and Sweden, forests have even expanded in the past 50 years, thanks to the high-yield management of the best farms and tree plantations.

Britain does not have massive farmlands, but it has significant farmlands. Without the production from British farmland, we’d have to clear more land for farming somewhere else.

Much of the land cleared for farming recently in Honduras is “steepland” with a slope of more than 30 percent. Farmers actually tie ropes around their waists so they won’t fall off their fields as they harvest the wheat crops with hand sickles. Every decade or so, a hurricane washes most of the soil into the valleys.

China is reforesting 12 million acres of recently-cleared hillsides in the Yangtze Valley; farming them produced huge floods and severe soil erosion.

In Indonesia, species-rich tropical forests are being cleared to grow chicken feed.

In India, the farmers are edging closer to the tiger preserves, so more farmers are eaten, and more tigers are shot as man-eaters.

The Food Challenge of the Future

Since 1960, births per woman in the Third World have dropped from 6.2 to 2.7, and are continuing to decline. (Replacement is 2.1 births.) Meanwhile, First World birth rates have dropped below replacement, to 1.7, with countries such as Italy and Germany at a scary 1.2. Naturally, their public pension systems are facing bankruptcy for lack of workers, and Italy is now offering a $1200 bonus for any family that has a second child.

The “Population Explosion” is virtually over, although its momentum will carry human numbers more and more slowly upward for another three decades or so.

The world’s farmers, however, still face the biggest challenge in world history. They must more than double farm output—again—to feed high-quality diets to more than 7 billion people in 2050. That compares to only about 1 billion people getting high-quality diets today. The children of 2050 will virtually all get milk and eggs, and most of them will get far more meat than today’s Third World children. The global demand for livestock products is likely to at least triple.

There will even be a pet challenge. Pets are among the first desires of newly affluent families with few children are pets. Brazil is building a pet food industry. China is already beginning to replace its traditional caged crickets with more emotionally satisfying cats and dogs (we expect China in 2050 to have 500 million companion animals). The expansion of pet numbers will take place around the world, and woe unto any politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.

The world’s farmers must more than double farm output again in the next 50 years despite the fact that most of the world’s good farmland is already being farmed, most of it with high-yield seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Most of the good irrigation projects have already been built.

If the high-yield farmers of the world cannot meet this challenge, then the poor people of the Third World will simply expand their bushmeat hunting and their slash-and-burn farming. The World Conservation Union estimates that there are a billion such people already living in the biodiversity hot spots of the world, and if we cannot feed them from modern farms, they will almost literally eat up the global biodiversity.

Winning the Battle to Save the Land

Modern high-yield farming is the most sustainable in all history, thanks to high-powered seeds, industrial fertilizer, integrated pest management, and low-till farming systems.

Better Seeds, Fertilizer, Pest Protection, Higher Yields, Less Erosion

Tripling the yields on the best land has avoided the need to farm more land and more risky land. When we triple the yields on a level, fertile acre of land, we cut soil erosion per ton of food by at least two-thirds. If we avoid extending farming onto a steep or wind-blown acre, we reduce the erosion per ton by an even bigger factor.

In the UK, the farming has become focused on the most level and sustainable croplands, with the rougher land shifted more heavily into livestock production. This has obvious soil erosion benefits. In America, the steep and rocky lands in New England and the Tennessee Valley have been put back into forests.

On both sides of the Atlantic, more of our cattle, hogs and poultry are being raised in confinement, which takes far less total land per bird or animal and produces far less soil erosion per ton of meat. Putting the birds and animals back outdoors could require huge amounts of land—and more feed per pound of meat. That, too, would take more land from Nature.

The Center for Global Food Issues has found that American farmers have doubled the meat production per acre over the past 30 years through a combination of higher crop yields, better bird and animal genetics, better veterinary pharmaceuticals, and confinement feeding.

The upshot is that today’s farmers in Europe and America are practicing the most sustainable and productive farming in all history. Without it, wildlife all over the world would be at far greater risk.

Conservation Through Fertilizer

The nitrogen fertilizer that conventional British farmers use is another major conservation tool. The world’s farmers use 80 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year to replace the nitrogen taken from soils by growing plants.

Without industrial fertilizer, the world would need to apply the manure from another 5-7 billion feedlot cattle to maintain soil fertility. That means we’d have to clear virtually all of the world’s remaining forests for cattle forage. I realize this is a startling statement, and one that is rarely presented in the popular press, but it has been validated by agriculturists the world over.

In 1999, the Bichel Committee, a high-level technical committee appointed by the Danish government, reported that an all-organic mandate for Danish agriculture would reduce its human food production by 47 percent. Most of Denmark’s land would have to be shifted to cattle forage. Denmark’s agricultural exports would also have to end, forcing more farmland to be cleared in other countries which have been buying Danish farm exports.

In America, during the Dust Bowl droughts of the 1930s, Midwestern farmers had used up the last of the nitrogen built up during the eons of wilderness years filled with grazing bison and antelope, birds, and grasshoppers. Yields declined, soil carbon became depleted, while less and less organic matter went back onto the soil. The advent of industrial nitrogen changed the direction of soil management, and this was soon augmented by soil testing. Modern farmers ensure that their soils get exactly the right amounts of nitrogen, potash, potassium, and 26 trace minerals, while the use of lime keep soil acidity at the right levels.

In Africa, where industrial fertilizers are rarely used on food crops, farming has entered a death spiral. Larger populations have demanded more food, so bush fallow periods have been cut from 15 years to three years. Soil nutrient levels have declined as a result, with lower crop yields and less crop biomass to put back on the soil. Lower yields mean still more land must be plowed, leading to still more erosion, and still-shorter bush fallows.

Conservation Tillage

For 10,000 years, soil erosion has been the most serious threat to the sustainability of human societies. The big problem with farming has always been weed control. In Medieval times, the best weed control system was clean-fallow, which left at least half of the farmland completely open to wind and water erosion all year long. The degraded soils of the Mediterranean Basin still offer mute testimony to the power of erosion under such a farming system.

In the constant fight for more crops and few weeds, farmers developed such bare-earth techniques as plowing and mechanical cultivation to stay ahead of the weed competition. But using these systems means the earth is open, at least part of the year, to the ravages of weather and the substructure of the soil is disturbed.

Today, many farmers around the world have eliminated the need for bare-earth farming through the use of herbicides. In the late 1970s, farmers were driven by high oil prices to try using chemical weed killers instead of the fuel-hungry process of plowing. They found that low-till and no-till farming radically reduced their fuel costs—but it also cut soil erosion by 65 to 95 percent, encouraged far more earthworms and soil bacteria, doubled the water retention capability in dry soils, and radically cut water runoff and pollution from fields to streams.

A recent study of the highly-erodable Coon Creek watershed in Wisconsin found it is suffering only 6 percent of the erosion the region endured during the 1930s. That’s well within the rate of natural topsoil creation. Coon Creek today is creating topsoil in the midst of the highest-yield farming in history. The region in 2004 harvested an average of 160 bushels of corn per acre, at least six times the yield they got before the Dust Bowl droughts attacked their farms.

Never before in history have any farmers produced so much food with so little erosion, or saved so much land for Nature.

Conservation tillage is now being used on nearly 500 million acres around the world, and radically reducing erosion even as it protects high yield potential. The erosion-prone use of clean fallow has virtually ended in the semi-arid regions of the American Plains and Australia. Most recently, no-till is being used to raise wheat yields with less irrigation water in India and Pakistan.

These chemical weed killers are very safe to use because they attack plant-specific enzymes, and people aren’t plants. Fish, birds and earthworms are not plants either. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and one of the most widely-used herbicides, is so safe that I can spray it on my fish pond (if my formulation doesn’t contain a petroleum-based carrier.)

Conservation tillage has not been as widely used in Europe as in many other farming regions, perhaps because of Europe’s generally negative reaction to farm chemicals of all sorts. However, the Soil and Water Conservation Society in America regards conservation tillage as the greatest soil conservation advance in the last 100 years.

Changes Coming in Farm Subsidies and Trade

World agriculture is about to take the next logical step in high-yield conservation: liberalizing farm trade. Thanks to the varying climates and soils around the world, the comparative advantages in agriculture are bigger and more permanent in agriculture than in any other industry.

For example:

• Britain cannot grow cotton.
• America cannot grow coffee or bananas.
• Sugar yields in the Tropics are twice as high as in the temperate climates.
• Wheat yields in the UK and Argentina are double the wheat yields in Brazil.
• India, with its heat, humidity and voracious tropical pests, is a poor place to raise cattle, even though it’s done.

It is also clear that national food self-sufficiency is a poor idea for the 21st century, though it may have been highly important for the 15th century. During the cold of Little Ice Age, the 15th century was even more prone to bad weather and crop pests than the 21st century, but transportation was poor. Every city tried to keep its own grain reserves, and the city walls helped ensure that if food was short, the city’s own residents got first claim on the reserves.

Today, food production is far more ample and far more stable, at least on the global basis. Transportation, too, has improved wonderfully, compared to wooden sailing ships that could be blown off course for weeks while weevils atethe grain in the holds.

Most of the bad things that happen to food supplies still happen locally, so our food security is enhanced when we can reach out to other countries for needed supplies. Food self-sufficiency today simply means high-cost food, high farmland costs and a limited diet.

Japan, today, has virtually no farmland and has become the world’s largest food importer. Yet the Japanese keep only about one month’s supply of imported food and feed on hand, with another month’s supply headed for the Japanese islands on ships.

China and India have now joined the World Trade Organization, and will become much bigger food importers than Japan, due to their huge populations, rising incomes and limited arable land and water resources. If the world is to help supply their diet aspirations—especially meat and milk—it’s time to liberalize farm trade as we have already liberalized nonfarm trade.

Since 1948, the WTO has helped to cut the average tariff on nonfarm goods and services from 40 percent to 4 percent, unleashing a global wave of prosperity. The average farm tariff today, however, is still about 65 percent, and many countries virtually prohibit farm trade. Until recently, China and India have been among the farm import prohibitors.

Rapid Change in Farm Subsidies

It has long been clear, of course, that the old farm trade rules and farm subsidies needed to change radically. The old Common Agricultural Policy, for example, was conceived on the idea that farm production couldn’t expand much. But, under the stimulus of the CAP subsidies, farmers in the original member countries doubled their output, and dumped major farm surpluses into the world market.

American farm subsidies may have been even less well-founded than the CAP. America paid farmers to divert land from farming, in the obviously foolish hope that it would somehow raise farm prices worldwide. It didn’t, of course, although it did stimulate higher U.S. farm land values—and thus higher costs for American farmers. America today knows that the world is short of both good farmland and good wildlife habitat, so our foolish government is paying farmers to ensure that 38 million acres of land is neither farmed nor allowed to harbor wildlife. It is called, with enormous irony, the Conservation Reserve.

Farm subsidies have been enormously popular with farmers on both sides of the Atlantic, but they have probably cost the farmers more in higher land values and more intensive input use than they have been worth. The export subsidies have also created a heavy backlash in recent years among Third World farmers, who believe they are being unfairly shut out of markets that would otherwise be open to them.

Worst of all, the EU farm subsidies have helped call into question the whole idea of farming in the UK. They presented a false picture of farm surpluses, even as they encouraged should-be importing countries to ban farm imports.

In any case, the EU’s farm policy was bound to change radically even without pressure from the World Trade Organization. With 25 members instead of ten or twelve, the old EU farm subsidy funding arrangements have become totally inadequate.

In addition, the farm output in such places as Poland and Romania is set to double or even triple with the capital investment that is flowing from the other EU countries. There is no place in Europe to sell these additional commodities.

America’s farm subsidies are also on the way out, though the Agriculture Committees of the Congress are loathe to admit it. There are two major reasons:

First, the U.S. is trying to serve a huge unfunded obligation to its retirees, in the form of Social Security and Medicare. The trillions of dollars that must be spent under these programs have vastly more political appeal than farm payments to a few well-off farmers, and the “grey panthers” will crowd the farmers away from the public trough.

Second, the farm export expansion opportunity that the U.S. has long forecast has finally begun to emerge strongly. We used to look at Asia and see three billion poverty-stricken people. In 2050, however, Asia will have four billion mostly-affluent people who will want hamburgers, lamb, ice cream, cheese and a huge variety of other high-quality foods.

Affluence Stimulates Asian Food Imports

Thanks to foreign direct investment, China’s economy and its personal incomes are expanding by roughly 9 percent per year! (America has been averaging about 2 percent.) Twenty years ago, Chinese families were hoping to “someday” be able to afford transistor radios and one-speed bicycles. Today, those same families already have cell phones, color TV set, and refrigerators. Now they’re saving for computers and cars. China has already doubled its pork consumption since 1990, and its people are still far behind the affluent world in their consumption of other dairy and livestock products.

This same economic growth phenomenon is beginning to develop in India, which for several decades after 1950 essentially had no economic growth at all. Its economic growth rate of 3 percent just about matched its population growth rate. Now the birth-per- woman rates have fallen by half, from about 6 to 2.8; while the economic growth rate has doubled to 6 percent. India will be a very good source of goods and services, and a very good market for dairy products and meat in the future. Surveys indicated that three-fourths of the Hindus will eat meat—though not beef—when they can afford it. India already has more than 100 million Moslems who eat meat, though not pork.

India is a terrible place to raise dairy cattle, with little pasture, high heat and humidity, tropical pests and dreadful feed shortages. I see no reason why India will not import chilled concentrated milk, ice cream concentrate, cheese, and large quantities of other dairy products in the future.

Most of the First World’s consumers have already become addicted to a wide variety of imported foods, such as bananas, oranges and other delicacies that we cannot cost-effectively and attractively grow in our own climates. In addition, we want fresh seasonal foods in our off-seasons, such as strawberries in December. That’s another good reason for freer farm trade.

We are also becoming gourmet consumers, eagerly or reluctantly. I like French Roquefort and British Stilton, and fresh lamb that isn’t produced in the U.S. I want fresh raspberries in the winter, and so will billions of other people in the future.

What About Biofuels?

In a world that is short of good land for food production, why would we divert big chunks of it to producing biofuels that are more expensive and far scarcer than coal, oil or nuclear power?

Before you tell me that burning fossil fuels causes global warming, let me remind you of three things:

1) Virtually all of our recent warming came before 1940, and thus before the human production of CO2;

2) The Polar Regions, which are supposed to warm before the equator, have been cooling for decades, the Arctic since the 1930s and the Antarctic since the 1960s.

3) The lower atmosphere is supposed to warm the Earth’s surface, by trapping the extra CO2 and then radiating the heat back to Earth. The lower atmosphere is warming about one-third as fast as the Earth’s surface.

Finally, let me point out that we have know since the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores were brought up in the 1980s about a natural, moderate, solar-driven 1500-year climate cycle (plus or minus 500 years) on this planet. The Roman Warming of the First Century and the Medieval Warming of the 12th century are just the most recent of at least 600 such warming cycles that go back a million years.

We’ve found the cycle in the ice cores, in seabed sediments from four oceans, and in the cave stalagmites on all continents plus New Zealand. The North American Pollen Data Base shows nine complete reorganizations of North American tees and plants in the past 14,000 years, or one every 1650 years.

The burning of fossil fuels may be adding slightly to the natural warming cycle, but we have no good evidence to prove it. The warming we’ve had, in timing, suddenness, and extent, match very well with the historical record.

The New Farm Trade Regime

I foresee in the near future a global shift away from the farm subsidies and farm trade barriers that have pervaded the world for most of the past thousand years.

The EU has already agreed to phase out its use of export subsidies, a key demand from the Third World countries. The U.S. has already lost a WTO case against its cotton subsidies, and will lose more such cases on other commodities.

The end of surplus dumping, along with rising Asian demand, will mean higher market prices for farm commodities.

What Can Lincolnshire Supply?

What will be British farming’s role be in all this? Unquestionably, I think your key role in helping feed the 21st century will come in livestock production. Britain has already shifted some of its better land from pasture to grain, and I do not expect that land to go back to pasture. After all, if the world must double its farm output again, most of the good farm land must be used even more intensively in 2050 than it is today.

However, I see a very productive synergy in the UK between land that can produce high-yielding feed crops and the pastures that can produce good crops of calves and lambs. Moreover, Britain can cost-effectively supplement its home-grown feeds from a wide variety of eager exporters, to support its skilled livestock managers.

Most of China’s land is mountains or deserts. It has 20 percent of the world’s people, and 7 percent of the arable land. Its rice paddies and hog farmers must increasingly compete with its expanding factories, suburbs and roads. It will import massive quantities of dairy products, lamb, mutton, oilseeds, and grains.

India will become a massive market for dairy products, lamb, mutton and poultry products.

Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan will follow in the wake of China and India as densely populated countries that will use their limited land and water increasingly for urban uses, and import more of their high-quality diets.

Why Shouldn’t England Abandon Farming?

Never before in human history have so many people bought into the romantic illusions about wilderness first popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1700s. That is probably because never before have there been so many humans with no real experience of wilderness.

I’m not speaking here of a comfortable boat trips up the Amazon, hiking, and canoe trips into Montana, or well-funded attempts to climb the Himalayas with the latest insulated climbing togs.

I’m talking about humans trying to live in the primeval forest that characterized most of the planet a million years ago.

Here in Britain, 85 percent of the forest had been cleared by the time William the Conqueror landed at Hastings.

In America, Indians burned the forests frequently, to improve the hunting. Birds and animals don’t like the climax forests, because there’s not much sunlight and therefore not much for them to eat. Burning extended the range of the bison 200 miles farther East than the deep dark forests would have permitted.

When British colonists got to the New World, they wrote of the “deep, dangerous, gloomy forests.” They wrote of food deprivation. They complained of the “Herculean task” involved in creating safety and civilization out of wilderness.

If Britain decided that farming was just too messy and dangerous to the environment, and forcibly retired all its farmers, the woods would quickly retake the land. Today’s fields and pastures would quickly be invaded by brush and berries, which would be followed by junipers and other pioneer tree species. Then would come the oaks and bigger trees.

Soon, the vistas would be gone. Britain would have just its cities and dark, gloomy climax forests with few birds or hedgehogs. In the dryer parts of America, this would produce intolerable fire risks, but in England the dead trees would probably fall and decay rather than burning. Most of the time. With more deadfalls and less sunlight, the forest floor would become wetter, more swampy, and gradually less attractive to hikers. The villages, lacking any farmers and attracting fewer tourists, would begin to decay and disappear even more rapidly.

The losses to Britain’s tourist industry might rival the economic losses from agriculture.

Alternatively, of course, Britain could advance toward the organic vision of locally grown organic food. Denmark’s Bichel Committee, however, noted that the organic vision in their country would mean most of the forest cleared to plant more fields of cattle forage. To maximize the effectiveness of the manure, the cattle would be kept in feedlots, and the forage would be green-chopped and hauled to the animals, so their manure could be distributed liberally across the crop fields. The impact on the landscape and the water quality would be remarkable—and awful.

Britain has its choice, and I will have no vote in it. As of tomorrow, however, I will once again be a British tourist, and I ardently hope Britain will keep its farming and its landscape.

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This extensive review of state-collected water quality data from North Carolina, conducted by Dr. Dwayne R. Edwards from the University of Kentucky, was sponsored by Frontline Farmers, Inc., a group of North Carolina hog farmers. We are honored that Frontline Farmers have allowed us the privilege of hosting this paper on our website. The information contained herein conincides with the Center’s own water quality report, available below. The evidence against environmental alarmists is growning.

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The data discussed in this report indicate that nutrient levels in the Black and Northeast Cape Fear watersheds are elevated above levels expected prior to farming and livestock. However, these data also indicate that the impacts from intensive confinement hog farms (and the rapid expansion of the hog population during the 1980s and 1990s) do not appear to be as severe as previously believed. This suggests that the effects may be no greater than farming operations that have existed in these watersheds for decades.

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Page 12 of this Lexington Institute publication features “Bogus Health Scares & the Costs to Society: GM Foods,” by Alex Avery. It is especially relevant in the context of today’s growing famine situation in southern Africa.