Hysteria over global warming has gripped the affluent countries of the world.

-Climate modelers claim the earth’s temperature could be boosted an astounding 11 degrees C by the additional CO₂ being released into the atmosphere as humans burn fossil fuels.

-Dozens of major governments have signed the Kyoto Protocol, which essentially promises their countries will give up all “non-renewable” energy sources— virtually all energy sources except solar and wind.

-U.S. farmers are cheerfully sharpening their chain saws to clear more forest and plant more corn for “renewable” ethanol even though the ethanol produces only 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre, against an annual U.S. gasoline demand of more than 134 billion gallons.

-A Kansas utility has been denied a permit for a new coal-fired power plant by the State Department of Health and Environment, which says it would add too much CO₂ to the air.[1]

     This is an astonishing set of events, given that there is no evidence human-emitted CO₂ has actually raised the earth’s temperatures significantly. The evidence we have is a warming, which began about 1850, and mostly occurred too early to be blamed on human-emitted greenhouse gases. The total warming from 1850 to the present has been 0.7 degrees C—but 0.5 degrees of the warming occurred before 1940. Eighty 80 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gases emissions came after that date.

The earth’s net global warming since 1940, moreover, has been a barely-measurable 0.2 degrees C—over 70 years. During this time the climate forcing power of CO₂ molecules has been declining logarithmically, to the point where soon additional CO₂ won’t make any further climate impact.

    The climate warming alarmists say that our recent warming “must be caused by humans,” since nothing else would account for the strong warming from 1976–1998. However, there was an equally strong global warming surge from 1916–1940, before global industrialization and auto numbers began to emit CO₂ in serious amounts. The fact is that no one can diagnose a climate change on the basis of a mere 25 years of data. Climate events are too long-term, and the short-term events are too complex.

From 1940 to 1975, global temperatures actually trended down, while CO₂ emissions were soaring. The alarmists blame this cooling on sulfate particle pollution from power plants, which they claim masked some of the incoming solar radiation. If that were true, however, the southern hemisphere should have warmed faster than the northern hemisphere. In fact, the temperatures rose fastest right were the power plants were located, in the northern hemisphere.

What else could have warmed the earth in our time? 

 

Our first clues come from history.

 

British Wine Grapes

 

    Wine grapes are one of our important climate proxies because people have always grown wine whenever and wherever they could. The Romans wrote of growing wine grapes in England in the 1^st century, when they occupied that island. They also wrote of wine grapes and olive trees gradually being cultivated farther and farther north in Italy. It seems clear that the climate was warming during the 1^st century. Then the Romans left Britain, and the world entered the Dark Ages, when it was apparently too cold to grow wine in Britain.

    In the 11^th century, the Britons themselves were growing wine grapes. William the Conqueror’s tax collectors had nearly 50 vineyards on the tax rolls of the Domesday Book.[2]  After 1300, however, the European climate shifted to a cold phase and for 550 years no wine grapes were grown on the island. Londoners held ice festivals on the frozen Thames instead.

   The next time British wine grapes matured was not until after 1950. Britain currently has about 400 vineyards, but almost all of them are of the hobby type. The British wine industry’s website says the vintners get only about two good years out of ten, but the rising global thermometers are giving them hope for the future. They also benefit from some hybrid grapes that the Romans didn’t have.

 

The Greenland Vikings

 

    Another eloquent testimonial to the existence of a long, natural climate cycle comes from Greenland. Eric the Red led a group of Viking settlers there from Iceland in 982 AD. They called it Greenland because the coastal regions were then bright green with grass. They pastured their dairy cattle and thrived for at least 300 years on milk, cheese, vegetables, seal meat and codfish. Eric’s son Leif even ventured to Newfoundland in search of timber, but the natives’ arrows drove him away.

    Then, the sea ice began to move south. The codfish moved south too, away from Greenland. The summers got shorter, making it harder and harder to grow enough hay for the cattle during the lengthening winters. Eventually, the sea ice and worse storms cut Iceland off from Greenland for a long 350 years. The last written record of its 3,000 inhabitants was a wedding in 1408. The Greenland Vikings starved or froze due to climate change.[3]

 

Ancient Chinese Records

 

 China’s written records, of course, go back further than those of any other country. China’s climate from 1000 BC to 1400 AD has been reconstructed from palace records, official histories, and diaries. Key indicators include the arrival dates of migrating birds, the distribution of plant species and fruit orchards, patterns of elephant migrations, and the major floods and droughts. G. Yu of the Chinese National Academy of Science concludes that Chinese temperatures must have been 2–3 degrees C higher than present during the Holocene Warming 6000 years ago. Pollen analysis reveals that the deciduous forest extended 800 km further north then than it does today, and tropical forest occupied areas that are now broad-leaved evergreens.[4] Also, Chinese wealth rose steadily from 200 BC, peaked about 1100 AD, and then entered a prolonged decline, according to Kang Chao’s careful economic analysis.[5] Chao also reports that China averaged less than four major floods per century during the Medieval Warming and twice that many during the Little Ice Age. Major droughts were only one-third as common during the warm centuries as during the cold phases (the unnamed cold period before 200 BC, the Dark Ages from about 200 to 800 AD, and the Little Ice Age from about 1300 to 1850 AD).

    Are we dealing with a cycle?  A cycle too moderate and long-term to be discerned by primitive peoples without thermometers or written records?

    The answer was confirmed in 1983, by the retrieval of the world’s first long ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet. Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland were anxious to learn what the ice could tell us about the earth’s temperature history. They had learned that the oxygen isotopes in the ice layers revealed the air temperature when the ice was laid down, through the ratio of 0¹⁸ “heavy isotopes” to 0¹⁶ “light isotopes,” which evaporate at different rates.

    Dansgaard and Oeschger had expected to see the long 90,000-year Ice Ages in the ice layers, and they did. What they had not expected was a long, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle. The cycle was very regular during the Ice Ages, at 1470 years, plus or minus 10 years. It is somewhat more erratic during the warm interglacial periods, but still dominated the earth’s temperatures over the past 12,000 years.[6]  The cycle is abrupt, which argues for an external source. Dansgaard and Oeschger suspected the sun, partly because that’s where most of our heat comes from, and partly because the “solar isotopes”—carbon 14 in trees and beryllium 10 in ice—showed the same cycles.

    Within a few years after Dansgaard and Oeschger, a team led by France’s Claude Lorius brought up an even longer ice core from the Antarctic, at the other end of the earth; and it, too, showed the 1,500-year climate cycle extending back nearly a million years.[7] Dansgaard, Oeschger, and Lorius shared the 1996 Tyler Prize (the “environmental Nobel”).

 

A Complication: At the Equator, Temperatures Don’t Change But Rainfall Does.

 

    The 1,500-year cycle typically produces a temperature change of 4–5 degrees C from peak to trough. Temperature changes are greater in the Arctic. At the equator, however, the temperatures don’t change, the rainfall does. The tropical rain belts at the equator can move hundreds of miles north and south during the cycle. The Sahara may become wet enough to pasture cattle, even as Kenya and Cameroon undergo severe drought. California tree rings show two century-long droughts during the Medieval Warming and the southern tier of United States showed persistent dryness, while Canada and Siberia became warmer and wetter.

    We don’t claim the 1,500-year cycle is totally benign. We do claim it is unstoppable. That means humanity’s response must be keyed to adaptation, not prevention.

 

 

Physical Evidence from the Earth

 

1,500-year Cycle in seabed sediments from at least nine oceans:

 

     Researchers have found physical evidence of the 1,500-year climate cycle in the seabed sediments of at least nine oceans based mostly on the number and variety of the plankton fossils found in the layers.

     Gerard Bond of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found it in ice-rafted rocky debris from Canada and Greenland, deposited in the North Atlantic.[8] 

Peter deMenocal of Lamont-Doherty found it in the plankton fossils of the South Atlantic, off West Africa. [9] Lloyd Keigwin found the 1,500-year cycle from a carbon-dated seabed core in the Caribbean. [10] Sweden‘s Carin Andersson constructed a 3,000-year temperature history in the Norwegian Sea that showed the cold period before the Roman Warming, the Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, and Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age.[11]

    A Baltic Sea sediment core shows a cold-weather period beginning about 1200 AD—and that the present Baltic is still too cold to support the warm-water plankton varieties it had in abundance during the Medieval Warming.[12]  Off Alaska, Old Dominion’s Dennis Darby found the cycle on the continental shelf of the Chukchi Sea.[13] 

    In the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel’s Bettina Shulman found the cycle in the oxygen isotopes of the plankton, in titanium/aluminum ratios, in iron/aluminum ratios, and in magnetic susceptibility.[14]

    In the Arabian Sea, W. H. Berger and Ulrich von Rad found the cycle in sediment cores ranging back nearly 5,000 years. They suggested the cycles were tide-driven, but noted that “internal oscillations of the climate system cannot produce them.”[15]

    In the Pacific near the Philippines, the phytoplankton were more productive during the glacial periods than during the warmings. The researchers say “the 1,500-year cycle . . . seems to be a pervasive feature of the monsoon climatic system.” [16]

   

The 1,500-year cycle—in lake sediments all over the world:

 

     In Switzerland, one-celled fossils from Lake Neufchatel showed Swiss temperatures were “on the average higher than at present,” and then fell by 1.5 degrees C during the shift to the Little Ice Age.[17]

     In West Africa, sediments from Cameroon show that the climate oscillates as the rain belts of the Intertropical Convergence Zone shift north and south in the 1,500-year rhythm. Francis Ngeutsop says his lake sediments showed southward shifts were marked both by drought in Nigeria and Ghana and by more rain in Zaire and Tanzania.[18]

     In Central America, the Mayan cities were abandoned after a prolonged drought during the cold Dark Ages. Evidence from Lake Chichancanab and the Cariaco Basin just off the Venezuelan coast both confirm that the Mayans suffered at least 100 years of low rainfall, punctuated by periods of three to nine years in a row with little or no rainfall.[19]

     In Argentina, lake sediments from a high volcanic plateau showed that rainfall and climate changed sharply when the world shifted from warm to cool and back again. The study team concluded, “The Little Ice Age stands as a significant climatic event in the Altiplano and South America.” [20] 

     Near Antarctica, on Signy Island, lake sediments clearly show the Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming, the Little Ice Age—and a 20^th century warming that is still not as warm as the Medieval Warming.[21]

 

The 1,500-year cycle in fossil pollen: 

 

    The North American Pollen Database shows nine complete reorganizations of our trees and plants during the last 14,000 years—in a 1,500-year rhythm. [22]

    In Spain, pollen analysis from 3,000 years of sediments in the Ria de Vigo shows three cold periods alternating with three warm ones, “paralleling global climatic changes recorded in North Atlantic marine records.”[23]

    In east Africa, pollen from the bottom of Kenya’s Lake Naivasha shows a two-century drought during the Medieval Warming, when the Sahara to the north was wetter than normal. [24]

 

The 1,500-year cycle—in cave stalagmites from every continent plus New Zealand:

 

    On the Arabian Peninsula, a stalagmite showed a precise record of the 1,500-year climate cycle in the monsoon rainfall of Arabia, the African Sahel and India. The stalagmite’s cycles were also in phase with the temperature fluctuations of the Greenland ice cores 12,000 years ago—but since the disappearance of the northern ice sheets, the cycle has been governed by solar activity instead.[25]

     In China, a cave stalagmite near Beijing used the manganese/strontium ratio as a “geochemical thermometer.” The study found the Medieval Warming—and a “little Ice Age which was 1.2 degrees C colder than now.”[26]

    A South African stalagmite shows temperature during the Medieval Warming may have been 3 to 4 degrees C higher than at present. The lowest Little Ice Age temperatures were recorded during the Maunder and Sporer sunspot minimums, just as in Europe.[27]

    A New Zealand stalagmite showed exceptionally warm temperatures from 1200 to 1400, and extreme cold from 1600 to 1700—“in the Southern Hemisphere and a region meteorologically separated from Europe.”   [28]

 

The 1,500-year cycle—in ancient tree rings from around the Northern Hemisphere:

 

    A 1,400-year tree ring study in 1990 led by Britain’s Keith Briffa showed little evidence of the Medieval Warming or Little Ice Age. In 1992, however, Briffa redid the study, using an alternative standardization technique, which captures temperature change on longer timescales. This showed the Dark Ages, with 660 being an especially cold year, and the Medieval Warming with “peaks of warmth” from 720 up to 1430.[29]  

    In northern Quebec, tree rings and buried spruce skeletons showed colder weather from 760 to 860, a warming from 860 to 1000, and severe cold from 1025 to 1400.[30]

    In Siberia, a 2,200-year record from peat-buried tree rings shows a warming from 850 to 1150, followed by a sharp cooling from 1200 through 1800. The authors report that 20^th century warming is “not extraordinary.” [31]

     In northwest Pakistan, more than 200,000 tree-ring measurements from 384 trees on 20 sites show the warmest decades between 800 and 1000, and the coldest period between 1500 and 1700.[32]

 

Climate Cycling in North America

  

    The North American Pollen Database, previously mentioned, shows nine complete shifts in vegetation since the last Ice Age. The most recent started about 600 years ago, culminating in the Little Ice Age, with maximum cooling 300 years ago. The previous shift culminated in the maximum warming of the medieval Warm period 1,000 years ago. “We suggest that North Atlantic millennial-scale climate variability is associated with rearrangements of the atmospheric circulation with far-reaching influences on the climate,” say the authors. [33]

    Water levels of the Great Lakes show a strong response to the 1,500-year climate cycle, with the lake levels high during the climate coolings and low during warming periods. Todd Thompson of Indiana University and Steve Baedke of James Madison University constructed their lake-level history from the “strandplains”—shore-parallel sand ridges that have a core of water-laid sediment.[34]

    In the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains, foxtail pine and western juniper tree rings indicate a Medieval Warming from 1100 to 1375, and a cold period from 1450 to 1850. Tree rings from the long-lived bristlecone pines correlate statistically from 800 to the present “with the temperatures derived from central England.”[35]

    U.S. Forest Service researchers analyzed long-dead trees that grew above the current treeline on California’s Whitewing Mountain—and concluded that temperatures must have been 3.2 degrees C warmer when they were killed by volcanic gases in 1350.[36]

    This is just a sampling of the physical evidence the earth offers on past climate changes. The evidence comes from a wide variety of sources which confirm each other. The evidence is clearly global. Much of it confirms higher temperatures during past warmings than today. Dansgaard and Oeschger clearly documented much higher temperatures than today during the Holocene Warmings 8,000 and 5,000 years ago, which severely undercuts the idea that the trees and plants and birds and bees won’t be able to adapt. They did. They’re here.

   

The 1,500-year cycle in other climate proxies:

 

    On Greenland, the University of Michigan’s Henry Fricke tested the tooth enamel of dead Vikings for oxygen isotopes. He documented a 1.5 degree C drop in temperatures from the colony’s settlement to its extinction.[37]

    In the north of England, archeologists found the nettle groundbug thrived in the city of York in both Roman and Medieval times. Its typical habitat today is on stinging nettles in the much-warmer south of England.[38]

    In the Swiss Alps, the three most recent and best-documented periods of landslides (colder and wetter weather) were during the Little Ice Age, the Dark Ages and the unnamed cold period before the Roman Warming.[39]

    In Argentina, prehistoric remains show that villages moved higher up the slopes as the Medieval Warming brought “a marked increase in environmental suitability,” rising as high as 4300 meters in the Peruvian Andes around the year 1000. After 1320, the people migrated back downslope in the colder, less stable climate of the Little Ice Age.[40]

    In southern Africa, carbon–dated crop remains prove the climate of the region must have been both warmer and wetter during the Medieval Warming, from about 900 to 1300.[41]

 

The Sun-Climate Connection

 

    People have known for some 400 years that there is a direct connection between sunspots and the earth’s temperatures. We’ve been counting the sunspots since Galileo made his first telescope, and we’ve known for centuries that the coldest period during the Little Ice Age occurred during the Maunder and Sporer sunspot minimums, when there were virtually no sunspots at all. Britain’s William Herschel said in 1801 that the price of wheat was directly controlled by sunspots, since less rain fell in Britain when there were few sunspots.

    But how could the sun control the earth’s climate? Fifty years ago, we spoke of the “solar constant.” However, we’ve found in recent years that there is a tiny variation, 0.1 percent in the sun’s irradiance. We’ve also found that the number of sunspots and the length of the sunspot cycle, which ranges from 8–14 years, have a powerful correlation with subsequent changes in the earth’s sea surface temperatures.

    Richard Willson, of Columbia and NASA, reports that the sun’s radiation has increased by nearly 0.05 percent per decade since the late 1970s, when satellites first made it possible to monitor the sun directly. He says he can’t be sure that the trend of rising solar radiation goes back further than 1978, but that if this trend had persisted through the 20^th century, it would have produced “a significant component” of the observed global warming.[42] Rodney Viereck of the NOAA Space Environment Center admits that natural climate variation could account for one-third of the recent global warming. [43]

    Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute offers a more powerful sun-climate hypothesis: that small variations in the sun’s irradiance are amplified into significant climate changes on earth by at least two factors: 1) cosmic rays creating more or fewer of the low, cooling clouds that deflect solar radiance back into space; and 2) solar-driven changes in ozone chemistry in the stratosphere that simultaneously create more or less heating of the earth’s lower atmosphere.[44] 

   The sun constantly releases a stream of charged particles, the solar wind, which partially shields the earth from the cosmic rays that are constantly emitted by distant, exploding stars. The solar wind varies with the sun’s irradiance. When the sun’s activity is weak, the solar wind is weakened too, so more cosmic rays streak through our atmosphere, creating low, wet clouds, which in turn increase the earth’s ability to reflect more of the sun’s heat away from the planet. That’s a cooling effect. That’s why cloudy skies predominated in the landscape paintings during the Little Ice Age.

    When the sun is stronger, as it has been since 1850, the solar wind blows more strongly and the earth is shielded more effectively from the cosmic rays. That means fewer low, cooling clouds, and more warming of our planet.

     Svensmark matched the data on cosmic rays from the neutron monitor in Climax, Colorado, with the satellite measurements of solar irradiance. Over the period from 1975 to 1989, he found cosmic rays increased by 1.2 percent annually, amplifying the sun’s change in irradiance about fourfold. “The direct influence of changes in solar irradiance is estimated to be only 0.1 degree C,” he says. “The cloud forcing, however, gives for the above sensitivity 0.3–0.5 C, and has therefore the potential of explaining nearly all of the temperature changes in the period studied.”   

     Svensmark then filled a laboratory cloud chamber with the earth’s mix of atmospheric gases, turned on a UV light to mimic the sun—and watched in fascination as the chamber quickly filled with microscopic globules of water and sulfuric acid.  In the real atmosphere, these “cloud seeds” attract more moisture and create more of the low, wet clouds that cool the earth. Further experiments are planned at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory.   

    Helpfully, the UN’s IPCC has already noted that its climate models cannot duplicate the impacts of clouds in the real world. It noted in the science chapter of its 2001 report that not only can it not estimate how much warming or cooling a given cloud might produce, it cannot even tell whether the impact of the cloud is warming or cooling!  If it turns out that low, wet clouds really do act as the earth’s thermostat, this cloud modeling failure could turn out to be the weakest link in the UN’s whole climate science adventure.[45]

    Ozone chemistry also seems to offer an amplifier of the solar variability. Joanna Haigh of London’s Imperial Collage says that more “far UV” from the sun produces more ozone in the atmosphere—and that ozone absorbs more of the near-UV radiation from the sun. Her computer modeling suggests that a 0.1 percent variation in the sun’s radiation could cause a 2 percent change in the ozone concentration.[46] NASA’s Drew Shindell says his team confirmed that ozone is one of the key factors that amplifies the effects of solar variations.[47]

     Climate warming alarmists don’t like to concede that the 1,500-year cycle exists, which is ridiculous in the face of the global evidence. Or they say that the 1,500-year cycle has been superseded in our time by man-made warming. How do we know that, when none of the warming which has occurred has been outside the parameters of the past cycles?

     The alarmists do not, however, offer clear evidence proving man-made warming, because they have none. They go only as far as saying that the Greenhouse Effect is “very likely” the cause of recent temperature increases. All they have are unverified climate models, which are not evidence.

     If we destroy modern society on the basis of that non-evidence, we will deserve what we will surely get: chaos, poverty, and radically shortened lifespans. For openers, we’d have to give up the 80 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer produced annually with fossil fuels. Half of the world’s food supply is grown using nitrogen fertilizer. Organic-only farming would either starve half the population, or force the clearing of the world’s remaining forests to grow more low-yield crops.

     For the determined cycle skeptics, I recommend getting a copy of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years. We cite hundreds of studies, by more than 450 peer-reviewed authors and co-authors who have found reason to doubt the “global warming consensus.”  

  

 

The Baseless Fears:  Debunking the Greenhouse Hype

 

    The green movement and the media, in their wisdom, have decided that just having a warmer world isn’t scary enough to make us give up 90 percent of our energy—although cars with pedals instead of accelerators and stone-cold furnaces are pretty scary thoughts in themselves. So they’ve given us a little added incentive to buy into the renunciation of fossil fuels: A shopping cart full of scary scenarios.

 

Millions of Extra Human Deaths

 

    One of the wildest claims is that global warming would cause millions of extra human deaths. This despite the well-known fact that cold is far deadlier to humans than heat. In fact, from 1979 to 1997, extreme cold killed roughly twice as many Americans as heat waves, according to Indur Goklany of the U.S. Interior Department. [48] Moreover, heat waves are becoming less and less of a threat as air conditioning spreads. Heat-related mortality in 28 U.S. cities dropped from 41 per day in the 1960s to only 10.5 per day in the 1990s.[49] 

     In the meantime, lots of people keep dying from heart attacks and high blood pressure, risks that are radically elevated by cold. In Germany, heat waves were found to actually reduce overall mortality, while cold spells led to a significant increase in deaths.[50] The German authors say that the longer a cold spell lasts, the more pronounced are the excess deaths, and that the higher death rates persist for weeks.

    What about malaria and yellow fever?  Wouldn’t warmer climates favor the mosquitoes that spread them?  How quickly we forget. Malaria was endemic all over the U.S. and Europe before it was eradicated by DDT and window screens after World War II. All the mosquitoes need is a patch of sunlit water that stays warm for a few days to hatch their larvae. One of the biggest malaria outbreaks in history occurred in Russia in the 1920s; 600,000 people died. If malaria began to spread in the U.S., we would probably remember the formula for DDT. DDT is not only a cost-effective mosquito killer, but also a powerful mosquito repellent that reduces malaria rates about 60 percent when sprayed inside homes every six months.

 

Huge Sea-Level Increases

 

    The second-scariest claim is that the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores will melt due to warming—and raise sea levels 20–30 feet. It’s true that sea levels rise when ice melts. At the end of the last Ice Age, there was so much ice in glaciers and ice sheets that sea levels rose 400 feet in about 2000 years. But note that this took two millennia—and happened at the end of a big Ice Age, when the forcing agent was the sun, not CO₂.

    Elephant seals are telling us that the frigid Antarctic has already had a thousand-year warming, which started during the Roman Empire and produced temperatures higher than today’s. Even that long warming didn’t melt the huge Antarctic ice mass or drown the world’s coastal cities. Brenda Hall of the University of Maine reports carbon-dating bits of molted elephant seal skin and hair—and even mummified seal pups—left behind in past centuries on the raised beaches of Antarctica’s Ross Sea. The region today is much too cold for elephant seals to molt or breed; they need ice-free beaches, and the Ross Sea shore is currently locked in ice year-round.

years ago” as the Medieval Warming ended and the Little Ice Age set in worldwide.  

     Hall and her research team conclude that the current retreat of the West Antarctic ice sheet may have been going on for thousands of years. It’s likely to continue even without further human-emitted greenhouse gases, until the planet gets another Little Ice Age—or a big one.[51] John Stone of the University of Washington says it would take another 7000 years to melt the Antarctic ice cap even with substantial warming.[52]  Another Little Ice Age, or a big one, is due long before that.

    Remember that Greenland and the Antarctic are too cold for their surface ice to melt. They melt only around their edges, and the ice above the edges must be heavy enough to keep delivering more to the edges. Even then, the ice moves “at a glacial pace” because it is so cold

     Even the alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the most-vulnerable part of the Antarctic ice sheet (the Amundsen Sea Embayment) would take thousands of years to melt at present temperatures. Even doubling of its current outflow rates would add only 0.5 mm per year to sea level rise.[53]

    Neils Reeh of the University of Denmark says there’s “broad agreement” among sea level experts that another 1 degree C of warming would melt enough of Greenland to raise sea level by only about half an inch per year. [54] Meanwhile, the Southern Ocean has warmed enough to produce snow over the Antarctic, so the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is adding about 45 billion tons of ice per year—almost completely offsetting the Greenland meltwater.

     Expect sea levels to keep rising at 6 inches per century.

 

What about the fiercer storms? 

 

    Storms are actually powered by the temperature differential between the poles and the equator. During a warming, the Polar Regions get 4–6 degrees warmer, and the equator doesn’t—so there are fewer, weaker storms. Dozens of research studies document the lack of more or fiercer storms, including the entire June, 2003, special issue of Natural Hazards. J.B. Elsner of Florida State University notes the British Navy recorded less than half as many major Caribbean hurricanes per decade during 1700-1850 (the end of the Little Ice Age) as we’ve recorded in the past 50 years of warming.[55]

 

Will a million wild species die because of our current, moderate warming?

 

   No species has died due to rising temperatures yet, despite 150 years of what we’re told was “unprecedented” warming. The Golden Toad of Costa Rica was a claimed overheating victim—but then we found that the ranchers who cleared the lower slopes of the toad’s cloud-forest home had altered the cloud dynamics. Trees and vegetation are cold-limited but not heat-limited, so they’re currently extending their ranges northward while also keeping their past habitat. Hundreds of studies worldwide have found that birds, bees, butterflies, mammals, snakes and myriad other fauna are extending their ranges to keep pace, creating a richer biodiversity in our forests than has existed over the past 1,000 years.[56]  Experts from Environment Canada say that Ontario forests still have 30 percent less biomass than during the Medieval Warming. [57]

 

What the 1,500-Year Climate Cycle Means for Engineering

 

   What all this means for engineering is that the current warming is unstoppable, and we must adapt to it rather than destroying the world’s economic growth in the attempt to stop burning fossil fuels. The first shift in our thinking should probably be toward support of the nuclear power resurgence to provide the base power that has so far relied on coal and is ill-suited to the erratic output of solar panels and wind turbines.

    Dozens of new nuclear power plants are now being built and designed all over the world, especially in China and India. The new generation of nuclear plants is focusing on well-tested designs with passive safety systems that will be both safer and more efficient than our present plants. We should probably also use fast breeder reactors to make better use of the uranium and rhodium deposits, and to minimize the need for long-term storage of spent fuel. Storage designs have already offered 10,000-year safety, but we have lacked the political will to move ahead as long as fossil fuels were cheap.

     We should also pursue greater efficiency in transportation fuels. Even if we can use petroleum and gas, their proven reserves are long-term limited. Hybrid cars will be increasingly useful. One biotechnology entrepreneur foresees biotech production of hydrogen, biologically freed from its oxygen molecules—a massive energy breakthrough, if it can be achieved.

    We will have a greater need for air conditioning, and for heat-adapted building designs that will be more efficient and comfortable in moderately-warmer climates. We will have a massive need for more water use efficiency, not only in farming, but in all other forms of our society’s water use.

     I recently visited The Springs project in Las Vegas, which has just won an architectural award for its excellent use of terrain, wind catching, yard plantings, and computers to increase energy and water efficiency. We will need such developments on a broader scale than ever before.

     The climate of the Modern Warming won’t be entirely benign. There will be severe droughts and some floods, and there will continue to be hurricanes and typhoons. We will have to roll with their punches. During the Medieval Warming, California had two century-long droughts that would have severely stressed a modern society. Such droughts may occur again, and we must be prepared to adapt. San Diego, for example, may become even dryer, for long periods. That may mean the city will have to desalinate its drinking water, recycle its wastewater, and import much of its food from a newly warmer and wetter Canada. We’ll need plans for desalination plants, and their energy sources. We may need to enhance the crop-production infrastructure in Canada, and tie it into the U. S. road and rail nets.

     The whole southern tier of U.S. States had a tendency toward drought in the Medieval Warming. If that occurs again, we may need to gradually shift cropping patterns northward, and produce more semi-arid crops in Texas and Georgia. This will require extensive adaptation by the farmers and farming infrastructure. We’re already seeing a northward shift in wine grape production—toward British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley as an example, while the long-famed Napa Valley has to harvest its grapes at night to minimize grape losses.

     On an even more somber note, the tropical rain belts are likely to move northward by hundreds of kilometers in Africa—bringing unusual wetness to the Sahel, and leaving Kenya and Cameroon unusually dry. Should we relocate the people? Will there be more efficient ways for them to support themselves where they are now? This will take study and effective decision-making, based on a difficult mix of science and politics.

     What will happen to the climate of the Middle East?  How will it impact Moslem societies already stressed by unequal world incomes and broadening use of modern technologies?  The problems might get easier to solve, but perhaps not.

    Our scientists have shown great enthusiasm in documenting the 1,500-year climate cycle, and our media have demonstrated marvelous talents for mobilizing public opinion in support of a very modest global warming. Now, the engineering professions must demonstrate their ability to adapt our societies to a less dramatic but equally pervasive challenge of warming adaptation.  

 

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.

Presentation in Winnipeg to the Canadain Association of Agri-Retailers
Dennis Avery

. . . farms obliterate empty places, ploughed fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts. . . and there are such great cities where formerly hardly a hut . . . everywhere there is a dwelling,
everywhere a multitude. . . . We are burdensome to the world. The resources are scarcely adequate to us . . . already nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.

Quintus Septimus Florence Tertillianus, Roman citizen, about 200 A.D., with a world population about 200 million.

“. . . the Western World today is on the verge of the greatest ecological renewal that humankind has known; perhaps the greatest that the Earth has known. Environmentalists deserve the credit for this remarkable turn of events. Yet our political and cultural institutions continue to read from a script of instant doomsday. Environmentalists, who are surely on the right side of history, are increasingly on the wrong side of the present, risking their credibility by proclaiming emergencies that do not exist.”

Greg Easterbrook, A Moment on Earth, 1995, p. xvi, with the world population 30 times as large and still increasing

“Here’s something for the Greens of the world to ponder: ‘genetic engineering’ may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries,’ Jonathan Rauch writes in The Atlantic Monthly. . . . Noting that ‘world food output will need to at
least double and possibly triple over the next several decades,’ the author argues that ‘the great challenge’ is ‘not to feed an additional three billion people (and their pets) but to do so without converting much of the world’s prime [wildlife] habitat into second- or third-rate farmland.’”

New York Times, “Frankenfoods to the Rescue of Mother Earth,” September 21, 2003

The Environmental Movement’s Record of Untruths

1. Myth: High-Yield Farming Threatens the Frogs

In 1995, a group of Minnesota school children visited a local pond, and found deformed frogs—too many legs or too few. They reported it on the Internet, and over the next three years reports of deformed frogs flooded in from across the country. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency quickly decided it must be pesticides in the water, and spent millions of dollars trying to prove it. Now, we’ve learned that the frogs are deformed because of a natural parasite, the trematode, which burrows into the developing leg joints of the tadpoles. Frogs don’t become deformed in ponds that don’t have trematodes. Pesticides were not the cause, though the Minnesota officials still refuse to admit this.

In the mountains of California, red-legged and yellow-legged frogs are often absent from the lakes. Several researchers are trying to prove that pesticide-laden dust from the Central Valley is being blown up into the lakes and killing the frogs. Indeed, traces of various pesticides were found in the mountain waters. However, the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California/Berkeley have now proved the cause of the frog decline: hungry trout. In the high lakes stocked with trout, there are no frogs. The aggressive fish eat the frog’s eggs and tadpoles. In the lakes no longer stocked with trout, the frogs thrive. When researchers netted all the fish out of a lake without frogs, the frog population “exploded,” even though there were still traces of pesticides in the water.

2. Myth: Farming and Logging Caused the Salmon Decline in the Pacific Northwest

The salmon numbers in the Columbia River of Oregon and Washington began to decline in 1977. Environmentalists were quick to blame overfishing, logging, and the water demands and pollution from irrigated farming. State and federal governments began spending billions of dollars on logging restrictions, fish ladders, and barging young fish down to the sea. Nothing helped. But in the fall of 2002, the Columbia River had a record salmon run, and the salmon numbers have recovered to their former abundance.

The salmon catch data for the past 100 years of the Columbia River and Gulf of Alaska fisheries clearly reveal a 25-year cycle. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents take the salmon food to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon/Washington salmon fishery shrinks. Then, for the next 25 years, the Oregon/Washington salmon fishermen flourish, while the Gulf of Alaska shrinks.

Did the Sierra Club not know about the cycle? In that case, we can’t trust their advice on fish management. Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us—in which case we can’t trust their advice on fish management.

3. Myth: Fertilizer from the Midwest Threatens the Gulf of Mexico

During the Clinton Administration, a White House Task Force recommended a 30 percent cut in Midwest fertilizer use because of a so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, the task force admitted in its report that it could find no evidence of either ecological or economic harm to the Gulf from the summer algae bloom that causes the “dead zone.” The first reports of such algae blooms in the Gulf go back into the 19th century. Fisheries experts say that most of the nutrients for the Gulf’s vast, rich fishery come down the Mississippi River. Such hypoxic zones are a common feature at the mouths of 40 major rivers around the world, where fresh, nutrient-laden water hits salt water. Under such conditions, the laws of biology and physics guarantee periodic algae blooms.

Know also that Midwest fertilizer use has not risen since 1980, while the yields from the corn that gets most of the N fertilizer have risen 25 percent. Obviously, more of the farm fertilizer is being harvested as corn. More of the Midwest’s poultry and livestock have been moved indoors, where their wastes are carefully collected and spread on growing crops. If the “dead zone” is expanding, which is in serious doubt, where is the additional N coming from? The sewage treatment plants of St. Louis and Kansas City?

Don’t forget either, that before farmers settled the Great Plains, the grasslands there had 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds and grasshoppers, all eating the grass and defecating. The N may have taken longer to reach the Gulf, but it’s likely that Cortez could have found an algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico when he invaded Mexico in 1520.

4. Myth: Modern Farming Causes Soil Erosion

In a piece of elegant ‘soil archeology,” Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA went back to the highly-erosive Coon Creek watershed in southern Wisconsin, and redid the 1938 Soil Conservation Service surveys, in the 1970s and again in the 1990s.. What he found is that the Coon Creek watershed is currently losing only 6 percent as much topsoil as it lost during the Dust Bowl era. Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and especially to conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history. Dr. Trimble says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. The fact is that they lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.

5. Myth: Farmers Caused Overpopulation By Producing Too Much Food

Environmentalists believe that high-yield farming is the root cause of global overpopulation. The reality, however, is that the population growth surge started before the Green Revolution. It started in the 1950s, powered by public health interventions such as vaccinations, clean water, sewage treatment, antibiotics—and yes, DDT. It was lower death rates, not higher crop yields, which caused the population surge.

At the same time, fortunately, the food security produced by high-yield farming helped bring about the first major decline in human birth rates the world has ever seen. Higher crop yields started a circle of reduced hunger risks, more food to support off-farm jobs, and affluent urban couples having 1.7 births each.

In 1960, the average woman in the Third World had 6.2 children. Today, she has 2.7, and since population stability is 2.1 births, the poor countries have come 75 percent of the way to stability in 34 years. No one in 1960 would have dared predict such a radical drop in birth rates. After 2050, the world’s human population will begin a slow decline.

6. Myth: Modern Farming is Destroying the World’s Plant Biodiversity

Eco-activists like to claim that high-yield farming is destroying the world’s biodiversity. By that they mean that farmers in the Third World tend to plant better, modern seeds when they can get them, forsaking the thousands of “farmer varieties” they used to plant. But those low yielding seeds aren’t original species. They couldn’t survive in the wild. And we have most of those varieties saved in seed banks.

The real challenge is to save the truly wild species, and to do that we need to save the wild lands. Understand that the modern farming you represent has saved virtually every tree and wild creatures on the planet today.

More good news: The world has set up a new Global Crop Diversity trust that is inventorying gene banks to identify plant material in need of rescue. The Trust is also raising more than $250 million to fill in the gaps in our gene banks, and to ensure high-quality retention and grow-out facilities – even in the Third World.

Still more good news: The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYjust demonstrated that genetic crop diversity can be restored—or even amplified—through modern plant breeding techniques. With “wide crosses,” CIMMYT has just created what it calls “synthetic bread wheats,” by crossing the original wild parents of durum wheat and then crossing their offspring with another wild wheat. This effectively duplicated the natural events that originally gave rise to bread wheat some 10,000 years ago.

The bad news: The eco-activists still want us to turn half of the world’s cr0pland into a gene museum for low-yielding farmers’ seed varieties.

Myth: Organic Farming is Kinder to the Environment

Organic farming is an environmental fraud. The first and foremost rule of organic farming is that ‘thou shalt not use industrial fertilizer.” This means organic farming needs more land to make up for its lower yields (typically 10 to 40 percent lower) and it needs more land for green manure crops or more cattle to produce more manure.

In Denmark, a high-level technical committee reported in 1999 that an all-organic mandate would cut Danish food production by 47 percent. Most of Denmark’s farmland would have to be planted to forage crops and fed to feedlot cattle so their manure could then be spread thickly over the whole Danish landscape.

Dr. Vaclav Smil, an award-winning science author from the University of Manitoba, says all-organic farming for America would take the manure from another 900 million to 1 billion cattle, at 3 to 30 acres of forage per beast. There are only 1.2 billion acres in the whole lower 48 states. We’d have to eliminate half our citizens, or plant all the forests to pasture grass. The world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of nitrogen we take from the air each year. (The air is 78 percent N.)

Organic farming could be nearly as kind to the environment as high-yield farming – if two thirds of the human population were executed, and the organic rules amended to allow soil-saving conservation tillage (with herbicides).

The Most Vicious Myth: DDT Was Dangerous to People and Birds

Rachel Carson claimed in Silent Spring that “Dr. Dewitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diets DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.”

Ms. Carson was lying. Dr. Dewitt’s study actually showed no significant difference in hatching rates between the quail fed DDT (80 percent) and the control quail (83.9 percent). When Dr. Dewitt tested pheasants, he found that those fed with DDT hatched more than 80 percent of their eggs, while the controls birds hatched only 57 percent. In total, then, the birds fed DDT hatched a larger percentage of their eggs than the control birds!

What about raptor birds, the smaller myth that has persisted longest (being the hardest to disprove)? Researchers for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fed captive eagles heavy doses of DDT for months, and found no impact on the birds or their eggs. Canadian peregrine falcons were found thriving with 30 times as much DDT in their tissues as were supposedly threatening the extinction of U.S. peregrines.

Dozens of studies of birds fed large doses of DDT have failed to thin their eggshells. Some of the studies achieve thin eggshells—but by reducing the calcium in the birds’ diets. Stress, old age, and mercury pollution have all been shown to produce thin eggshells in the wild, but DDT has not.

Yet the myth of DDT causing declines in bird populations has been allowed to ruin a billion human lives. We are still accepting a million deaths per year from malaria – most of them African children—rather than use DDT indoors, as the most effective and cost-effective mosquito killer and repellent ever discovered. Why are we being so inhumane?

Myth: Modern Farming is a Major Contributor to Global Warming

Eco-activists hate the fact that American farmers burn diesel fuel and put nitrogen fertilizer on their crops and they’ve gotten the whole world excited about global warming Everyone knows about CO2 and global warming and the push for the Kyoto Treaty that would sharply raise the cost of both diesel and fertilizer for American farmers and destroy the economies of the first world. But wouldn’t it be worth it? Who wants a fried planet?

Unfortunately, the Kyoto Treaty would bring about a bigger collapse in human standards of living than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Solar and wind power couldn’t possibly provide all the power a modern society needs, nor could nuclear power plants. (We don’t have enough uranium ore.) But would it influence the warming trend?

Researchers around the world are giving us a new reality. This reality is that the Earth’s climate has always been in a state of flux and will continue in its ordained cycles farther into the future than man can fathom. We didn’t cause it, we can’t “fix” it, but we can live with it and modern farming can help.

Global Warming and the 1,500-Year Cycle of the Sun

History tells us of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1400 AD to 1850. Before that, there was a Medieval Warming, which lasted from about 950 AD to 1400. The temperatures during the Medieval Warming were about 2 degrees C. warmer than today in Northern Europe, and during the Little Ice Age they were about 2 degrees colder. Before the Medieval Warming, the Romans enjoyed a moderate warming period from 200 BC to 400 AD, and the Roman Empire began to disintegrate when the Dark Ages cold period began (600 to 950 BC).

Now, cave stalagmites and ice cores and seabed sediments and fossilized pollen are allowing us to go back into the temperature record of prehistory—and we’re finding dramatic findings that the eco-activists don’t want you to know: the Earth is governed by an irregular 1500-year cycle. It’s natural, it’s moderate, and it’s unstoppable. But we can adapt, as humans have been adapting through the centuries. The North American Pollen Database testifies that there’s been a major reorganization of this continent’s vegetation nine times in the past 14,000 years. That’s an average of once every 1650 years. The seabed sediments say these long-term cycles have been occurring for at least a million years.

We first learned of the cycles from a Greenland ice core in 1984. By that time, lots of people were already committed to the idea of man-made global warming. Al Gore had already held his first congressional hearing on the problem. Greenpeace had already announced that mankind must give up fossil fuels (and send in money).

Fortunately, it doesn’t look as though our current warming is due to CO2 from factories and auto exhausts. In the first place, most of it took place before 1940, and thus before the big increase in CO2 emissions. We’ve had very little global warming since 1940.

More important, the Greenhouse Theory says the additional CO2 will collect heat in the lower atmosphere, from the Earth’s surface up to 30,000 feet. Then the heat of the atmosphere will radiate down to heat the Earth’s surface itself. The problem is that for the past 25 years, we’ve been getting the most accurate temperature readings of the atmosphere ever taken, from satellites and high-altitude balloons. They show virtually no warming at all. The Earth’s surface is warming faster than the atmosphere that is supposed to warm it! That can’t be Greenhouse warming.

There’s more. The ice cores in Antarctica clearly show CO2 and global temperature tracking closely together through 250,000 years and three Ice Ages—but the changes in CO2 lag behind the changes in temperature by 200 to 800 years! CO2 is a lagging indicator of temperature change, not the forcing agent for global climate.

The physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate says we’re 150 years into a moderate, cyclical warming being caused by the sun. We used to think the sun was a constant. But now that we can send satellite measuring devices out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of the Earth, we find that it varies by fractions of a percent.

And we have the linkage. We’ve known for 400 years that when the number of sunspots is low, the Earth’s climate will be cold. When the number of sunspots is high, the Earth will be warmer. And the number of sunspots is higher now than it has been in 1200 years.

We also have beryllium. Beryllium is created when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. When the sun is weak, we get hit by lots of cosmic rays, and lots of beryllium is created. (When the sun is active, solar winds protect us from cosmic rays.) In the last 50 years, researchers find there’s less beryllium in our atmosphere than for the past 1150 years.

Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly at least 600 million years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species. But over the past 100 years, we’ve already had that much warming—and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result.

Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.

Will there be more and worse droughts? Maybe, we don’t know, but there are always droughts. California should perhaps start serious water conservation efforts. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. In eithercase, conservation tillage and water management will become even more important.

Will malaria sweep over Winnipeg? History says malaria was throughout most of the U.S. and clear up to the Arctic Circle until after World War II. Then window screens and DDT helped us eradicate it. If the temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, we’ll still have window screens and pesticides.

It’s not your pickup trucks, your tractors or your fertilizer. It’s not my Chevy Suburban. It’s the sun, and we’ve got to adapt to a moderate warming, probably at least for the next 500 years. If it’s any comfort, the Medieval Warming was also known to history as the Medieval Climate Optimum—the finest weather humanity can remember. The following Ice Age will be the true challenge.

The Strange Anti-Human World of the Late 20th Century

For the past 40 years, human society has been in a unique anti-human mode. “Saving the planet” has been the watchword. For the first time in human history, kangaroo rats and flowerhead weevils are deemed more important than people.

This orgy of anti-humanity was almost certainly driven by people-hating Paul Ehrlich and his wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.

Much of our eco-fervor seems to be due to an irrational fear that our ways of living would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion additional poor brown and yellow people who might grab all the resources away from us.

In Southern Africa, in 2003, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. They convinced African government leaders not to distribute U.S. corn donated as food aid. America co-mingles corn that is genetically altered with conventional corn. The president of Zambia said the activists told him the U.S. corn was poison. People who were boiling poisonous roots because they had nothing else to eat were denied access to an abundance of their favorite food staple. And remember, this is the same corn that everyone in this room eats as corn flakes, tacos, and chips.

Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior? Does nature-worship always push society over that thin line?

The same moral codes that say humans are responsible for protecting Nature also say we’re also responsible for helping our fellow men. They don’t say we can become Druids, worshiping trees and practicing human sacrifice.

It would certainly be easier to leave room for wildlife if we eliminated all the humans. But killing off our fellow men or forcing billions of forced abortions are not moral solutions when we have the intelligence and societal skills to save both people and wildlife.

Rich Countries Are Better for the Environment

Paul Ehrlich said the affluent people of the First World were: (1) the worst polluters in the history of the world; (2) would destroy half the world’s wildlife species in the next few decades; and, (3) would bring about the ruin of the whole planet.

The reality, however, is that most of the Third World is already in the most polluting phase of industrialization—burning huge amounts of coal to smelt massive amounts of iron, cooking food with wood from trees that aren’t replanted and caring too little about water pollution.

Meanwhile, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling rhinoceros horn and “bushmeat” from endangered gorillas—harvested with AK-47s.

Mexico is losing three million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farming. More than half of the forestland cleared in Honduras in recent decades has been “steepland,” with a slope of more than 30 degrees; at least once a decade, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.

How can the eco-movement present these hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future?

But there is hope for humanity and nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. A World Bank staff team has documented a bell-shaped curve in environmental protection. In the early years of industrialization, forests die and pollution surges. Rising populations and higher incomes demand more farmland and better diets.

But when per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) a different set of factors take over. People are already well-fed and birth rates fall rapidly. With better inputs and management, crop yields rise, so less land per capita is needed for food. Diesel fuel, taken from under the land or sea, substitutes for firewood and forests are replanted. Affluent people want cleaner air and are willing and able to pay for it. They begin to demand clean rivers, for both health and aesthetics.

Richer Means Fewer Wildlife Extinctions

We tend to forget that man has been using and abusing wildlife for eons. Stone Age man used to hunt birds and animals to extinction. North America lost more than 40 species of huntable birds and animals within a few years after the human hunters arrived from Asia some 14,000 years ago—including North America’s horses, camels, and elephants.

Equally dangerous, we’ve forgotten how vicious people were to other people when food was scarce. Paleontologists tell us that up to 25 percent of the males (and perhaps 15 percent of the females) in primitive communities showed signs of violent death. They were essentially fighting over food: good hunting grounds and good farmland.

Only in the last 100 years has man been able to support high populations of both people and wildlife in the same region. Only after World War II, when the Green Revolution extended high-yield farming over most of the world, did human society free itself from “food wars.” (Just before WWII, crowded Japan invaded Manchuria, in part for its soybean fields; Nazi Germany invaded Poland for “living room.”)

The World Conservation Union today warns that more than one billion poor people are living in the world’s biodiversity hotspots (particularly tropical and mountain rain forests)—and trying to feed their children by hunting bushmeat and doing slash-and burn farming. We must give these people higher-yield farming if we hope to prevent massive wildlife extinctions in the next 50 years.

Yet the eco-movement holds up primitive hunters and farmers as the environmental models for the future.

Richer Means a Cleaner Environment

Remarkably, the waste volume from American homes today is one-third less than the waste volume from Mexican homes! This is due in sizeable part to the centralized processing of our food supply. Our broiler chickens, for example, arrive at the store wrapped in sanitary, lightweight plastic-wrapped trays—with the feathers, heads, feet and many of the unwanted internal organs already separated out for recycling at the processing plant.

These poultry waste products are then turned into livestock feeds and many other products, far more effectively than they could be handled without the centralized waste management.

The modern rendering industries are among the world’s most successful and most critically needed recyclers. In America, they treat 50 billion pounds per year of waste that urgently needs to be treated, even if it were only going into a landfill. However, it would take millions of additional acres of farmland to replace the nutrients salvaged and put to use through rendering.

The rest of the First World’s vaunted recycling effort has pretty much collapsed. Most of our carefully sorted urban trash is all dumped together in the local landfill, because it takes more resources to produce useful things with recycled stuff than it takes to start from scratch.

21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable in History

Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago, with good reason: soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human society.

Thanks to chemical fertilizer, modern farmers no longer need to “wear out” their soils. Today’s farmers use soil testing and industrially supplied nutrients to keep their soils rich and productive. In addition, modern farmers invented conservation tillage and no-till. These farming systems cut erosion by up to 95 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria.

Industrial fertilizers and conservation tillage are two of the major reasons why the Soil and Water Conservation Society of North America calls modern high-yield farming “the most sustainable in history.”

The New Surge of Support for High-Yield Technologies

After the success of the Green Revolution became clear in the 1970s, a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation—founder of the key agricultural research stations in Mexico and the Philippines-spoke of his profound regret. He said that agricultural research had turned humanity into a cancer on the earth. We now know he was wrong.

Now, with the end of the population surge, high-yield farming is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.

In May of 2001, our Hudson Institute presented (at the National Press Club in Washington) two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the then-latest winner of the World Food Prize, and the British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, as signers of our “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry.”

This remarkably broad coalition was led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, Chairman Emeritus of our Center, and the 1970 winner of the Peace Prize for his work on high-yield crops for the Green Revolution.

The Declaration doesn’t endorse any agricultural technology or system. It simply states that the world urgently needs higher yields based on sustainable advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology—to save room for wildlife.

At the time of the Press Club event, we feared it had been a failure. The biggest media outlet to feature the event was the American Farm Bureau News. But in the months since that event, the concept of high-yield conservation has been praised by columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October, 2003, issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly carried an article lavishly praising both high-yield farming and biotech. More startling by far, the editorial page of the New York Times recommended the Atlantic Monthly article to its readers-in a newspaper which has been editorially praising organic food and condemning high-yield farming for decades.

In October of last year, the journal Science carried an editorial by Dr. Donald Kennedy, the magazine’s editor. Kennedy states that world hunger is now the overarching issue for world health-and concludes:

“Unless agricultural production is increased on the good lands, population pressures will cause farmers to move upslope and deforest the hillsides. That’s a double whammy: a loss for those families, and a loss for the environment. And on already marginal lands, GM technology may offer the best hope for producing crops that can withstand drought, impoverished soils and disease. For both these reasons, we’d better resolve the GM controversy.”

Half Again As Much Meat Demand in 2025

All of that comes in the nick of time because the worlds’ demand for meat and livestock produce will continue to soar. The Third World is raising its meat demand three times as fast as the First World. No vegetarian societies are emerging anywhere. (India has always consumed lots of milk, and now they’re eating chicken and yearning for mutton.)

Meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. We project that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025.

This meat increase will be good for children, since it provides them with high-quality protein and key micronutrients. Without livestock products, children do not reach their full genetic stature, and may lag in cognitive learning. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, since birds and animals can nourish themselves on grass and other things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat and milk is just about the same as for the same amount of non-meat proteins and calories.

Such a major meat production increase will require higher grain yields (perhaps 30 percent higher), higher oilseed yields (25 percent higher?) and still-better feed conversion ratios. These will only be possible if we continue to invest in research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted.

The current regulatory war against farmers, renderers, fertilizer makers, and virtually anyone else involved in high-yield farming must stop if we are to sustain the kids, pets, and wild animals in the 21st century.

It looks now as though agricultural biotechnology is winning its place in the 21st century. I’m thankful, since I do not know how we would triple the world’s crop yields again in the next 50 years without it. And unless we triple the crop yields again, we risk losing most of the world’s wildlands.

More Globalization, Not Less

The world also urgently needs farm trade liberalization. Obviously, most of the increase in global meat consumption will occur outside of North America. It is also true that much of the meat consumption gain will occur in densely populated countries that will be critically short of land and water to produce their own livestock products cost-effectively.

Fortunately, the farm trade liberalization talks among the members of the World Trade Organization have taken a dramatic positive turn. Last year, the EU had refused to consider much farm subsidy reform, and the Third World countries walked out of the talks at Cancun, Mexico, and went home. Many of us feared it would take ten years to get farm trade liberalization back on the table. However, thanks to Brazil and India, the talks are back in high gear. The EU has promised to eliminate all of its farm export subsidies as part of a global farm trade reform. President Bush has promised a dramatic reduction of U.S. farm subsidies. (Bush has consistently worked for farm trade reform, and signed the 2002 farm bill only reluctantly.)

The EU is already having trouble paying for the Common Agricultural Policy, and it has just taken in 10 new countries, including big agricultures in Poland and Romania with millions of small farmers and tens of millions of hectares of underperforming farmland.

Meanwhile, China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and 7 percent of its arable land. Three-fourths of India’s Hindus say they will eat meat when they can afford it, and their GNP is now rising twice as fast as their population. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Egypt are other major population centers which are likely to bid happily for farm imports in the decades ahead.

The world urgently needs both high-yield farming and the liberalization of global farm trade to meet the population and conservation challenges of the 21st century. I think the time is now ripe for North American farmers to present their credentials more forcefully, and more successfully than when the First World was fleeing in terror from “overpopulation.”

You might start by joining the thousands who have signed the High Yield Declaration, at www.highyieldconservation.org

Presentation in New Delhi, India for a Seminar on Pesticides: Myths, Realities, and Remedies
Dennis Avery

It is a tremendous privilege to be in India, a key site of the Green Revolution, to discuss pesticides, the modern miracle of high-yield agriculture, and the future of our world.

For thousands of years, mankind was constantly threatened by hunger and famine. Ancient civilizations were often destroyed by crop failures. Graneries were stocked for “the lean years” whenever possible, even though rats and beetles ate much of the stored grain; no one knew when the next drought or plague of locusts would create the next hunger emergency.

Paleontologists tell us that the skeletons of our prehistoric ancestors reveal a high level of violent death—nearly 30 percent among males and about 15 percent even among females. Since many violent deaths don’t leave skeletal evidence, that means huge numbers of prehistoric people died at the hands of their fellow men. Most of the fighting was over food: the richest hunting grounds, the favored river valleys full of wild rice, the best groves for finding tree nuts.

After humans learned to farm, they fought over cropland. As recently as World War II, Japan invaded Manchuria, in part for its cropland. Hitler told us he invaded the Soviet Union so his German farmers could take over the fertile fields of the Ukraine.

The world been largely freed of hunger-driven violence and the almost constant fear of famine only since the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Even now, in Africa where the Green Revolution is only now beginning to express itself famine stalks the land during the drought years.

In the densely populated highlands of Rwanda, it was only ten years ago that a lack of rising crop yields contributed to genocide. The Hutus and Tutsis doubted there would be enough land to support both tribes. Neighbor wielding machetes against neighbor resulted in the murder of a million.

Only the must recent generation of humans has been freed for the first time in history from the chronic, traditional human fears of hunger, violence, and being crowded away from crucial resources.

How ironic that the well-fed children of the first generation of well-fed humans is now trying urgently to destroy the very high-yield agriculture that freed them from fear and violence.

The well-fed elite are attempting to persuade humanity to throw itself back into fear and violence with a cavalcade of myths, which are proving amazingly successful in the very countries where education should have made myths an untenable strategy.

They are being aided by the very journalists who have sworn to free their readers, viewers and listeners from ignorance and untruth. Why? Because the mythical scares gain the journalists more attention and prominence. Even some scientists have put the hope of bigger government grants ahead of sound research.

Let me offer what I believe are the most dangerous myths threatening the world.

Dangerous Myth #1: DDT Causes Human Cancer.

I put this as the most dangerous myth about the modern farming because this is the myth that started the movement to reverse the Green Revolution.

It was invented by Rachel Carson, the widely revered and even more widely read author of Silent Spring, in 1962. She had no evidence that DDT caused cancer, but she hated the pesticides that she thought were killing too many birds and bees. She said that DDT and “six or seven other” pesticides then in use would be proven carcinogenic. None have been so proven. In fact, the only proven carcinogen among farming’s widely used pesticides to date has been the lead arsenate, the deadly blue powder the modern synthetic pesticides have displaced.

DDT and its metabolites are long-lasting molecules, and they do build up in the fatty tissues of people, fish, and animals. So, how do we know DDT doesn’t cause cancer?

Primates have been fed more than 33,000 times the average daily human exposure to DDT during the heyday of widespread DDT spraying. The test was “inconclusive with respect to a carcinogenic effect of DDT in nonhuman primates.” That means the primates didn’t get cancer, even when exposed to massive doses of DDT.

Even today, more than 30 years after DDT was banned in the United States, huge numbers of urbanites are still terrified that they will get cancer from DDT residues. The federal government was recently forced by congress to spend millions of dollars on a massive test of women in the New York City area, where elevated breast cancer rates were being blamed on the DDT that helped New York and America eradicate malaria decades earlier. The results of the study were published in 2002. They concluded that the elevated breast cancer rates were due to more women smoking, and having their children later in life. Both are well-known cancer factors. The women of New York are still not convinced, and are demanding still more studies, which they hope will allow them to blame their cancer risks on a pesticide instead of on their own life choices and genetics.

The cancer myth lingers because modern medicine has eliminated so many other causes of death in the modern world. Cancer is one of the few things left for us to die from. All over the world, city people eating pesticide-grown food are living 30 or 40 years longer than their ancestors did,. They are also spending far less time being sick than did their forebears. But they still fear pesticides.

Humanity, which evolved one paw-swipe away from death, has few real un-chosen risks left—and thus few places to target its numerous fear genes.

Our cancer researchers, our medical professionals, and our food safety experts tell us that consumers need not fear pesticides. Yet organic food is the fastest-growing segment of the food industry in the richest, safest cities of the planet.

This is the most dangerous myth because it could lead us to renounce the use of the pesticides that protect our food supplies, both in the field and during storage, and bring back the famines that the pesticides have done so much to help us escape.

Pesticides are also helping to protect us from dangerous natural toxins such as aflatoxin and fumonisin that are far more deadly than pesticide residues. Britain recently pulled all of the organic corn meal brands from its supermarket shelves because all of them were dangerously contaminated with fumonisin, which causes cancer in rats. Our food safety standards normally permit pesticide residues at a rate one hundredth or less of the “no-effect” levels in test animals, and not even one-thousandth of the levels of anything that triggers cancer. However, the organic corn meals were contaminated with as much as one-third of the fumonisin that caused cancer in the test rats.

British authorities said the organic corn meals averaged more than 9,000 parts per billion of fumonisin, more than 20 times the new EU standard for the toxin. Twenty brands of conventional corn meal averaged a tiny 130 parts per billion, because they were better protected with synthetic pesticides than the organic corn crops. Better insecticides helped prevent damage to the seed heads, so the fungi could not attack successfully, and better fungicides meant fewer fungi to attack.

Dangerous Myth #2: DDT thins the eggshells of birds.

My second ranking myth also is based on DDT. This myth is a proven global danger, having caused more than 30 million human malaria deaths, and perhaps a billion ruined human lives from chronic, debilitating malaria. This is the myth that caused the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban DDT in 1972, leading to the banning of DDT in most of the non-tropical countries (after they had eradicated their malaria mosquitoes, of course).

Worse, the “righteous” concern of well-fed elites for the birds also led them to discourage the use of DDT in tropical countries where poverty was as endemic as the mosquito-born malaria, yellow fever, and dengue that kept the populace debilitated and poor, if not actually dead.

During the DDT hearing in Washington in 1972, Dr. Charles Wurster, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, testified that DDT was a danger to birds. Asked if a DDT ban would lead to more human deaths, he stated that the world had too many people. “We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”

The First World’s concern about birds has been so strong that it has often tied tropical countries’ foreign aid to their not using DDT, even sprayed indoors where it is not only the most cost-effective, long-lasting mosquito killer, but also the most cost-effective, longest-lasting mosquito repellent we have.

The myth about DDT thinning birds’ eggshells also came directly and wrongfully from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. She wrote, “Dr. Dewitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diets DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.”

Ms. Carson was lying. Dr. Dewitt’s study actually showed no significant difference in hatching rates between the quail fed DDT (80 percent) and the control quail (83.9 percent). When Dr. Dewitt tested pheasants, he found that those fed with DDT hatched more than 80 percent of their eggs, while the controls birds hatched only 57 percent.

What about raptor birds, the smaller myth that has persisted longest (being the hardest to disprove)? Researchers for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fed captive eagles heavy doses of DDT for months, and found no impact on the birds or their eggs. Canadian peregrine falcons were found thriving with 30 times as much DDT in their tissues as were supposedly threatening the extinction of U.S peregrines. Dozens of studies of birds fed large doses of DDT have failed to thin their eggshells. Some of the studies achieve thin eggshells-but by reducing the calcium in the birds’ diets. Stress, old age, and mercury pollution have all been shown to produce thin eggshells in the wild, but DDT has not.

Yet the myth of DDT causing declines in bird populations has been allowed to ruin a billion lives. Why?

Dangerous Myth #3: High-yield Farming is the Cause of “Overpopulation.”

The world’s population has sharply increased since the Green Revolution, from 3 billion to more than 6 billion. The world’s rapid population surge began in the 1950s, before the Green Revolution, thanks to the rapid spread of modern health care: vaccinations, clean water, sewage treatment, sulfa drugs, antibiotics, etc.

High-yield farming did not create the population growth, but on the contrary helped to create a virtuous circle of lower birth rates. Poor farmers the world over and throughout history have traditionally had large families. Kids quickly become useful on a farm—and parents needed two or three adult children to support them in their old age. With the threat of famines and epidemics, no one felt safe without five or six kids. Throughout history, the fertility rate was probably about six or seven births per woman.

High-yield farming, however, created more food security, even as it permitted more people to move to high-value jobs in the cities—where children are an expensive luxury. The countries that raised their crop yields the most rapidly also turned out to be the countries where birth rates declined most rapidly.

Births per woman in the developing world have dropped from about 6.2 in 1960 to 3.1 today, three-fourths of the way to population stability at 2.1. First World fertility has dropped to 1.7, and in many European countries it is at 1.2. Italy is now offering $1200 bonuses for families which have a second child.

It is the hungry countries that still have high birth rates In Ethiopia, the average woman still has seven births.

Dangerous Myth # 4: Pesticides are dangerous to wildlife.

Nothing could be more dangerous to the future of the world’s wildlife than getting rid of pesticides.

Virtually every tree and wild creatures alive on this planet today owes its existence to high-yield farmers and farm-science researchers. The Green Revolution technologies essentially tripled the crop yields on the Earth’s good cropland since 1960—and even so we are farming half the planet’s land not covered by deserts or ice. Without the Green Revolution, the wildlands and their species would already have been plowed down for low-yield crops.

The plant breeding, irrigation, and fertilizer of the Green Revolution would simply have created the perfect environment for insects, weeds, bacteria, and plant diseases without pesticides. Without pesticides, crops would have been decimated, and along with it, much of humanity.

Without veterinary pharmaceuticals, our livestock and poultry would have had their energies and feed efficiency ruined by diseases and by internal and external parasites. As they still are in Africa. Without chemistry, we’d be starved and stunted for lack of high-quality protein and the micronutrients we get from livestock products.

The well-fed elitist children announce that the world should go back to organic farming to produce “natural” food that it claims, without any proof whatsoever, would somehow be more nutritious. But organic farmers’ yields in the First World are usually 20 to 40 percent lower than high-yield farmers’ yields. More wildlands would have to be plowed down for crops.

In addition, there is the “organic fertilizer penalty.” The world has less than half enough organic nitrogen to nourish its crops. Farmers globally use 80 million tons of nitrogen per year that’s taken from the air through an industrial process. Giving up that industrial fertilizer would require fertilizing our crops with the manure from another 7-8 billion cattle. Where would we get the forage? There isn’t enough land on the planet to feed the expected 8 billion people plus another 8 billion cattle. The forests would be cleared—to produce manure. What a ghastly prescription we are getting from the children of the elites.

Pesticides, badly used, can threaten birds, bees, and other wild creatures. However, pesticides properly used are the most important protection for wildlife habitat. Ultimately, it is the amount of habitat we can leave unplowed that protects the wildlife.

Only high-yield agriculture protects both people and Nature.

Dangerous Myth #5: Modern farming is Unsustainable.

The farming-ignorant children of the well-fed elitists crusade against high-yield farming with the claim that it allows too much soil erosion.

Let’s think about that soil erosion claim logically. If the high-yield fields get three times as much yield, than we can get the same amount of food by planting only one-third as much land. One-third as much planted land should mean one-third as much soil erosion.

If we need only one-third as much land, moreover, we can concentrate our crops on the land with the least erosion potential—and we do. That means high-yield farming must allow less than one-third as much erosion as would a global mandate for organic farming.

Finally, we must look at a recent marvel of accidental technology called conservation tillage. During the first world oil shock after 1974, farmers trying to conserve diesel fuel discovered that the newly developed chemical weed killers—the herbicides—could control weeds even if they didn’t plow their fields. They could just disc the top inch of topsoil to create a seedbed, and it took far less diesel.

Then they discovered that discing the crop residue into the soil surface created billions of tiny dams that defied the efforts of wind and water to carry soil away. Erosion per planted acre was reduced by 65-95 percent, with lower production costs. Water retained in the fields often doubled, because the residue encouraged it to infiltrate instead of running off. Soil microbes and earthworms doubled, too, because they fed on the residues. Conservation tillage was born.

Conservation tillage is now being used on hundreds of millions of hectares, around the world. Its latest expansion has been here in South Asia, where it not only reduces erosion and increases soil moisture, but radically speeds the preparation of wheat land after a rice crop. That allows the wheat crop to mature before the worst heat of summer.

One important soil study in the American state of Wisconsin found that a highly-erodable farming region is now suffering only 6 percent as much erosion as it did during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s.

Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history. The study’s author, Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA, says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. They lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.

The Soil and Water Conservation Society of America says modern high-yield farming is the most sustainable in history, thanks to high-yield seeds, irrigation, chemical fertilizers, pesticides-and especially conservation tillage.

Dangerous Myth # 6: There is already plenty of food to go around.

Population is like a train, it has momentum. When the brakes are applied, it still has a long stopping distance. World population is likely to increase further in the next three decades, from 6.3 billion to between 8 and 9 billion, before it stops and then retreats.

Even more importantly, humans throughout history have displayed an urgent hunger for high-quality protein. In India, this is reflected primarily in the very strong growth in the demand for milk. India’s annual consumption of milk has risen nearly 25 million tons here since 1990. All over the world, as incomes are rising strongly, the demand for meat, milk and eggs is amplifying the demand for farming resources.

Thanks to technology, free trade, and democracy, we can expect incomes to grow more rapidly in the next half-century than ever before. India and China, with the two largest populations in the world, are now both expanding their incomes faster than any big countries in world history. By 2050, we can expect the world to have 7 billion affluent consumer buying meat, milk, and eggs, rather than the 2 billion or so affluent consumers the world has today.

The world demand for farming resources will more than double by 2050. We will need not only the pesticides and fertilizers we use today, but twice as much yield per hectare of farmland as we get today. Whether it comes from biotechnology, chemistry, physics, or some other scientific source, we must at least double the world’s crop yields again in the next several decades. The alternative is to watch human poverty, hunger, and the needless destruction of wildlands increase.

Dangerous Myth #7: High-yield seeds risk destroying the world’s natural biodiversity.

Traditional farmers used to plant thousands and thousands of locally developed seed varieties. Today, they tend to plant a few specialized, high-yield seed strains developed by universities and seed companies. The activists say that we must stop this march of seed uniformity before some genetic or natural disaster creates a huge famine disaster.

Fortunately, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is being created to assist the world’s gene banks. These gene banks already have most of the world’s farm crop diversity in their hundreds of thousands of selections. The Trust will help them protect that diversity. The latest storages keep their seeds at -18C to -55C, so they need to be regrown only once every 50 to 100 years instead of every five or ten.

Other good news: The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico has demonstrated we can restore or even amplify crop genetic diversity through “wide crosses” between the traditional, modern and wild wheat seeds in the gene banks. Over the past 15 years, CIMMYT researchers crossed banked wheats that represented the original wild parents of durum wheat and then crossed their progeny with another wild wheat. This effectively duplicated the natural events that originally gave rise to bread wheat some 10,000 years ago.

These efforts are far more effective for people and wildlife than turning half the world’s scarce cropland into a giant low-yielding gene museum.

Dangerous Myth #8: Affluence and fertilizer production are destroying the planet with too much CO2.

The Earth’s average temperature has increased about 0.8 degree Celsius since 1850. The children of the well-fed elites are telling us it’s because humans are emitting too much greenhouse gas, from factories and autos, rice paddies, and fertilizer factories. They say we’re overheating the planet. The well-fed elites tell us we must give up fossil fuels, or the planet will become too hot for humans to prosper.

They have no evidence of this, however, beyond the fact that the planet has warmed and that there is more CO2 in the air. The computer models predicting drastic warming are completely unverified. And unverifiable.

The planet warmed in two surges, one from 1850-1870 and another from 1920-1940. These warming periods came before humanity emitted much CO2. Since 1940, the Earth has not gotten significantly warmer despite a huge increase in CO2 emissions and more rice and cattle production.

The lower atmosphere (up to 10,000 meters) that the Greenhouse Theory says must warm before the Earth’s surface hasn’t been warming much at all. Instead, our satellites show a very modest linear upward trend since 1979—about 1 degree C per 300 years! Even that small increase may be an artifact of a recent, natural El Nino event in the Pacific. The satellite readings had virtually no upward trend before 1998. The trend for 1979-1999 with the El Nino year deleted is tiny—0.0003 degrees C.

Meanwhile, in the last two decades scientists have found from the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores that the Earth has a moderate, natural 1500-year climate cycle driven by changes in the sun’s irradiance. The 1500-year cycle has also been found in seabed sediments in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, in cave stalagmites from Ireland to Oman to South Africa, and in carbon-dated glacier advances and retreats all over the world.

The Medieval Warming and the recent Little Ice Age were the two halves of a moderate climate cycle that goes back at least 1 million years.

Based on the million years of the cycle, we are 150 years into a moderate, unstoppable, natural warming that could last another 600 years. It will be followed by either another Little Ice Age or a big Ice Age.

Why would we expect a climate, which has been cycling up and down for 1 million years, to remain stable in the 21st century, with or without fossil fuels? The Greenhouse Effect may be real, but the evidence says it’s not very important. The Modern Warming started too soon, has been too abrupt and too erratic, and has too little warming in the lower atmosphere to blame on CO2. However, it fits the pattern of the 1500 year cycle very neatly.

Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly millions of years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species. But over the past 150 years, we’ve already had that much warming—and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result. Trees and plants are cold-limited, but they are rarely heat-limited, so our forests have become more diverse in the past century. Most species extend their ranges as the cold-tolerant species hold theirs.

Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and the physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.

Will there be more and worse droughts? We don’t know, but there are always droughts somewhere. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. That means conservation tillage will become even more important.

Will malaria sweep over Europe? History says malaria was rampant in Europe and North America until after World War II, when window screens and DDT allowed it to be eradicated. If their temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, they’ll still have window screens and pesticides-and I am quite sure that if the First World is at risk, the elite will be more amenable about doing whatever it takes, including DDT. However, remember that the medical doctors of the world have had to beat back a proposed worldwide ban on DDT within the last three years, and the UN machinery is still straining to produce that result.

Dangerous Myth # 9: The Children of the Well-fed Elites Are Benevolent

The same well-fed elitists have been pushing an organic farming mandate that would be unable to feed more than half the world’s current human population—apparently not realizing that the hungry people would destroy the remaining wildlife before they grew too weak to slash, burn, and hunt.

And they are against biotech in food production—although they are happy enough to have it in their personal medical arsenal. Two years ago, the children of the well-fed elites told the governments of famines-stricken countries in southern Africa that American food aid was “poison.” This was the same biotech corn that Americans have been eating in their breakfast cereals and snack foods for a decade with no documented danger whatsoever. This is essentially the same biotech corn that the government of the European Union has now belatedly approved for sale in the sanctified precincts of the EU countries.

We don’t know how many poor Africans starved as a result. Fortunately, it was less than the 30 millions deaths we must already lay at the door of Rachel Carson’s ghost.

How many additional people would die if the world suddenly shut off the fossil fuels and rationed the electricity for schools and hospitals, the heating oil for homes, the fuel for ambulances? How many more forest trees would be cut for firewood? How many more women would die of lung disease from the smoke of their unsustainable cookfires?

The Arrogant Selfishness of the Well-Fed Elites

Why are the First World elites trying to push low-yield farming? Apparently, they would like a world with fewer, poorer people. Remember that classic book sponsored by the wealthy industrialists of the Club of Rome’s book, Limits to Growth. The eco-movement has always said there were too many people, and fought against affluence for more people.

Such constraints might be justified if the world were truly a lifeboat without adequate resources for all of its passengers. Instead of a lifeboat, however, we live on a planet, and one of the most important resources is humanity’s ability to learn and use technology— including conserving technologies such as the herbicides which are making humanity more sustainable through conservation tillage.

Africa today averages only about 2300 calories per capita per day, compared to Europe’s 3400, and Africa’s average is declining. The International Food Policy Research Institute warns that by 2020, current farming and population trends would leave Africa with more than 200 million malnourished people—even after African farmers clear wildlands equal to the land area of France.

Africa averages about 13 grams of animal products per capita per day, compared to about 60 grams of livestock products per capita per day in Europe. This means that many, perhaps most, African children are suffering from key deficiencies in amino acids, zinc, and iron that can stunt their growth, cause such nutritional diseases as rickets, and retard their cognitive development.

Somehow, I think that if 200 million Europeans were starving and its children stunted, even after Europe had destroyed European wildlands equal to the land area of France for additional low-yield farming, Europe would have welcomed the development of genetically enhanced crops.

I think the well-fed elites have mainly been concerned about losing their own wealth and access to resources—in a world they mistakenly see as having too few resources to go around. Their fear of overpopulation is driven by a fear that the extra people would take their wealth instead of creating the new wealth that economic growth has historically produced.

In a world of increasing human knowledge, the environmental movement is revealed as inhumane and immoral. I have little doubt that if the anti-technology elites succeeded in shutting down the energy systems, and the chemistry laboratories, and the biotech fields, the world would all too soon look again as it did in prehistory when nearly half the humans died violently at the hands of their neighbors.

Only in the most recent era of world history, since World War II, has the world largely gotten beyond the geopolitics of envy. (If, indeed, Moslem extremism is not itself an exhibition of that envy, and it may be.)

The danger is not so much that Nature will be shortchanged as that humans will forget how to be humane. That is why civilization has had such a high value on human life. Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden remind us that we abandon that precept at everyone’s peril.

We must rein in the arrogant ignorance of the children of the well-fed elites. We must defeat them in the public debates and at the polls. We must reclaim the right to pursue the technological abundance that already supplies our food, our medical care, and most of our attractive lifestyle choices—while preserving our wildlands.

Presentation to the Brazilian Meat Conference hosted by Elanco Animal Health
Dennis Avery

I am pleased to be here today and to able to talk about the sharp improvement in world meat export prospects that appears to be occurring in the World Trade Organization. The WTO’s current trade liberalization talks, the Doha Round, have suddenly taken an important turn for the better, after a virtually complete breakdown a year ago at Cancun, Mexico.

Six Months Ago: Farm Trade Gridlock

Over the past 50 years, the world has liberalized its non-farm trade, with tariffs on manufactured goods reduced from about 40 percent to 4 percent over the past 50 years. As a result, world non-farm trade has increased perhaps 15-fold in value. Farm trade has barely doubled in volume over that time period, and only recently has rising Third World meat demand produced any significant trend in farm trade value.

Six months ago, I expected the world’s pervasive farm trade barriers to continue, virtually intact, for another five to ten years. As a result, I was predicting a crash of land values in farm exporting countries, especially in the United States and Western Europe as their subsidy funding dried up. I was forced to predict extremely slow growth in all farm exports. I expected the densely populated and increasingly affluent countries of Asia to continue overcharging their consumers for “national food self-sufficiency”-achieved only by hiding behind the massive food import barriers that have been typical of the world since the 1860s.

Six months ago, I predicted that only Brazil would gain farm export volume in the coming decade. However, I expected that Brazilian farmers would gain only minimally from their small and low-priced export sales expansion. And this only because Brazil’s extremely low land costs put it ahead of subsidized farmers when competing for the small increase that would be allowed in world food and feed exports.

Today: The Beginnings of Real Farm Trade Reform?

Now, fortunately, the picture looks far more optimistic-both for the world’s farm exporters and for the billions of consumers in Asia.

Until recently, the European Union said it could make no changes in its farm subsidies. Now, the EU has agreed to end its massive, long-term program of farm export subsidies, as part of a liberalized set of WTO farm trade regulations.

The United States, after putting in place a major increase in its farm subsidies just two years ago, has now agreed to radically reduce its farm subsidies-also as part of a WTO farm trade liberalization.

The developing countries, after their much-publicized walkout on the WTO talks in Mexico, are back at the negotiating table and working seriously toward the first-ever liberalization of farm trade since Napoleon III reduced French food tariffs nearly 150 years ago. The likelihood is that the WTO will soon require more openness to farm imports in the densely populated Asian countries.

Bullish World Demand for Livestock Products

The French in the 1860s were quickly frightened into re-installing their tariffs by the advent of the steam locomotive and the steamship, which unleashed 500 million acres of additional farmland in such places as the Great Plains of North America, Western Australia, Argentina, and Brazil.

At that time, the only affluent markets in the world for farm commodities were a few cities such as New York and Paris. Western Europe quickly became terrified that its farming regions would be depopulated, with all of its food coming from overseas and the former farm workers standing in unemployment lines in the cities.

Today, the situation is far different. Most of the world’s good farmland not in Brazil is already growing crops. The future of feeding the world lies not in clearing more forest, but in using the farmland we already have more intensively.

Even more dramatic changes have occurred in the world’s consumer markets. Today, roughly 1 billion people are affluent enough to afford high-quality diets, and by the year 2050, we can confidently expect 7 billion affluent consumers. Only Africa, and to some extent the non-oil Middle East, are failing to participate in the modern global surge of prosperity. Non-farm employment is expanding much faster than farm employment, and will do so for the foreseeable future.

The intensification of farming will depend on stronger consumer demand (fueling somewhat higher real prices) to produce more food, especially more feed and more meat, from the existing farmland base.

The world is still rapidly increasing its demand for farm products, driven not only by population growth but even more by rising incomes. Twelve years ago, I predicted world farm demand would nearly triple by 2050. I expected the demand for high-quality foods-meat, milk, eggs, fruits, and vegetables-to increase five-fold.

Since then, total world demand for farm products has been increasing pretty much on that schedule.

World grain consumption has been increasing by about 18 million tons per year, world oilseed demand by about 7 million tons per year, and world meat demand by more than 5.5 million tons per year. To date, as in the past, most of the demand has been met domestically behind trade barriers.

Unfortunately for the world’s export farmers, virtually all of the demand growth has been occurring in Third World countries pursuing the myth of food security through national food self-sufficiency.

Unfortunately for the world’s consumers, virtually all of the demand growth has occurred at high cost, behind trade barriers that prevent rational use of the world’s scarce land and water. They also suffer higher levels of food insecurity because individual countries’ food production is far less stable than that of the world as a whole. Especially if they’re trying to rely on marginal farming resources subject to drought, flood, pests and diseases.

Unfortunately for the world’s wildlife, the continuing drive for national food self-sufficiency has left huge tracts of Third World wildlands at risk of being cleared for more unsustainable, low-yield cropping. For example, Indonesia has been clearing low-quality, species-rich land with massive erosion potential on the island of Kalimantan-to grow chicken feed. China is now forced to reforest millions of acres of steeply sloping land in the Yangtze Valley because stripping it produced more floods and soil erosion-and not much more food.

What Free Trade Can Achieve When Given the Chance

It’s no accident that the strongest growth in global pork imports has been in Mexico, where the United States and Canada got duty-free market access through the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico’s pork imports have risen by 155,000 tons per year in the past five years, to a projected 345,000 tons in 2004. Without NAFTA, Mexico, too, would have forced its consumer to overpay for domestic livestock products, even though Mexico lacks the rainfall to support expanded pastures and feed crop production.

Nor is it any accident that the strongest growth among pork exporting nations in the past five years has been in Brazil, where low land costs and the construction of new pork processing facilities have enabled Brazil to reach more export markets with processed products. Farm land values, and thus farmers’ costs, have been driven up in many of the other export-worthy countries by government farm subsidies.

Without farm trade reform, of course, the U.S. and European farmers have been at risk of their subsidy systems collapsing and their land values crashing to Brazilian levels, and the ancient competitive forces in agriculture re-emerged full force.

The new turn of events in the WTO seems to lift the pall of gloom that had re-settled over the farm export markets after the Cancun Collapse.

The World’s Fast-Fading Population Growth

The world’s population is still rising, but far less rapidly than in the past 50 years. Within the next 50 years, human population numbers will start a long slow decline.

Back in the 1970s, people were afraid of population growth. I can understand why. Agricultural research had just created the Green Revolution, which was tripling crop yields on good land over most of the world, except Africa. Famine was becoming outmoded. In addition, DDT and other synthetic chemicals and vaccines were radically cutting human death rates. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, wrote eloquently of his fears that human population would top 20 billion.

High-yield farmers were accused of “growing too much food.” We were seen as the root cause of global overpopulation.

Since then, we have learned that while poor farmers mostly have large families, affluent, urban couples have small families. We have learned that the countries which increased their crop yields the fastest also brought down their birth rates the most rapidly. Now, the world is moving rapidly toward good diets and urban affluence, and birth rates are plummeting.

Europe is now down to a fertility rate of about 1.7 births per woman, with Germany, Italy, and Spain at 1.2. (Italy is now offering a $1200 subsidy for 2nd Italian children, to ensure the country is not totally given over to Albanian and North African immigrants.)

In the Third World, birth rates have fallen 75 percent of the way to stability, from about 6.2 births per woman in 1960 to about 3.1 births today-with stability at 2.1 births. Fertility levels continue to decline rapidly in all countries. The UN Population Division has just lowered its peak projection for human numbers-again-to between 8 and 9 billion people. That still means a substantial increase in people, but not nearly the fearsome expansion predicted in The Population Bomb.

Rising Incomes: the Last Frontier of Farm Product Demand

In 2004, income gains for emerging economies are the last frontier of farm product demand growth. To date, my long-term demand growth forecast has been largely on target and Asia remains the key area.

China, with its massive population of 1.3 billion people, has been increasing its GNP by roughly 8 to 9 percent per year, with virtually no population growth. That has meant very rapid increases in consumer incomes. The “precious three” desired household purchases in China have changed radically from the 1970s (bicycle, digital wristwatch, and transistor radio) to the 1980s (telephone, TV, and refrigerator) to the current moment (cell phone, computer, and car). Yes, the Chinese will have cars, lots of them. They bought 2 million last year.

Chinese pork consumption increased nearly 70 percent in the decade of the 1990s, and is currently expanding by more than one million tons per year. So far, China has been supplying virtually all of that pork domestically. China is fostering domestic pork production with import barriers, high consumer prices and investments in its own animals and facilities.

Chinese pork imports this year will about match the EU’s pork imports. They will total a pitiful 70,000 tons, less than 0.2 percent of China’s annual consumption. China is now a member of the World Trade Organization, but the WTO farm trade rules have not yet required its members to open their farm commodity markets.

Perspective for farm imports: China has about 20 percent of the world’s population, about 7 percent of its arable land and a huge proportion of its economic growth.

India has been expanding its GDP by nearly 6 percent annually since it began to liberalize its economy in 1990, while its rate of population growth has been declining from 3.2 percent to 2.9 percent. That means India’s per capita incomes are now finally rising rapidly.

India’s milk consumption has been increasing by about 1.4 million tons per year, and its poultry consumption is also rising by about 8 percent per year. (Even India’s pork consumption has risen nearly 5 percent annually, though from a small base.) Again, the expanded livestock consumption has been met through domestic price supports protected by import barriers. However, in the last five years, consumer demand has been constrained by high prices. Milk consumption has increased only about half as fast in the last five years as in the especially high, government-set grain prices of the 1990s, partly because milk prices have sometimes been three times as high as on the world market.

India imports significant amounts of pulses and palm oil, but virtually no other farm products.

Perspective for farm imports: India has 17 percent of the world’s population and about 11 percent of its arable land and most of the Third World economic growth not occurring in China.

Indonesia, with 225 million people, has not recently achieved the 7 percent annual GDP growth it registered from 1990 to 1997. However, the economy has lately been expanding by 3 to 3.5 percent per year, and household consumption has been rising by 6 percent per year.

Indonesia’s poultry consumption has recently been about 50 percent higher than a decade ago, despite the economic ravages of the “Asian Collapse” of 1997. Indonesian meat consumption is heavily focused on poultry because it is a Moslem country and eats virtually no pork. (It does produce some pork on its northern islands to supply Singapore.)

Perspective for farm imports; Indonesia has 3 percent of the world population and only 2 percent of its arable land.

Combined, these three countries have 40 percent of the world’s consumers and less than 20 percent of its farmland.

Asian Incomes Will Continue to Rise, Especially in China and India

Fifteen years ago, the new phenomenon of rapid Asian economic growth was a startling development, seemingly shaky by its unprecedented nature. Eight years ago, the Asian Economic Collapse seemed to portend the end of a brief, soaring, unsustainable skyrocket of economic spurt and collapse. Today, in contrast, we see strong, continuing growth in both incomes and long-term prospects for at least the 2.5 billion Asians who live in China, India, and Malaysia.

The industrialization that started in Europe 200 years ago has been spreading, with increasing speed, around the world. It took Britain 70 years to double its living standards in the 19th century. South Korea did it in 15 years, and China in 10 years.

Growth is now so strongly embedded in Asia that it’s said the recent deliberate slowdown in Chinese GDP growth, from 10-11 percent to about 8-9 percent, will primarily stimulate higher GDP growth in India.

China has also successfully managed a massive employment shift in the last decade. Employment in the inefficient and money-losing state-owned industries has been reduced by 20 million, even as self-employment by Chinese businesspeople has risen by about 20 million. This is a huge movement toward increased Chinese growth in the future financed in major part by a rise in foreign direct investment. In 2002 alone, China received more than $52 billion in foreign direct investment, close to half of it from Hong Kong (i.e., the global Chinese community). That was more investment than in any country not in the OECD “rich nations” club. Chinese exports, already large, grew by more than 34 percent last year.

India is more and more integrated into the world economy. Until 1990, India was content with what economists used to call “the Hindu rate of growth,”-less than 3 percent annually. Its recent economic growth has been 5-6 percent annually, a little higher than its population growth. Since 1990, India has begun to unravel much of its bureaucratic red tape, and is taking much greater advantage of its strengths in textiles, computers, and most recently, modern medicine. India is now attracting patients who need major surgery, both from Third World countries that lack the facilities and skills to perform them, and from First World countries such as Britain and Canada where public health systems have long waiting lines and higher costs.

There is little doubt that the unleashing the energy and creativity of tens of millions of well-educated Indians will generate strong economic growth over the next decades.

The Problem of Moslem Extremism

Neither China nor India will be much hampered by Moslem extremism. In fact, they are likely to receive extra foreign direct investment as businesses try go avoid the negative impact of Moslem zealots in such countries as Pakistan, and Bangladesh-and perhaps even in Indonesia with its milder approach to Islam and its new democracy.

The Asian Development Bank estimated, before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, that Asia could be producing 40 percent of world GDP by 2020 or 2025. Terrorism will necessarily slow down that timetable in South Asia’s Moslem countries. The need to re-establish the will of the moderate Moslem majorities in Asian countries could cost these societies as much as a decade, though it may be resolved in somewhat less time. Ultimately, there is little question that Asian societies will reject murder and violence as the guiding principles of their societies, as all societies have done in the past.

To date, however, the lack of representative government in most Moslem countries, and the fear of fundamentalist retaliation against moderate spokespeople, has stalled the inevitable debate about extremism and moderation among Moslems. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon became unlikely surrogates in the religious debate for control of their countries.

At the moment, it does not seem as though Moslem extremists are having a major impact on world meat demand, since Moslems have traditionally been too poor to eat much meat per capita. And, of course, they eat virtually no pork at all. Let us think more broadly, however, about the reality that Moslems are just as hungry for high-quality protein and the valuable micronutrients in livestock products as other humans. The surge in poultry demand in Indonesia since the Asian Collapse is testimony to this fact.

Moslems will eventually achieve economic growth. The competitive nature of societies virtually guarantees that they will. The replicated model of modern industrialization- and the massive, unprecedented decline in world trade barriers-will make this easier to achieve with each passing decade.

When the Moslem countries achieve economic growth, they will demand poultry, lamb, and milk, if not pork. Those commodities will require more feedstuffs. That will add Moslem demand to the already-apparent demand among Christians, Confucians, Hindus and Buddhists for better diets. The global surge will stimulate the demand for more intensive and productive use of the land and water in agriculture. This will then stimulate somewhat higher real prices to call forth the new farming efforts and investments.

The Pet Challenge

There will even be a pet challenge.

Brazil is already in the midst of a massive expansion of its pet population. There has been a one-third increase in dog and cat numbers in the last half-dozen years, and more cats and dogs are undoubtedly to come. Pet food statistics were not even kept until the last decade, but sales are rising rapidly in both volume and value as more affluent households want their pets to have “the best.” The only creatures that stimulate more intensive caring than children are pets. (And pets don’t argue or want the car keys.)

In China, with its one-child policy and rising incomes, we can expect a surge in pet ownership as people divert their parenting instincts to companion animals. The traditional Chinese pets were crickets and small birds, but with affluence we can expect Chinese people to stop eating dogs and put them on leashes. Pet stores will be a growth industry in China, as they already are in Brazil. We can expect perhaps 500 million companion cats and dogs in China in 2050, and their dietary demands will be added to the length of the world’s “grocery” list.

The pet challenge, like the better-diet challenge, will reverberate around the world.

The Farm Subsidies Were Already Shaky

The stifling effect of farm subsidies on world farm trade is a well-known story. However, the First World’s farm subsidies have been on shaky ground for decades. The first problem was rising yields, which not only increased farm subsidy costs, but produced massive food surpluses for export-even in Japan with its limited cropland.

More recently, the commercialization of agriculture has made it much harder for politicians to claim that subsidies are helping the “small farmers” of the world. However, politicians are very reluctant to stop buying votes with public funds.

Witness the United States in 2002. The U.S. was split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. Control of the entire U.S. government seemed to turn on a few farmer votes in the Midwest. To make matters worse, the federal budget seemed to be in surplus at the time, so there was no political constraint against increasing American farm subsidies. A lavish new farm bill was passed by the congress, and President Bush did not dare to oppose it.

Unfortunately for farmers, the 2002 election also proved that American voters were ready to hear about reforming our massive Social Security system. It’s basically a pyramid scheme, and we will soon have less than three workers to support each of the 77 million “baby-boom” retirees-an impossible tax burden for our younger generation.

Within the next five years or so, the United States will be forced to reform its entitlements for the elderly-Social Security and Medicare. The unfunded obligation on those massive social subsidies is so huge that a pay-as-you-go system would double Americans’ taxes. The outlook for farm subsidy money in Washington, D.C. after the current farm bill ends in 2007 is bleak.

Nor does Western Europe’s capacity to finance future farm subsidies look very promising. EU economic growth is currently less than 2 percent per year, and Germany has lately been achieving about half of that. Europe has not been creating many additional off-farm non-government jobs in recent decades, and there is no indication of a new flow of off-farm income that could be “painlessly” shared with EU farmers. Yet the EU has just taken in 10 new countries, millions of additional farmers and tens of millions of hectares of farmland. The EU needs WTO farm trade liberalization perhaps even more than the United States or Brazil.

My prediction is that EU expansion and WTO farm trade liberalization will lead to fundamental Common Agricultural Reform-keyed not to commercial production but to direct income payments favoring small farmers.

Who Will Be the Winners in the Export Markets of the Next Decade?

Unless the current WTO negotiations successfully lower the world’s farm trade barriers, there will be few winners in farm exporting over the next decade-and the winners will not win much. There might be modest gains for farmers who do not currently get very much government subsidy, and thus have been forced to keep their production costs low. The biggest of these winners are likely to be the South American giants, Argentina and Brazil. Of these, the biggest is likely to be Brazil.

However, slow market growth and low prices will not finance much improvement in Latin America infrastructure, the biggest weakness of most farm exporting countries.

The real “winners” in an unreformed farming world would be farmers in China, India, and other Third World countries where economic growth is raising incomes for formerly poor consumers. Their governments-and consumers-would likely continue overpaying for low-yield crops and the rape of the Third World environments.

In that sense, all of the world’s export farmers and all of its urban publics share a strong interest in farm trade liberalization. If Brazil, the United States, the EU and Third World consumers succeed in liberalizing the WTO farm trade rules, many people and many countries will be winners, in many ways.

Among the major winners:

Brazil, which has low land costs and relatively low labor costs, also gets relatively high yields. Brazil also has much of the good farmland not yet being cropped in the world. Most nations are pasturing only land that cannot be cropped because of arid climates, steep slopes, or short growing seasons. The U.S. Department of Agriculture believes that 70 to 90 million hectares of Brazilian pasture could be converted to cropland in the future.

Brazil’s ability to expand rapidly is constrained by its lack of infrastructure and a shortage of capital. Brazil suffers from high transport costs, because it lacks railroads, export-suited rivers, and even paved roads over much of its Western frontier. Nor will farm exports likely finance new railroads.

The United States has ultra-high yields and the world’s most cost-effective farm exporting infrastructure. Many of its farms are near low-cost river transport and the rest of them within reach of good railroads already built and amortized. Even its remote country roads are paved, and it has plenty of trucks. The U.S. has burdened itself less severely than Western Europe with high land costs driven by high farm subsidies. The U.S. also has about 16 million hectares of usable cropland in the Conservation Reserve.

Turkey, too, is capable of major increases in crop production. This is partly through the development of its huge new irrigated projects in the Upper Euphrates Valley, where it is creating the equivalent of a new California. Turkey also has the potential to sharply increase its dryland crop production through extending conservation tillage across its large tracts of semi-arid rainfed land. Conservation tillage could double dryland production, by radically reducing soil erosion, and retaining much more of the rainfall in the root zone of its fields. Turkey has now finally been promised membership in the European Union, a move virtually forced by the extremism in other Moslem countries. Thus Turkey will benefit from broader and cheaper access to capital.

Romania is farming with horse-carts and saved seeds, but it has the broad, fertile plain of the Danube Valley in its favor, and now is a new member of the EU. Expect Romania to radically increase the yields-and export potential-from its 10 million hectares of cropland.

Biotechnology: Wave of the Future?

The United States has doubled its yield of meat per acre of farmland in the past 30 years. This has been due to higher grain yields, higher soybean yields, more complete feed rations, better livestock pharmaceuticals, and better animal genetics. Pessimists, however, have said technology was running out.

On the contrary, America has just harvested a record-busting yield of corn and soybeans. Corn yields this year are estimated at nearly 8.9 tons per acre, on 30 million hectares of harvested land. The yield is nearly 13 percent higher than any previous U.S. corn yield average, but it fits the long-term trend of increase a slight gain of 2 to 3 percent per year. The soybean yield was also a record, but not by as much. It, too, fits the long-run trend of increase. Both crops obviously benefited from good weather-but it is also likely that they benefited from the new biotech seeds that permitted better, more cost-effective weed and insect control.

How much of this record yield was due to biotechnology? We don’t yet know.

We do know that China and India are getting much higher cotton yields, due to the improved pest control of Bt varieties.

I am impressed that Bt corn test plots in the Philippines outyielded farmers’ corn fields by 80 percent, testifying to the importance of insect control in tropical fields. Biotech has given us our first victories over plant viruses (in bananas, papayas, and sweet potatoes).

I am highly impressed by the new blight-proof potatoes bred in both the U.S. and Europe. The blight-resistance gene was discovered in a wild potato some 50 years ago, but it had defied efforts to cross-breed it into modern potatoes that taste good and yield well. Now, biotech will prevent a recurrence of the Irish Potato Famine in modern Asia. Will that encourage more densely populated countries to rely more heavily on the ultra-high food yields per acre of the potato? It’s too early to know, although Rwanda tripled its potato production in the 1990s.

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

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.

The Organic Alternative

Many non-farmers have praised organic farming as the appropriate path for Europe and American agricultures. We can understand why they believe it. Affluent city-dwellers see modern agriculture as producing too much food while employing too few farmers. They think organic farming will solve both problems at once.

The reality is that few people want to be organic farmers; doing the hand weeding and the composting, being too often at the mercy of insects and crop diseases; and needing far more land to get the same food production.

In 1999, Denmark’s high-level technical committee on organic farming, the Bichel Committee, revealed (if only in the fine print of its report) that a true organic mandate would cut Denmark’s human food production by 47 percent. Its pork and poultry industries would be slashed 70 percent for lack of feed. Much of the countryside would have to be planted to green-chop forage, to be hauled to feedlot cattle, so their manure could be slathered over the countryside. All of this to replace the natural N from the air (which is 78 percent N) captured today by the Haber-Bosch industrial process invented in 1908.

If Europe went all-organic, it would probably not be able to export any farm products at all, even with the best efforts of newly energized farmers in Poland and Romania.

Dr. Vaclav Smil, author of Enriching the Earth, a fine book on the history of nitrogen in agriculture, says the world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of N we currently take from the air industrially. America would need the manure from another 900 million to one billion cattle, at three to 30 acres of forage per beast. The U.S. has only 2.1 billion acres in its lower 48 states, so we’d have room for our cities and manure production, but no room for food, forests or national parks.

The Crucial Importance of Farm Trade Reform

Wheat yields in Argentina are double those of Brazil. Sugar yields in Brazil, on the other hand, are double those of beets in the temperate-zone countries. Dairy cattle suffer in the moist tropics. Desert countries have trouble growing feed for livestock and poultry. All over the world, the comparative advantages are far greater and more permanent in farming than in any other industry.

At the same time, the world’s best farmland has relatively few wildlife species. The Great Plains of North America had 60 million bison, 100 million antelopes, and a billion prairie dogs-but that’s only three species. Researchers have recently counted more wild species in three square kilometers of the Amazon rain forest than in all of North America.

The goal of world farm policy should be to use its best land as intensively as sustainability permits, and to leave as much of the poorer land as possible to Nature. Free trade and agricultural research are the two powerful ways to do this.

Without farm trade liberalization, the 21st century promises to be a period of stifling stagnation for the world’s export farmers, and a period of high food costs and wildlands destruction in the densely-populated parts of the Third World.

With farm trade liberalization, there will be a hugely dynamic interaction between population growth, increased incomes, consumer tastes, pet numbers, cropland, and new technology. There is no way we can pick all the winners in advance-but we can be sure that this competition will be healthier and more constructive than the subsidy-imposed stagnation of world farm markets that is the alternative.

Presentation to Hanover College
Alex Avery

The name of my presentation reflects my fundamentalist rejection of the term genetically altered food. It’s an anti-biotech activist term deliberately designed to elicit distaste and turn off consumers. But more fundamentally, it is totally inaccurate. As a scientist, I simply cannot perpetuate the use of that term.

The terms “food” and “genetic” for the most part don’t belong together. Do we mate with out food? Do we “inherit” genes from our food? No, we eat and digest it. We break down the DNA, RNA, proteins and sugars in “genetically altered” food into their base components the same as we digest and metabolize the constituents of all of our traditional foods.

If corn meal from biotech-improved corn varieties is till corn meal, i.e. starch and proteins, then the “food” hasn’t really been altered at all. What is altered is the genetics of the plants that produce the food—for the most part, things like resistance to disease, pests, drought, herbicides, salt water, etc.

So, I stubbornly have changed the name of my presentation to the promise and perils of agricultural biotechnology. I will cover some examples of the incredible power of agricultural biotechnology and what impacts they will have on agriculture in the 21st century. How they will make our farming more productive, more sustainable, and more environmentally sensitive. How we will make our food safer and more nutritious. How it will lead to new roles for the farm, such as growing pharmaceutical compounds.

But I also want to go beyond a dry, technical discussion of ag biotechnology—genetic engineering—because I don’t think the debate we’ve been stuck in for the past 5-7 years is truly about the technology of genetic engineering and it’s potential perils and pitfalls. I think the debate is for the large part more fundamental. It is about the changes in the social, community, and business structure of agriculture that have occurred over the past 75 years. It is about the change from small, mom-and-pop operations to big agribusiness and vertical integration. It is about the visible role of large corporations, patents, knowledge, and economic power. As such, I want to address some of these issues.

Finally, I will remind all that this issue is also about the fundamental realities of the size and scope of humanity and the daunting challenges of feeding and clothing a larger and more affluent global population without further degrading our environment or destroying biodiversity. These are the key reasons why agricultural biotechnology are so critically important for humanity in the 21st century.

Promises Made, Promises Kept

First, the incredible realities—not promises, but current realities-of genetic engineering in agriculture.

Agricultural biotechnology, or genetic engineering, has already begun transforming agriculture around the globe. It is making farming more environmentally friendly and more sustainable. And 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 their own insect protectants, perhaps 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 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. No-till farming is when weeds are killed with herbicides rather than tilling the soil; plowing, disking, scraping, etc. Since the introduction of biotech herbicide tolerant crops, no-till crop acreage has increased nearly 40 percent. Two thirds of soybean growers who reduced their tillage since 1996 cited herbicide tolerant crops as a key factor. I must point out, however, that there are also non-genetically engineered, conventionally-bred herbicide tolerant crops on the market.

Why is no-till and conservation tillage so important? The absence of plowing and tilling leaves a layer of crop and weed residues on the topsoil to protect against wind and rain erosion. Crop seeds are knifed into the soil and the slits closed again with rollers. Farming this way cuts soil erosion by 65-95%. Instead of losing our topsoil, we’re building it. This also protects water bodies from sediment pollution. No till and conservation tillage farming 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.

Finally, the soil quality and sustainability benefits are huge. No-till and conservation tillage result in 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 detritovors.

Importantly, biotech has given us crops tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, or Roundup, one of the softest chemicals in terms of environmental impact. It breaks down rapidly into harmless byproducts. Using glyphosate rather than other, less soft herbicides is a big biotech benefit.

As Stanly Trimble of UCLA has shown in research published in Science, soil erosion from modern farming is now far lower than commonly thought. In one “highly erodible” basin in Wisconsin that he studied extensively, erosion was only 6% of what it was in the 1930s.

Nor are the benefits of herbicide tolerant crops limited to farmers in the developed countries. One of the Subsaharan Africa’s worst pests is witchweed, a parasitic weed that can devastate corn and sorghum, the key food grains in the region. A new strategy is preparing for field trials, which would plant herbicide-tolerant corn seeds, soaked in systemic herbicide which can kill the witchweed as it attempts to invade the crop 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, 18% 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. However, the bacteria sprayed on the crops die immediately and the toxin protein breaks down in a couple of days. So farmers must spray crops with Bt 6-10 times per season or more. This uses fuel, time, and compacts the soil. Moreover, as the protein degrades quickly, pests are more likely to develop resistance by a sub-lethal dose. Incorporating the protein into the plant drastically reduces the chances of pest resistance, as the dose remains consistently high. And, we are able to tweak the protein and tailor it to specific caterpillar pests. 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 are increased productivity, less pest damage and, thus, higher quality crops, and increased profitability. All of these benefits are scale neutral, and farmers from subsistence to mega have adopted biotech crops rapidly.

Globally, both herbicide tolerant and insect resistant crops are and will have significant positive benefits for farmers and humanity. For example, in the Kwa Zulu Natal province of South Africa, esophageal cancer rates have been historically high. The suspected culprit is fumonisin, a fungal toxin that contaminates the corn supply due to inadequate pest protection, crop damage, and environmental conditions. In fact, fumonisin was discovered in 1989 by South African researchers attempting to explain health problems in cattle. More recently, fumonisin has recently been linked by NIH and CDC scientists to spina bifida and other birth defects as it blocks the uptake of folic acid.

Due to the proactive work by scientists in South Africa, farmers in the Makhathini Flats have begun growing Bt white corn. In 2003, over 200,000 acres were planted there, by 90% of the farmers, most of them women. The farmers have seen productivity increases of 10-80% and fumonisin levels lowered. Their incomes are up, they have more time, and their children are likely healthier.

This should be extended into Central America, where rates of neural tube birth defects are 30 times higher than the U.S.

(Note: Fumonisin toxin contamination is a significant concern with organic corn. The UK’s Food Standards Agency last year tested 33 cornmeal brands for fumonisin as a test of a new European Union safety limit of 500 parts per billion. Six of the brands were organic, and all six failed and had to be recalled from stores. Only four brands of non-organic corn meal failed, and these were from corn grown in Turkey.)

One third of biotech crops are now grown in developing countries. Farmers in South Africa and the Philippines are growing Bt corn for food. Indian and Chinese smallholder farmers are growing large amount 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%.

Indian farmers are officially growing only 250,000 acres of Bt crops, or about 1% of the total Indian cotton area of 22 million acres. But there are literally thousands of acres of illegal Bt crops—the result of fraud by an Indian seed company and the impatience of Indian farmers. But it tells you what the farmers in developing countries that have had a taste of biotech crops think about biotech. The productivity, pollution, and sustainability benefits are significant.

How about a super-eco-potato? A potato resistant to the Colorado Potato Beetle and a devastating virus spread by aphids. As a result, instead of spraying potato crops with broad spectrum insecticides 7-15 times per season, only 2-3 applications are needed. The wildlife benefits are huge. Pheasant forage for insects in the potato fields for the first time. Sound like a fantasy? Nope. It was grown for two years before McDonald’s complained about controversy. It is no longer grown and potato farmers have returned to 7-15 sprays per year. The only place this potato continues to be grown is John Ashcroft’s wife’s Washington, DC garden.

Recently, scientists in Wisconsin, California, and the Netherlands collaborated to create the first “blight-proof” potato. Potato blight is the fungus that caused the potato famine. It destroys potatoes. Even after 50 years of trying, we’ve been unable to breed into edible potatoes the resistance from inedible wild potatoes. Genetic engineering has enabled the blight-resistance genes to be identified and inserted into modern, edible, high-yield potatoes. So far, the potatoes have resisted every type of blight thrown at them. They may be ready for farmer’s fields in 5 years.

Understand, that every year, millions and millions of pounds of fungicides are sprayed prophylactically on potatoes. Organic potato farmers spray copper sulfate, a heavy metal, as their fungicides. Non-organic farmers use safer and less environmentally damaging fungicides, however, they still pose potential ecological risks. The blight-proof potato would require few if any fungicide treatments. Combining the blight-proof trait with insect and virus resistance could cut global fungicide and insecticide use by tens of million of pounds per year. No more spraying, fuel use, soil compaction.

Potatoes are an important nutritious food, and growing in importance in developing countries. Rwanda has tripled its potato production through the 1990s, growing some 250 lbs per person annually. Currently, their potato crops remain vulnerable to blight—as the Rwandan people remain vulnerable to hunger and famine.

We can now grow 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. These are our most productive lands and salts are in all water used for irrigation. For example, the canola plants store up to 18 grams of salt in their leaves during the growing season. Their oilseeds have no more salts that 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.

To tackle the global problem of aluminum toxic soils, Mexican researchers inserted a gene for citric acid into tobacco, papaya, and rice and created the world’s first aluminum-tolerant crops. This is a problem on 40% of the worlds arable cropland. The citric acid is excreted from the plant roots—a strategy they copied from naturally aluminum tolerant grasses. The citrate locks the aluminum ions in the soil, preventing their uptake by the plants and permitting far more plant growth and yield.

We can now fully explore and exploit the yield-enhancing genes from wild crop relatives as well. Two researchers from Cornell University reasoned that more than a century of inbreeding the world’s crop plants had significantly narrowed the genetic base of our crops. They also reasoned that the world’s gene banks contained a large number of genes from wild relatives of our crop plants. They selected a number of genes from wild relatives of the tomato family, a crop where yields have been rising by about 1 percent per year. The wild-relative genes produced a 50 percent gain in yields and a 23 percent gain in solids. The same researchers selected two promising genes from wild relatives of the rice plant—a crop where no yield gains had been achieved since the Chinese pioneered hybrids some 15 years ago. Each of the two genes produced a 17 percent gain in the highest-yielding Chinese hybrids; the genes are thought to be complementary and capable of raising rice yields by 20 to 40 percent.

Nutrition will be advanced as well. The Rockefeller Foundation has funded research that has overcome two of the world’s largest sources of malnutrition with genetically-modified rice. Around the world, some 400 million people currently suffer a chronic severe shortage of Vitamin A. About 14 million of these people go blind every year, including about 8 million children. Rockefeller’s new “golden rice” contains beta carotene, which the human body readily turns into Vitamin A. (The beta-carotene literally turns the rice golden.) The new rice also has three new genes which overcome the chronic iron deficiency among people in rice cultures; 4 billion people suffer this iron deficiency, and the women are at increased risk of birth complications. (The phytate in rice tied up the iron in their bodies no matter how much iron they consumed; the new rice has phytase to free the iron.) “Golden rice” will offer improved health to billions of women and children in rice-eating countries who could not have been helped through factory-food additives—at a tiny cost to society and no cost to them.

We’re also reducing the allergenicity of foods for the first time in human history. Researchers are currently working on hypoallergenic soy, wheat, and peanuts. While the peanuts appear to be a long-shot, the soy and wheat are nearing the human trial stages. Food allergies kill dozens of US citizens every year.

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 of toxic pesticides—fewer even than organic farmers. This alone is an enormously important point.

Why? 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. Our success will also depend heavily on how urgently we explore such high-tech methods as biotechnology in food, fiber, and forestry.

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.

Yet many who we would think would be with us in this, and would encourage resource conserving, land conserving, habitat conserving, high-yield, low-impact farming technologies have lined up against them. Why have so many environmental groups opposed agricultural biotechnology?

There are four main arguments against agricultural genetic engineering: Human health concerns, environmental concerns, natural/organic ethics, and corporate control of the food system.

So far, the human health concerns have been completely unjustified. Even the famed “Starlink” fiasco was a non-health issue. We know only that it was hundreds of times safer than peanut butter. Not even a hiccup has occurred due to biotech crops. Environmental concerns have also not yet been justified. Monarch butterflies are alive and thriving. Weeds haven’t overtaken fields or gardens. The sky hasn’t fallen. Ethics are a personal matter.

Then there is what I think is the real issue: Corporate control of the “food system”. This is what I think motivates the vast majority of those opposed to ag biotechnology. Those opposed to ag biotech are also opposed to the “corporate” farm paradigm, as in farmers using seeds and inputs developed by large corporations and farming as a business rather than a way of life. The “corporate control” label is to me amusing, as no corporation controls any consumers in a free market. Any company must earn its market share. Consumers are always free to buy competing products.

How many companies are needed for effective competition? Two. Look at soft drinks: Coke and Pepsi. Does Coke “control” its consumers? Of course not. Same with inputs and seeds. Today there are six large biotech seed companies. And there are many more smaller ones who have licensed particular traits into their own genetic lines, expanding even further the choices available.

The anti-corporate activism declaims that we should only allow those technologies and policies that “empower” farmers and “the people”. Yet this is a vision of poverty and stagnation, not of economic growth, empowerment, and advancement.

We live in advanced societies, made possible through technology and knowledge, where our children have a high chance of reaching adulthood healthy and productive. Malnutrition and disease are comparatively low. We have good living standards, clean drinking water, good sanitation, low environmental pollution, and high-quality, protected wildlands. Much of this is possible because so few of us must dedicate our lives solely to producing our food.

Instead of extending these benefits to more of the world’s people, we are told to reject these technologies and condemn corporations in favor of subsistence lifestyles. It is about keeping people on small farms—for their own good. It is about keeping them from being “exploited” by corporations.

Why not let them make that choice. I find that the places in the world with few or no private businesses and corporations are places I’d rather not be.

But fundamentally, do we want people free to make their own business choices, weathly and capitalized enough to buy seeds and inputs from a range of potential private suppliers in a free market system? Or do we want them dependent on government handouts or the charity of the horribly underfunded international ag research system?

Do we want a socialist agricultural system or a private enterprise system? I submit that the environmental and productivity (starvation) record of socialist ag systems is far worse than the private model. And all the developing country farmers I have spoken to over the past 10 years have unanimously preferred the private enterprise system.

Instead of creating further barriers to these technologies—thereby making them far more expensive and the supplier/innovator pool far more restricted—social and environmental activists should change course and begin actively promoting these crops. Help reduce regulatory barriers, increase access, and steer developments toward even greater environmental sensitivity.

The risks (perils) of ag biotechnology are manageable and far less than the realizable and needed gains made possible by it. We have the capability through biotechnology to feed and clothe the world’s larger and more affluent population using less land and inputs than we currently use. This would conserve the world’s remaining wildlife habitats at the same time as we improve nutrition, food safety, and sustainability.

That’s why I’m a strong biotech supporter. And also why I’m happy that this war is nearly over and the full promise of biotech will begin to be realized.

Presentation to the American Meat Institute: The Meat Industry and the Consumer Confidence Challenge Dennis AveryIt’s happened again. The food industry has once again allowed activists and headline-hungry journalists to turn the safest food system in human history into a house of horrors. Once again, there has been no effective answer or strategy on behalf of the food system to the unwarranted public attack.The Mad Cow Media Circus is probably over-for the time being-but we’ll be paying the price for the public’s admission to that media circus for decades-in tighter regulations, heavier inspections and lost public confidence. In cattle, the cost may be $40 per head – which would make the annual cost of BSE non-confidence close to $1.5 billion per year. In the case of confinement hogs and poultry, the regulatory costs of defending indoor production are equally substantial, and continuing to rise.Modern agriculture has lost another round to the know-nothings who pretend that organic and natural is the best way to feed a more-populous world that urgently wants to keep its wildlife.Today, the cattle and feed industries are just praying that the USDA will find no additional cases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy as they test hundreds of thousands of animals, and that things will get back to “normal.” That’s unlikely.We’re hoping against all odds that Japan and the other beef-importing countries that have suspended U.S. beef imports will not keep their bans in place for years to come, in order to favor their own farmers.We’re hoping here today that the activists are not sitting in their offices right now, plotting new attacks to undermine our faith in our food. Which, of course, is an impossible dream.We’re hoping that McDonald’s and the other big retailers that market U.S. meat, eggs and milk are not going to demand more and more costly changes in the food production and processing systems to protect their investments and their reputations from the next activist foray. Bigger cages, no antibiotics, no cages at all, pasture-only feeding? We have no idea what they’ll demand next – because of pressure from the public dictated by the activists and their symbiotic journalists.Agriculture looks at Mad Cow as an aberration that was impossible to foresee. An unknown disease, caused by a misfolded protein that no one knew existed, may have done what we thought was impossible, crossing over two species, from sheep to cattle to humans, through a rendering system that had previously been safe and environmentally constructive.That rendering system itself was invented for environmental and health reasons: nobody wanted billions of pounds of rotting slaughter scraps lying around the countryside, or even buried in pits where dogs or wild animals could dig them up. How much better to turn the slaughter by-products into meat and bone meal, and then to make use of that protein, so we didn’t have to clear still more forest for more livestock feed.The meat industry was holding true to the reality that land is the scarcest resource. Humans are already farming half the land on the planet that isn’t under deserts or glaciers. The world’s population is still growing, though more slowly, and getting richer. They’ll demand three times as much farm output by 2050 and perhaps five times the livestock products we produce today.Fortunately, we’ve doubled the meat output per acre in the First World over the past 30 years. Part of that is higher crop yields. Part of it is better breeding and better feed rations. Part of it is better processing and markeing. All of it represents a wildlands conservation miracle.Unfortunately, unless we triple the yields of crops and livestock again, over the next 45 years, we risk losing the world’s wildlife after all. That’s why biotechnology is important. That’s why the eco-activist model of organic farming can’t be allowed to win even a temporary victory.But our opponents don’t see Mad Cow and Industrial Agriculture the way we do. They really don’t. They claim there’s already enough food produced on the planet for everybody – especially since humans don’t need meat. They say that producing more food will just produce more people who will need more food, and on and on. They say that factory farming is eroding all the soil, using up all the water, and polluting all the streams. Nitrogen from the farms is causing “dead zones” downstream and killing all the fish. Antibiotics from livestock are making it less and less effective to treat human illnesses with antibiotics. And now, industrial farming has created Mad Cow disease.We’ll get to the realities later, but these are things they tell each other and tell the public.What does agriculture tell the public? Nothing. We don’t seem to feel any need to tell the public anything. We produce lots of safe food at low cost. That’s all they need to know, and they already know it. This crisis will blow away just like the others.After all, the public wouldn’t do anything truly stupid to farmers and jeopardize their food supply, would they? Just out of ignorance?Yes, this crisis will blow away, after costing agriculture billions of dollars, and making the public even more willing to believe the next “crisis” about modern agriculture.Urban Myths Working Against Agriculture1.Organic Farming Would Be Kinder to the EnvironmentToday’s consumers have been told organic farming is kinder to the environment. They hear that organic farmers don’t use any pesticides, which isn’t true. They hear that conventional farmers’ pesticides are destroying huge amounts of wildlife-which isn’t true either.We can resolve this “he-said, she-said” debate very simply. By pointing out that if conventional farmers hadn’t tripled their yields in the years since 1960, all of the world’s wildlife habitat would already have been cleared for low-yield crops to produce today’s food supply.Recently, the UN Environmental Program published a new edition of The Atlas of Biodiversity. In it, they mention that the current rate of species loss-20 birds, fish, and mammals in the last third of the 20th century-is half the rate of wildlife extinctions in the last third of the 19th century. In fact, the rate of species extinctions today is as low as it’s been in 500 years.Why? Primarily because high-yield farming eliminated the need to clear more land for food production.Today’s farmers are feeding 6.3 billion people on the same cropland that used to be inadequate to feed 2.3 billion in 1940.If we extend high-yield farming to Africa and the world’s currently-marginal farmlands, we shouldn’t have to clear any more land for farming ever again. If we don’t extend high-yield farming to the Third World, thousands of the world’s wildlife species will be destroyed in the next century.Organic farming is an environmental fraud. The first and foremost rule of organic farming is that ‘thou shalt not use industrial fertilizer.” This means organic farming needs more land to make up for its lower yields (typically 10 to 40 percent lower) and it needs more land for green manure crops or more cattle to produce more manure.In Denmark, a high-level technical committee reported in 1999 that an all-organic mandate would cut Danish food production by 47 percent. Most of Denmark’s farmland would have to be planted to forage crops and fed to feedlot cattle so their manure could then be spread thickly over the whole Danish landscape.Dr. Vaclav Smil, an award-winning science author from the University of Manitoba, says all-organic farming for America would take the manure from another 900 million to 1 billion cattle, at 3 to 30 acres of forage per beast. There are only 1.2 billion acres in the whole lower 48 States. We’d have to eliminate half our citizens, or plant all the forests to pasture grass. The world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of nitrogen we take from the air each year. (The air is 78 percent N.)2. Confinement Feeding is Bad for the EnvironmentBobby Kennedy Jr., and a whole host of his urban friends are telling the world that it is unkind and unfair to keep hogs and chickens indoors, and he’s promising to sue all of our livestock back outdoors.Let’s point out first that indoor hogs and chickens have roughly a 20 percent better feed conversion efficiency. That’s because they’re more comfortable. In the summer, they’re shaded from the sun and shielded from the rain, with cooling fans to ease the hot days. In the winter, they’re protected from the cold and snow.This is particularly important for hogs, which can’t sweat (that’s why they make mud) and don’t grow a heavy hair coat in the cold weather.Equally important, confinement livestock present us with the same question of saving land for nature. In America, with 6 million sows and 1000 million market hogs per year, we’d need pasture for 56 million animals at any one time. Organic farmers say they can stock 12 animals per acre. That would mean reserving about 14 million acres of American land for hog pasture, or the farmland total of Indiana.However, we’re already using Indiana, and its record corn and soybean crops weren’t adequate to supply global demand this year. Thus, to move our hogs back outdoors, we’d have to clear additional land, probably in a forest. The forest land usually isn’t as productive, so we might need to budget 1.5 acres of forest land for each acre of current farmland. Let’s guess at 21 million acres.Where would we clear another 21 million acres of farmland from today’s U.S. forests?The National Park system has about 80 million acres of land, so it’s comforting to know that we could put all our hogs back outdoors by using only about one-fourth of the national park land.Unfortunately, that doesn’t allow the hogs to feed themselves from their normal diet of roots, tubers and vegetation. If allowing the hogs to live “naturally” is the goal, then we should aim higher. We should allow only hogs fed only on pasture and plants they harvest themselves. Ohio State says a pasture-only system can be operated at about 3 hogs per acre. That quadruples the land area, but nothing’s too good for our hogs. All we have to do is clear all of the U.S. National Park Service land for hogs, and find new jobs for the park rangers. The government biologists can be put to work counting the wildlife species endangered by the land clearing.Then we can put the chickens outdoors on the land from the state parks. The foxes will love it.3. Pesticides Threaten the FrogsIn 1995, a group of Minnesota school children visited a local pond, and found deformed frogs-too many legs or too few. They reported it on the Internet, and over the next three years reports of deformed frogs flooded in from across the country. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency quickly decided it must be pesticides in the water, and spent millions of dollars trying to prove it. Now, we’ve learned that the frogs are deformed because of a natural parasite, the trematode, which burrows into the developing leg joints of the tadpoles. Frogs don’t become deformed in ponds that don’t have trematodes. Pesticides have not been implicated by any science, though the Minnesota officials still refuse to admit this.In the mountains of California, red-legged and yellow-legged frogs are often absent from the lakes. Several researchers are trying to prove that pesticide-laden dust from the San Joaquin Valley is being blown up into the lakes and killing the frogs.Indeed, traces of various pesticides were found in the mountain lake waters!However, the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California/Berkeley have now proved the cause of the frog decline: hungry trout. In the high lakes stocked with trout, there are no frogs. The aggressive fish eat the frog’s eggs and tadpoles. In the wilderness areas, where the lakes are no longer stocked with trout, the frogs thrive. When researchers netted all the fish out of a lake without frogs, the frog population “exploded,” even though there were still traces of pesticides in the water.4. Farming and Logging Caused the Salmon Decline in the Pacific NorthwestThe salmon numbers in the Columbia River of Oregon and Washington began to decline in 1977. Environmentalists were quick to blame overfishing, logging, pollution and the water demands of irrigated farming. State and federal governments began spending billions of dollars on logging restrictions, fish ladders, reserving water for off-season flow, and barging young fish down to the sea. Nothing helped. But in the fall of 2002, the salmon came back. Columbia River had a record salmon run, and the salmon numbers have recovered to their former abundance. I had predicted this, three years earlier, in a Knight-Ridder newspaper column.How? The salmon catch data for the past 100 years of the Columbia River and Gulf of Alaska fisheries clearly reveal a 25-year cycle. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents take the salmon food to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon/Washington salmon fishery shrinks. Then, for the next 25 years, the Oregon/Washington salmon fishermen flourish, while the Gulf of Alaska shrinks. Studies now show that this cycle is Pacific-wide, exhibited most dramatically a 250year shifts in sardine and anchovy populations.Did the Sierra Club not know about the cycle? If not, we can’t trust their advice on fish management. Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us-in which case we can’t trust their advice on fish management.But the public hasn’t yet heard about the salmon cycle. The Portland Oregonian just said it was “changed sea conditions.” A fish researcher from the University of Washington-who has published in peer-reviewed journals on the 25-year cycle-is on TV saying it was the $1 billion per year in federal fish management subsidies. He’d rather be funded than right.5. Fertilizer from the Midwest Threatens the Gulf of MexicoDuring the Clinton Administration, a White House Task Force recommended a 30 percent cut in Midwest fertilizer use because of a so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, the task force admitted in its report that it could find no evidence of either ecological or economic harm to the Gulf from the summer algae bloom that causes the “dead zone.” The first reports of such algae blooms in the Gulf go back into the 19th century. Fisheries experts say that most of the nutrients for the Gulf’s vast, rich fishery come down the Mississippi River, and when fresh, nutrient-laden water hits salt water, the laws of biology and physics guarantee period algae blooms. It’s a common feature at the mouths of 40 major rivers around the world.Know also that Midwest fertilizer use has not risen since 1980, while the yields from the corn that gets most of the N fertilizer have risen 25 percent. Obviously, more of the farm fertilizer is being harvested as corn. More of the Midwest’s poultry and livestock have been moved indoors, where their wastes are carefully collected and spread on growing crops. If the “dead zone” is expanding, which is in serious doubt, where is the additional N coming from? The sewage treatment plants of St. Louis and Kansas City?Don’t forget either, that before farmers settled the Great Plains, there were 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds and grasshoppers, all eating the grass and defecating. The N may have taken longer to reach the Gulf, but it’s likely that Cortez could have found an algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico when he invaded Mexico in 1520.6. Modern Farming Causes Soil ErosionIn a piece of elegant ‘soil archeology,” Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA went back to the highly-erosive Coon Creek watershed in southern Wisconsin, and redid the 1938 Soil Conservation Service surveys, in the 1970s and again in the 1990s.. What he found is that the Coon Creek watershed is currently losing only 6 percent as much topsoil as it lost during the Dust Bowl era.Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and especially to conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history.Dr. Trimble says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. The fact is that they lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.Incidentally, conservation tillage cuts soil erosion by 65-95 percent, and organic farmers don’t use it. They aren’t allowed to apply the herbicides.7. Farmers Cause Overpopulation by Producing Too Much FoodTed Turner claims modern farming is the root cause of global overpopulation. The reality, however, is that the food security produced by high-yield farming helped bring about the first major decline in human birth rates the world has ever seen.In 1960, the average woman in the Third World had 6.2 children. Today, she has 2.7, and since population stability is 2.1 births, the poor countries have come 75 percent of the way to stability in 34 years. No one in 1960 would have dared predict such a radical drop in birth rates. After 2050, the world’s human population will begin a slow decline.The only reduction in human birth rates ever recorded on this planet occurred as farmers’ crop yields were being tripled by the Green Revolution.8. Modern Farming Aggravates Global WarmingEco-activists hate the fact that American farmers burn diesel fuel and put nitrogen fertilizer on their crops and they’ve gotten the whole world excited about global warming.But the physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate-the ice cores, the tree rings, the cave stalagmites and the fossilized pollen grains-are telling us something quite different. They’re telling us that the Earth is ruled by an irregular solar cycle that lasts about 1500 years. That cycle is moderate (about 2 degrees C up or down), goes back a million years, and all of the Earth’s creatures and plants are adapted to it. It’s not something to be feared, it’s just something to be accommodated-until the next Ice Age brings a really bad climate.9. Global Warming and the 1,500-year Solar CycleHistory tells us of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1400 AD to 1850. Before that, there was a Medieval Warming, which lasted from about 950 AD to 1400. The temperatures during the Medieval Warming were about 2 degrees C. warmer than today in Northern Europe, and during the Little Ice Age they were about 2 degrees colder. The Romans enjoyed a moderate warming period from 200 BC to 400 AD, and the Roman Empire began to disintegrate when the Dark Ages cold period began (600 to 950 BC).The North American Pollen Database testifies that there’s been a major reorganization of this continent’s vegetation nine times in the past 14,000 years. That’s an average of once every 1650 years. The seabed sediments say these long-term cycles have been occurring for at least a million years.The Great Lakes lake levels show the 1500-year cycle too, with the water levels low during the warmings (more evaporation) and high during the cold phases.We first learned of the cycles from a Greenland ice core, which was reported in 1984. By that time, lots of people were already committed to the idea of man-made global warming. Al Gore had already held his first congressional hearing on the problem. Greenpeace had already announced that mankind must give up fossil fuels (and send in money).But most of the warming of the last 150 years took place before 1940, and thus before the big increase in CO2 emissions. We’ve had very little global warming since 1940.More important, the Greenhouse Theory says the additional CO2 will collect heat in the lower atmosphere – up to 30,000 feet. Then the heat of the atmosphere will radiate down to heat the Earth’s surface itself. But the lower atmosphere is hardly warming at all. The highly-accurate satellite reading show virtually no warming trend since 1979. The Earth’s surface is warming faster than the atmosphere that is supposed to warm it! This can’t be Greenhouse warming.There’s more. The ice cores in Antarctica clearly show CO2 and global temperature tracking closely together through 250,000 years and three Ice Ages-but the changes in CO2 lag behind the changes in temperature by 200 to 800 years! CO2 is a lagging indicator of temperature change, not the forcing agent on global climate.The physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate says we’re 150 years into a moderate, cyclical warming being caused by the sun. We used to think the sun was a constant. But now that we can send satellite measuring devices out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of the Earth, we find that it varies by fractions of a percent.And we have the linkage. We’ve known for 400 years that when the number of sunspots is low, the Earth’s climate will be cold. When the number of sunspots is high, the Earth will be warmer. And the number of sunspots is higher now than it has been in 1200 years.We also have beryllium. An isotope called Beryllium 10 is created when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. When the sun is weak, we get hit by lots of cosmic rays, and lots of beryllium 10 is created. (When the sun is active, solar winds protect us from cosmic rays.) In the last 50 years, researchers tracking ice cores find there’s less beryllium in our atmosphere than for the past 1150 years.Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly millions of years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species by 2050. But over the past 100 years, we’ve already had that much warming-and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result.Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.Will there be more and worse droughts? We don’t know, but there are always droughts. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. In either case, conservation tillage and water management will become even more important.Will malaria sweep over Virginia? History says malaria was rampant in Virginia until after World War II, when window screens and DDT helped us eradicate it. If the temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, we’ll still have window screens and pesticides.The Harsh Costs of KyotoUnfortunately, the Kyoto Treaty would bring about a bigger collapse in human standards of living than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Solar and wind power couldn’t possibly provide all the power a modern society needs, nor could nuclear power plants. (We don’t have enough uranium ore.) The Ecologist magazine in Britain says we should give up 80 percent of the fossil fuels and 75 percent of the wood we use-now, next year, in a crash program.How would it affect your life if your electricity supply was cut 80 percent and you could only drive your car two days a month?Worse, we’d have to give up the nitrogen fertilizer that supplies more than half the world’s human food.I want to see very strong proof of a CO2-warming linkage before I accept Kyoto.The Strange Anti-Human World of the Late 20th CenturyFor the past 40 years, human society has been in a unique anti-human mode. “Saving the planet” has been the watchword. For the first time in human history, kangaroo rats and flowerhead weevils are deemed more important than people.This orgy of anti-humanity was almost certainly driven, not by Rachel Carson and her erroneous 1962 book Silent Spring, but by people-hating Paul Ehrlich and his equally wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.I think people cared about the environment before Rachel Carson, and will continue to do so in the future. However, much of our eco-fervor has been due to an irrational fear that our affluence would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion additional poor brown and yellow people who might grab all the resources away from us.In Southern Africa, in 2003, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. The president of Zambia said the activists told him the U.S. corn was poison. People who were boiling poisonous roots because they had nothing else to eat were denied access to an abundance of their favorite food staple. And remember, this is the same corn that everyone in this room eats as corn flakes, tacos, and chips.The environmental movement has been broadly involved for many years in an even more deadly effort-to ban the use of DDT on the planet. The campaign against DDT has cost at least a million malaria deaths per year in the Third World-and tens of millions of lives ruined by the disease. There is no evidence that DDT harms humans, and no solid evidence that it harms birds. Nevertheless, the eco-movement has tried to ban even the indoor use of DDT in malarial regions, which could not possibly harm wildlife. On the inside walls of homes, it’s by far the most cost-effective mosquito killer, and also the longest-lasting and most effective mosquito repellent.Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior?The same moral codes that say humans are responsible for protecting Nature also say we’re also responsible for helping our fellow men. They don’t say we can become Druids, worshiping trees and practicing human sacrifice.It would certainly be easier to leave room for wildlife if we eliminated all the humans. But killing off our fellow men or forcing billions of forced abortions are not moral solutions when we have the intelligence and societal skills to save both people and wildlife.The End of the Population SurgeThe absolute best news for the planet is that the world’s recent population surge is nearly over. Farmers won’t have to feed many more people, but instead of having one billion affluent people eating meat and cheese, we’ll have at least 7 billion affluent consumers. Most of them will demand hamburgers, fish, salad bars and fresh fruit year round.There’ll even be a pet challenge. America has 112 million companion cats and dogs today. A rich, urbanized China in 2050 may still have the one-child policy, but it will also have perhaps 500 million companion cats and dogs; and, woe unto the politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.The New Surge of Support for High-Yield TechnologiesAfter the success of the Green Revolution became clear in the 1970s, a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation-founder of the key agricultural research stations in Mexico and the Philippines-spoke of his profound regret. He said that agricultural research had turned humanity into a cancer on the earth. We now know he was wrong.Now, with the end of the population surge, high-yield farming is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.In May of 2001, our Hudson Institute presented (at the National Press Club in Washington) two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the then-latest winner of the World Food Prize, and the British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, as signers of our “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry.”This remarkably broad coalition was led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, Chairman Emeritus of our Center, and the 1970 winner of the Peace Prize for his work on high-yield crops for the Green Revolution.The Declaration doesn’t endorse any agricultural technology or system. It simply states that the world urgently needs higher yields based on sustainable advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology-to save room for wildlife.At the time of the Press Club event, we feared it had been a failure. The biggest media outlet to feature the event was the American Farm Bureau News. But in the months since that event, the concept of high-yield conservation has been praised by columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October, 2003, issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly carried an article lavishly praising both high-yield farming and biotech. More startling by far, the editorial page of the New York Times recommended the Atlantic Monthly article to its readers-in a newspaper which has been editorially praising organic food and condemning high-yield farming for decades.In October of last year, the journal Science carried an editorial by Dr. Donald Kennedy, the magazine’s editor. Kennedy states that world hunger is now the overarching issue for world health-and concludes:”Unless agricultural production is increased on the good lands, population pressures will cause farmers to move upslope and deforest the hillsides. That’s a double whammy: a loss for those families, and a loss for the environment. And on already marginal lands, GM technology may offer the best hope for producing crops that can withstand drought, impoverished soils and disease. For both these reasons, we’d better resolve the GM controversy.”Half Again As Much Meat Demand in 2025All of that comes in the nick of time because the worlds’ demand for meat and livestock produce will continue to soar. The Third World is raising its meat demand three times as fast as the First World. No vegetarian societies are emerging anywhere. (India has always consumed lots of milk, and now they’re eating chicken and yearning for mutton.)Meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. We project that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025.This meat increase will be good for children, since it provides them with high-quality protein and key micronutrients. Without livestock products, children do not reach their full genetic stature, and may lag in cognitive learning. It will also be good for adults, who need calcium and protein. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, since birds and animals can nourish themselves on grass and other things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat and milk is just about the same as for the same amount of non-meat proteins and calories.Such a major meat production increase will require higher grain yields (perhaps 30 percent higher), higher oilseed yields (25 percent higher?) and still-better feed conversion ratios. These will only be possible if we continue to invest in high-yield farming research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted.It looks now as though agricultural biotechnology is winning its place in the 21st century. I’m thankful, since I do not know how we would triple the world’s crop yields again in the next 50 years without it. And unless we triple the crop yields again, we risk losing most of the world’s wildlands.More Globalization, Not LessThe world also urgently needs farm trade liberalization. Obviously, most of the increase in global meat consumption will occur outside of North America. It is also true that much of the meat consumption gain will occur in densely populated countries that will be critically short of land and water to produce their own livestock products cost-effectively.Liberalization of farm trade remains a strong imperative, despite the recent collapse of the World Trade Organization talks at Cancun. I say this because the world’s big agricultural players will all need farm trade reform in the coming decades.The EU is now admitting it will have to change its Common Agricultural Policy as it takes in millions of additional farmers and farming acres in 10 new member countries that include Poland and Romania. The EU should be exporting more livestock products to Asia.The United States recently passed a lavish farm bill-but did it during a period of supposed budget surplus. Now the budget surplus has disappeared (economic slump and war on terror). Worse, we are rapidly approaching the time when the federal government must begin to pony up the money for Social Security reform. The Congressional Budget Office says the costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the baby boomers’ retirement will force a 36 percent increase in all federal taxes-or a 91 percent increase in the payroll tax and 81 percent increase in the individual income tax. The next farm bill will have to cost far less than the current one.Meanwhile, China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and 7 percent of its arable land. Three-fourths of India’s Hindus say they will eat meat when they can afford it, and their GNP is now rising twice as fast as their population. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Egypt are other major population centers which are likely to bid strongly for farm imports in the decades ahead.The world urgently needs both high-yield farming and the liberalization of global farm trade to meet the population and conservation challenges of the 21st century. I think the time is now ripe for American farmers to present their credential more forcefully, and more successfully than when the First World was fleeing in terror from “overpopulation.”You might start by joining the thousands who have signed the High Yield Declaration, at www.highyieldconservation.org

Dennis Avery

It’s happened again. The food industry has once again allowed activists and headline-hungry journalists to turn the safest food system in human history into a house of horrors. Once again, there has been no effective answer or strategy on behalf of the food system to the unwarranted public attack.

The Mad Cow Media Circus is probably over – for the time being — but we’ll be paying the price for the public’s admission to that media circus for decades – in tighter regulations, heavier inspections and lost public confidence. In cattle, the cost may be $40 per head – which would make the annual cost of BSE non-confidence close to $1.5 billion per year. In the case of confinement hogs and poultry, the regulatory costs of defending indoor production are equally substantial, and continuing to rise.

Modern agriculture has lost another round to the know-nothings who pretend that organic and natural is the best way to feed a more-populous world that urgently wants to keep its wildlife.

Today, the cattle and feed industries are just praying that the USDA will find no additional cases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy as they test hundreds of thousands of animals, and that things will get back to “normal.” That’s unlikely.

We’re hoping against all odds that Japan and the other beef-importing countries that have suspended U.S. beef imports will not keep their bans in place for years to come, in order to favor their own farmers. That’s equally unlikely.

We’re hoping here today that the activists are not sitting in their offices plotting new attacks on the modern food system, designed to undermine our faith in our food. Which, of course, is an impossible dream.

We’re hoping that McDonald’s and the other big retailers that market U.S. meat, eggs and milk are not going to demand some additional changes in the production system to protect their investments and their reputations from this latest activist foray, or the next one. Bigger cages, no antibiotics, no cages at all, pasture-only feeding? We have no idea what they’ll demand next – because of pressure from the public dictated by the activists and their symbiotic journalists.

Agriculture looks at Mad Cow as an aberration that was impossible to foresee. An unknown disease, caused by a misfolded protein that no one knew existed, may have crossed from sheep to cattle to humans, through a rendering system that had previously been safe and environmentally constructive.

That rendering system itself was invented for environmental and health reasons: nobody wanted billions of pounds of rotting slaughter scraps lying around the countryside, or even buried in pits where dogs or wild animals could dig them up. How much better to turn the slaughter by-products into meat and bone meal, to make use of that protein, so we didn’t have to clear still more forest for more livestock feed.

The meat industry was holding true to the reality that land is the scarcest resource. Humans are already farming half the land on the planet that isn’t under deserts or glaciers. The world’s population is still growing, though more slowly, and getting richer. They’ll demand three times as much farm output by 2050. and perhaps five times the livestock products we produce today. Fortunately, we’ve doubled the meat output per acre in the First World over the past 30 years. Part of that is higher crop yields. Part of it is better breeding and better feed rations. But it’s a conservation miracle.

And unless we triple the yields of crops and livestock again, over the next 45 years, we risk losing the world’s wildlife after all. That’s why biotechnology is important. That’s why the eco-activist model of organic farming doesn’t win.

But our opponents don’t see Mad Cow and Industrial Agriculture the way we do. They really don’t. They claim there’s already enough food produced on the planet for everybody – especially since humans don’t need meat. They say that producing more food will just produce more people who will need more food, and on and on. They say that factory farming is eroding all the soil, using up all the water, and polluting all the streams. Nitrogen from the farms is causing “dead zones” downstream and killing all the fish. Antibiotics from livestock are making it less and less effective to treat human illnesses with antibiotics. And now, industrial farming has created Mad Cow disease.

We’ll get to the realities later, but these are things they tell each other and tell the public.

What does agriculture tell the public? Nothing. We don’t need to tell the public anything. We produce lots of safe food at low cost. That’s all they need to know, and they already know it. This crisis will blow away just like the others.

After all, the public wouldn’t do anything truly stupid to farmers and jeopardize their food supply, would they? Just out of ignorance?

Yes, this crisis will blow away, after costing agriculture billions of dollars, and making the public even more willing to believe the next “crisis” about modern agriculture.

Urban Myths Working Against Agriculture

1. High-Yield Farming Threatens the Frogs

In 1995, a group of Minnesota school children visited a local pond, and found deformed frogs-too many legs or too few. They reported it on the Internet, and over the next three years reports of deformed frogs flooded in from across the country. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency quickly decided it must be pesticides in the water, and spent millions of dollars trying to prove it. Now, we’ve learned that the frogs are deformed because of a natural parasite, the trematode, which burrows into the developing leg joints of the tadpoles. Frogs don’t become deformed in ponds that don’t have trematodes. Pesticides have not been implicated by any science, though the Minnesota officials still refuse to admit this.

In the mountains of California, red-legged and yellow-legged frogs are often absent from the lakes. Several researchers are trying to prove that pesticide-laden dust from the San Joaquin Valley is being blown up into the lakes and killing the frogs.

Indeed, traces of various pesticides were found in the mountain lake waters!

However, the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California/Berkeley have now proved the cause of the frog decline: hungry trout. In the high lakes stocked with trout, there are no frogs. The aggressive fish eat the frog’s eggs and tadpoles. In the wilderness areas, where the lakes are no longer stocked with trout, the frogs thrive. When researchers netted all the fish out of a lake without frogs, the frog population “exploded,” even though there were still traces of pesticides in the water.

2. Farming and Logging Caused the Salmon Decline in the Pacific Northwest

The salmon numbers in the Columbia River of Oregon and Washington began to decline in 1977. Environmentalists were quick to blame overfishing, logging, pollution and the water demands of irrigated farming. State and federal governments began spending billions of dollars on logging restrictions, fish ladders, reserving water for off-season flow, and barging young fish down to the sea. Nothing helped. But in the fall of 2002, the salmon came back. Columbia River had a record salmon run, and the salmon numbers have recovered to their former abundance. I had predicted this, three years earlier, in a Knight-Ridder newspaper column.

How? The salmon catch data for the past 100 years of the Columbia River and Gulf of Alaska fisheries clearly reveal a 25-year cycle. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents take the salmon food to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon/Washington salmon fishery shrinks. Then, for the next 25 years, the Oregon/Washington salmon fishermen flourish, while the Gulf of Alaska shrinks. Studies now show that this cycle is Pacific-wide, exhibited most dramatically by a 250- year shift in sardine and anchovy populations.

Did the Sierra Club not know about the cycle? If not, we can’t trust their advice on fish management. Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us-in which case we can’t trust their advice on fish management.

But the public hasn’t yet heard about the salmon cycle. The Portland Oregonian just said it was “changed sea conditions.” A fish researcher from the University of Washington -who has published in peer-reviewed journals on the 25-year cycle – is on TV saying it was the $1 billion per year in Federal fish management subsidies. He’d rather be funded than right.

3. Fertilizer from the Midwest Threatens the Gulf of Mexico

During the Clinton Administration, a White House Task Force recommended a 30 percent cut in Midwest fertilizer use because of a so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, the task force admitted in its report that it could find no evidence of either ecological or economic harm to the Gulf from the summer algae bloom that causes the “dead zone.” The first reports of such algae blooms in the Gulf go back into the 19th century. Fisheries experts say that most of the nutrients for the Gulf’s vast, rich fishery come down the Mississippi River, and when fresh, nutrient-laden water hits salt water, the laws of biology and physics guarantee period algae blooms. It’s a common feature at the mouths of 40 major rivers around the world.

Know also that Midwest fertilizer use has not risen since 1980, while the yields from the corn that gets most of the N fertilizer have risen 25 percent. Obviously, more of the farm fertilizer is being harvested as corn. More of the Midwest’s poultry and livestock have been moved indoors, where their wastes are carefully collected and spread on growing crops. If the “dead zone” is expanding, which is in serious doubt, where is the additional N coming from? The sewage treatment plants of St. Louis and Kansas City?

Don’t forget either, that before farmers settled the Great Plains, there were 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds and grasshoppers, all eating the grass and defecating. The N may have taken longer to reach the Gulf, but it’s likely that Cortez could have found an algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico when he invaded Mexico in 1520.

4.Modern Farming Causes Soil Erosion

In a piece of elegant ‘soil archeology,” Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA went back to the highly-erosive Coon Creek watershed in southern Wisconsin, and redid the 1938 Soil Conservation Service surveys, in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. What he found is that the Coon Creek watershed is currently losing only 6 percent as much topsoil as it lost during the Dust Bowl era.

Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and especially to conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history.

Dr. Trimble says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. The fact is that they lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.

5. Farmers Cause Overpopulation by Producing Too Much Food

Ted Turner claims modern farming is the root cause of global overpopulation. The reality, however, is that the food security produced by high-yield farming helped bring about the first major decline in human birth rates the world has ever seen. In 1960, the average woman in the Third World had 6.2 children. Today, she has 2.7, and since population stability is 2.1 births, the poor countries have come 75 percent of the way to stability in 34 years. No one in 1960 would have dared predict such a radical drop in birth rates. After 2050, the world’s human population will begin a slow decline.

6. Organic Farming Would Be Kinder to the Environment

Recently, the UN Environmental Program published a new edition of The Atlas of Biodiversity. In it, they mention that the current rate of species loss-20 birds, fish, and mammals in the last third of the 20th century-is half the rate of wildlife extinctions in the last third of the 19th century. In fact, the rate of species extinctions today is as low as it’s been in 500 years.

Why? Primarily because high-yield farming eliminated the need to clear more land for food production.

Today’s farmers are feeding 6.3 billion people on the same cropland that used to be inadequate to feed 2.3 billion in 1940. With the crop and livestock yields of 1950, the world would already have had to plow all 16 million square miles of its remaining forestland to get today’s food supply. If we extend high-yield farming to Africa and the world’s currently-marginal farmlands, we shouldn’t have to clear any more land for farming ever again.

Organic farming is an environmental fraud. The first and foremost rule of organic farming is that “thou shalt not use industrial fertilizer.” This means organic farming needs more land to make up for its lower yields (typically 10 to 40 percent lower) and it needs more land for green manure crops or more cattle to produce more manure.

In Denmark, a high-level technical committee reported in 1999 that an all-organic mandate would cut Danish food production by 47 percent. Most of Denmark’s farmland would have to be planted to forage crops and fed to feedlot cattle so their manure could then be spread thickly over the whole Danish landscape.

Dr. Vaclav Smil, an award-winning science author from the University of Manitoba, says all-organic farming for America would take the manure from another 900 million to 1 billion cattle, at 3 to 30 acres of forage per beast. There are only 1.2 billion acres in the whole lower 48 States. We’d have to eliminate half our citizens, or plant all the forests to pasture grass. The world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of nitrogen we take from the air each year. (The air is 78 percent N.)

7. Modern Farming Aggravates Global Warming

Eco-activists hate the fact that American farmers burn diesel fuel and put nitrogen fertilizer on their crops and they’ve gotten the whole world excited about global warming.

But the physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate – the ice cores, the tree rings, the cave stalagmites and the fossilized pollen grains — are telling us something quite different. They’re telling us that the Earth is ruled by an irregular solar cycle that lasts about 1500 years. That cycle is moderate (about 2 degrees C up or down), goes back a million years, and all of the Earth’s creatures and plants are adapted to it. It’s not something to be feared, it’s just something to be accommodated – until the next Ice Age brings a really bad climate.

Global Warming and the 1,500 Cycle of the Sun

History tells us of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1400 AD to 1850. Before that, there was a Medieval Warming, which lasted from about 950 AD to 1400. The temperatures during the Medieval Warming were about 2 degrees C. warmer than today in Northern Europe, and during the Little Ice Age they were about 2 degrees colder. Before the Medieval Warming, the Romans enjoyed a moderate warming period from 200 BC to 400 AD, and the Roman Empire began to disintegrate when the Dark Ages cold period began (600 to 950 BC).

The North American Pollen Database testifies that there’s been a major reorganization of this continent’s vegetation nine times in the past 14,000 years. That’s an average of once every 1650 years. The seabed sediments say these long-term cycles have been occurring for at least a million years.

We first learned of the cycles from a Greenland ice core about 1980. By that time, lots of people were already committed to the idea of man-made global warming. Al Gore had already held his first congressional hearing on the problem. Greenpeace had already announced that mankind must give up fossil fuels (and send in money).

But most of the warming of the last 150 years took place before 1940, and thus before the big increase in CO2 emissions. We’ve had very little global warming since 1940.

More important, the Greenhouse Theory says the additional CO2 will collect heat in the lower atmosphere – up to 30,000 feet. Then the heat of the atmosphere will radiate down to heat the Earth’s surface itself. But the lower atmosphere is hardly warming at all. The highly-accurate satellite reading show virtually no warming trend since 1979. The Earth’s surface is warming faster than the atmosphere that is supposed to warm it! This can’t be Greenhouse warming.

There’s more. The ice cores in Antarctica clearly show CO2 and global temperature tracking closely together through 250,000 years and three Ice Ages-but the changes in CO2 lag behind the changes in temperature by 200 to 800 years! CO2 is a lagging indicator of temperature change, not the forcing agent on global climate.

The physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate says we’re 150 years into a moderate, cyclical warming being caused by the sun. We used to think the sun was a constant. But now that we can send satellite measuring devices out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of the Earth, we find that it varies by fractions of a percent.

And we have the linkage. We’ve known for 400 years that when the number of sunspots is low, the Earth’s climate will be cold. When the number of sunspots is high, the Earth will be warmer. And the number of sunspots is higher now than it has been in 1200 years.

We also have beryllium. An isotope called Beryllium 10 is created when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. When the sun is weak, we get hit by lots of cosmic rays, and lots of beryllium 10 is created. (When the sun is active, solar winds protect us from cosmic rays.) In the last 50 years, researchers tracking ice cores find there’s less beryllium in our atmosphere than for the past 1150 years.

Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly millions of years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species by 2050. But over the past 100 years, we’ve already had that much warming-and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result.

Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.

Will there be more and worse droughts? We don’t know, but there are always droughts. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. In either case, conservation tillage and water management will become even more important.

Will malaria sweep over Virginia? History says malaria was rampant in Virginia until after World War II, when window screens and DDT helped us eradicate it. If the temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, we’ll still have window screens and pesticides.

The Harsh Costs of Kyoto

Unfortunately, the Kyoto Treaty would bring about a bigger collapse in human standards of living than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Solar and wind power couldn’t possibly provide all the power a modern society needs, nor could nuclear power plants. (We don’t have enough uranium ore.) The Ecologist magazine in Britain says we should give up 80 percent of the fossil fuels and 75 percent of the wood we use – now, next year, in a crash program. How would it affect your life if your electricity supply was cut 80 percent and you could only drive your car two days a month?

Worse, we’d have to give up the nitrogen fertilizer that supplies more than half our food.

I want to see very strong proof of a CO2-warming linkage before I accept Kyoto.

The Strange Anti-Human World of the Late 20th Century

For the past 40 years, human society has been in a unique anti-human mode. “Saving the planet” has been the watchword. For the first time in human history, kangaroo rats and flowerhead weevils are deemed more important than people.

This orgy of anti-humanity was almost certainly driven, not by Rachel Carson and her erroneous 1962 book Silent Spring, but by people-hating Paul Ehrlich and his equally wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.

I think people cared about the environment before Rachel Carson, and will continue to do so in the future. However, much of our eco-fervor has been due to an irrational fear that our affluence would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion additional poor brown and yellow people who might grab all the resources away from us.

In Southern Africa, in 2003, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. The president of Zambia said the activists told him the U.S. corn was poison. People who were boiling poisonous roots because they had nothing else to eat were denied access to an abundance of their favorite food staple. And remember, this is the same corn that everyone in this room eats as corn flakes, tacos, and chips.

The environmental movement has been broadly involved for many years in an even more deadly effort-to ban the use of DDT on the planet. The campaign against DDT has cost at least a million malaria deaths per year in the Third World-and tens of millions of lives ruined by the disease. There is no evidence that DDT harms humans, and no solid evidence that it harms birds. Nevertheless, the eco-movement has tried to ban even the indoor use of DDT in malarial regions, which could not possibly harm wildlife. On the inside walls of homes, it’s by far the most cost-effective mosquito killer, and also the longest-lasting and most effective mosquito repellent.

Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior?

The same moral codes that say humans are responsible for protecting Nature also say we’re also responsible for helping our fellow men. They don’t say we can become Druids, worshiping trees and practicing human sacrifice.

It would certainly be easier to leave room for wildlife if we eliminated all the humans. But killing off our fellow men or forcing billions of forced abortions are not moral solutions when we have the intelligence and societal skills to save both people and wildlife.

Rich Countries Are Better for the Environment

Paul Ehrlich said the affluent people of the First World were: (1) the worst polluters in the history of the world; (2) would destroy half the world’s wildlife species in the next few decades; and, (3) would bring about the ruin of the whole planet.

The reality, however, is that most of the Third World is already in the most polluting phase of industrialization-burning huge amounts of coal to smelt massive amounts of iron, cooking food with wood from trees that aren’t replanted and caring too little about water pollution.

Meanwhile, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling rhinoceros horn and “bushmeat” from endangered primates – harvested with AK-47s.

Mexico is losing three million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farming. More than half of the forestland cleared in Honduras in recent decades has been “steepland,” with a slope of more than 30 degrees. At least once a decade, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.

How can the eco-movement present these hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future?

There is hope for humanity and nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. When per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) crop yields rise and birth rates fall rapidly. Less land per capita is needed for food. Diesel fuel from under the land or sea substitutes for firewood and forests are replanted. Affluent people want and pay for cleaner air and water.

High Yield Mean Fewer Wildlife Extinctions

The biggest reasons for the low rate of wildlife extinctions today are high-yield crops and high-efficiency meat production. High-yield farming has tripled the yields of crops on the world’s best farmland in recent decades. High-efficiency meat production has doubled the pounds of meat produced per acre of pasture and cropland in the past 30 years. While some activists rail against confinement feeding, moving the birds and animals indoors has made them more comfortable and increased their feed efficiency by 15-20 percent. It has also prevented the clearing of millions of acres of wildlife habitat for hog and chicken playgrounds.

We tend to forget that man has been using and abusing wildlife for eons. Stone Age man used to hunt birds and animals to extinction. North America lost more than 40 species of huntable birds and animals within a few years after the human hunters arrived from Asia some 14,000 years ago-including North America’s horses, camels, and elephants.

Equally dangerous, we’ve forgotten how vicious people were to other people when food was scarce. Paleontologists tell us that up to 25 percent of the males (and perhaps 15 percent of the females) in primitive communities showed signs of violent death. They were essentially fighting over food: good hunting grounds and good farmland.

Only in the last 100 years, (thanks to nitrogen fertilizer, plant breeding, and integrated pest management) has man been able to support high populations of both people and wildlife in the same region. Only after World War II, when the Green Revolution extended high-yield farming over most of the world, did human society free itself from “food wars.” (Just before WWII, crowded Japan invaded Manchuria, in part for its soybean fields; Nazi Germany invaded Poland for “living room.”)

The World Conservation Union today warns that more than one billion poor people are living in the world’s biodiversity hotspots (particularly tropical and mountain rain forests)-and trying to feed their children by hunting bushmeat and doing slash-and burn farming. We must give these people higher-yield farming if we hope to prevent massive wildlife extinctions in the next 50 years.

Richer Means a Cleaner Environment

Remarkably, the waste volume from American homes today is one-third less than the waste volume from Mexican homes! This is due in sizeable part to the centralized processing of our food supply. Our broiler chickens, for example, arrive at the store wrapped in sanitary, lightweight plastic-wrapped trays-with the feathers, heads, feet and many of the unwanted internal organs already separated out for recycling at the processing plant.

These poultry waste products are then turned into livestock feeds and many other products, far more effectively than they could be handled without the centralized waste management.

The U.S. rendering industry is one of the world’s most successful and most critically needed recyclers, treating 50 billion pounds per year of waste that urgently needs to be treated, even if it were only going into a landfill. However, it would take millions of additional acres of farmland to replace the nutrients salvaged and put to use through rendering.

The rest of America’s vaunted recycling effort has pretty much collapsed. Most of our carefully-sorted urban trash is all dumped together in the local landfill, because it takes more resources to produce useful things with recycled stuff than it takes to start from scratch.

21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable in History

Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago, with good reason: soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human society.

Environmental activists today rely on our long-held and valid fear of soil erosion to undermine our confidence in the sustainability of modern high-yield farming. They tell us that today’s farmers are “mining the soil.” That’s not the truth.

Thanks to chemical fertilizer, modern farmers no longer need to “wear out” their soils. In the traditional farming of the 19th century, growing crops often took more nutrients out of the soil than farmers could replace with manure. As yields and soil organic matter declined, the farm would be abandoned as “worn out.” (On a broader scale, the depleted soils combined with drought to give us “Dust Bowls.”) Today’s farmers use soil testing and industrially supplied nutrients to keep their soils rich and productive.

In addition, modern farmers invented conservation tillage and no-till. These farming systems cut erosion by up to 95 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria. Organic farmers can’t use conservation tillage because they don’t allow themselves to use herbicides. Thus, organic farmers are still forced to use bare-earth, erosion-inviting plows and rotary hoes.

Industrial fertilizers and conservation tillage are two of the major reasons why the Soil and Water Conservation Society of North America calls modern high-yield farming “the most sustainable in history.”

The End of the Population Surge

The absolute best news for the planet is that the world’s recent population surge is nearly over. Farmers won’t have to feed many more people, but instead of having one billion affluent people eating meat and cheese, we’ll have at least 7 billion affluent consumers. Most of them will demand hamburgers, fish, salad bars and fresh fruit year round.

There’ll even be a pet challenge. America has 112 million companion cats and dogs today. A rich, urbanized China in 2050 may still have the one-child policy, but it will also have perhaps 500 million companion cats and dogs; and, woe unto the politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.

The New Surge of Support for High-Yield Technologies

After the success of the Green Revolution became clear in the 1970s, a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation-founder of the key agricultural research stations in Mexico and the Philippines-spoke of his profound regret. He said that agricultural research had turned humanity into a cancer on the earth. We now know he was wrong.

Now, with the end of the population surge, high-yield farming is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.

In May of 2001, our Hudson Institute presented (at the National Press Club in Washington) two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the then-latest winner of the World Food Prize, and the British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, as signers of our “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry.”

This remarkably broad coalition was led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, Chairman Emeritus of our Center, and the 1970 winner of the Peace Prize for his work on high-yield crops for the Green Revolution.

The Declaration doesn’t endorse any agricultural technology or system. It simply states that the world urgently needs higher yields based on sustainable advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology-to save room for wildlife.

At the time of the Press Club event, we feared it had been a failure. The biggest media outlet to feature the event was the American Farm Bureau News. But in the months since that event, the concept of high-yield conservation has been praised by columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October, 2003, issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly carried an article lavishly praising both high-yield farming and biotech. More startling by far, the editorial page of the New York Times recommended the Atlantic Monthly article to its readers-in a newspaper which has been editorially praising organic food and condemning high-yield farming for decades.

In October of last year, the journal Science carried an editorial by Dr. Donald Kennedy, the magazine’s editor. Kennedy states that world hunger is now the overarching issue for world health-and concludes:

“Unless agricultural production is increased on the good lands, population pressures will cause farmers to move upslope and deforest the hillsides. That’s a double whammy: a loss for those families, and a loss for the environment. And on already marginal lands, GM technology may offer the best hope for producing crops that can withstand drought, impoverished soils and disease. For both these reasons, we’d better resolve the GM controversy.”

Half Again As Much Meat Demand in 2025

All of that comes in the nick of time because the worlds’ demand for meat and livestock produce will continue to soar. The Third World is raising its meat demand three times as fast as the First World. No vegetarian societies are emerging anywhere. (India has always consumed lots of milk, and now they’re eating chicken and yearning for mutton.)

Meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. We project that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025.

This meat increase will be good for children, since it provides them with high-quality protein and key micronutrients. Without livestock products, children do not reach their full genetic stature, and may lag in cognitive learning. It will also be good for adults, who need calcium and protein. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, since birds and animals can nourish themselves on grass and other things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat and milk is just about the same as for the same amount of non-meat proteins and calories.

Such a major meat production increase will require higher grain yields (perhaps 30 percent higher), higher oilseed yields (25 percent higher?) and still-better feed conversion ratios. These will only be possible if we continue to invest in high-yield farming research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted.

It looks now as though agricultural biotechnology is winning its place in the 21st century. I’m thankful, since I do not know how we would triple the world’s crop yields again in the next 50 years without it. And unless we triple the crop yields again, we risk losing most of the world’s wildlands.

More Globalization, Not Less

The world also urgently needs farm trade liberalization. Obviously, most of the increase in global meat consumption will occur outside of North America. It is also true that much of the meat consumption gain will occur in densely populated countries that will be critically short of land and water to produce their own livestock products cost-effectively.

Liberalization of farm trade remains a strong imperative, despite the recent collapse of the World Trade Organization talks at Cancun. I say this because the world’s big agricultural players will all need farm trade reform in the coming decades.

The EU is now admitting it will have to change its Common Agricultural Policy as it takes in millions of additional farmers and farming acres in 10 new member countries that include Poland and Romania. The EU should be exporting more livestock products to Asia.

The United States recently passed a lavish farm bill-but did it during a period of supposed budget surplus. Now the budget surplus has disappeared (economic slump and war on terror). Worse, we are rapidly approaching the time when the federal government must begin to pony up the money for Social Security reform. The Congressional Budget Office says the costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the baby boomers’ retirement will force a 36 percent increase in all federal taxes-or a 91 percent increase in the payroll tax and 81 percent increase in the individual income tax. The next farm bill will have to cost far less than the current one.

Meanwhile, China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and 7 percent of its arable land. Three-fourths of India’s Hindus say they will eat meat when they can afford it, and their GNP is now rising twice as fast as their population. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Egypt are other major population centers which are likely to bid strongly for farm imports in the decades ahead.

The world urgently needs both high-yield farming and the liberalization of global farm trade to meet the population and conservation challenges of the 21st century. I think the time is now ripe for American farmers to present their credential more forcefully, and more successfully than when the First World was fleeing in terror from “overpopulation.”

You might start by joining the thousands who have signed the High Yield Declaration, at www.highyieldconservation.org

Presentation to the Illinois Farm Bureau Commodity Conference: Is High-Yield Farming Worth Saving?

Dennis Avery

. . . farms obliterate empty places, ploughed fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts. . . and there are such great cities where formerly hardly a hut . . . everywhere there is a dwelling,
everywhere a multitude. . . . We are burdensome to the world. The resources are scarcely adequate to us . . . already nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.

Quintus Septimus Florence Tertillianus, Roman citizen, about 200 A.D., with a world population about 200 million

“. . . the Western World today is on the verge of the greatest ecological renewal that humankind has known; perhaps the greatest that the Earth has known. Environmentalists deserve the credit for this remarkable turn of events. Yet our political and cultural institutions continue to read from a
script of instant doomsday. Environmentalists, who are surely on the right side of history, are increasingly on the wrong side of the present, risking their credibility by proclaiming emergencies that do not exist.”

Greg Easterbrook, A Moment on Earth, 1995, p. xvi, with the world population 30 times as large and still increasing

“Here’s something for the Greens of the world to ponder: ‘genetic engineering’ may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries,’ Jonathan Rauch writes in The Atlantic Monthly. . . . Noting that ‘world food output will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades,’ the author argues that ‘the great challenge’ is ‘not to feed an additional three billion people (and their pets) but to do so without converting much of the world’s prime [wildlife] habitat into second- or third-rate farmland.’”

New York Times, “Frankenfoods to the Rescue of Mother Earth,” September 21, 2003

Urban Myths worth Exploring

High-Yield Farming Threatens the Frogs

In 1995, a group of Minnesota school children visited a local pond, and found deformed frogs-too many legs or too few. They reported it on the Internet, and over the next three years reports of deformed frogs flooded in from across the country. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency quickly decided it must be pesticides in the water, and spent millions of dollars trying to prove it. Now, we’ve learned that the frogs are deformed because of a natural parasite, the trematode, which burrows into the developing leg joints of the tadpoles. Frogs don’t become deformed in ponds that don’t have trematodes. Pesticides were not the cause, though the Minnesota officials still refuse to admit this.

In the mountains of California, red-legged and yellow-legged frogs are often absent from the lakes. Several researchers are trying to prove that pesticide-laden dust from the Central Valley is being blown up into the lakes and killing the frogs. Indeed, traces of various pesticides were found in the mountain waters. However, the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California/Berkeley have now proved the cause of the frog decline: hungry trout. In the high lakes stocked with trout, there are no frogs. The aggressive fish eat the frog’s eggs and tadpoles. In the lakes no longer stocked with trout, the frogs thrive. When researchers netted all the fish out of a lake without frogs, the frog population “exploded,” even though there were still traces of pesticides in the water.

Farming and Logging Cause the Salmon Decline in the Pacific Northwest

The salmon numbers in the Columbia River of Oregon and Washington began to decline in 1977. Environmentalists were quick to blame overfishing, logging, pollution and the water demands of irrigated farming. State and federal governments began spending billions of dollars on logging restrictions, fish ladders, and barging young fish down to the sea. Nothing helped. But in the fall of 2002, the Columbia River had a record salmon run, and the salmon numbers have recovered to their former abundance.

The salmon catch data for the past 100 years of the Columbia River and Gulf of Alaska fisheries clearly reveal a 25-year cycle. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents take the salmon food to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon/Washington salmon fishery shrinks. Then, for the next 25 years, the Oregon/Washington salmon fishermen flourish, while the Gulf of Alaska shrinks.

Did the Sierra Club not know about the cycle? In that case, we can’t trust their advice on fish management. Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us-in which case we can’t trust their advice on fish management.

Fertilizer from the Midwest Threatens the Gulf of Mexico

During the Clinton Administration, a White House Task Force recommended a 30 percent cut in Midwest fertilizer use because of a so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, the task force admitted in its report that it could find no evidence of either ecological or economic harm to the Gulf from the summer algae bloom that causes the “dead zone.” The first reports of such algae blooms in the Gulf go back into the 19th century. Fisheries experts say that most of the nutrients for the Gulf’s vast, rich fishery come down the Mississippi River, and when fresh, nutrient-laden water hits salt water, the laws of biology and physics guarantee period algae blooms. It’s a common feature at the mouths of 40 major rivers around the world.

Know also that Midwest fertilizer use has not risen since 1980, while the yields from the corn that gets most of the N fertilizer have risen 25 percent. Obviously, more of the farm fertilizer is being harvested as corn. More of the Midwest’s poultry and livestock have been moved indoors, where their wastes are carefully collected and spread on growing crops. If the “dead zone” is expanding, which is in serious doubt, where is the additional N coming from? The sewage treatment plants of St. Louis and Kansas City?

Don’t forget either, that before farmers settled the Great Plains, they had 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds and grasshoppers, all eating the grass and defecating. The N may have taken longer to reach the Gulf, but it’s likely that Cortez could have found an algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico when he invaded Mexico in 1520.

Modern Farming Causes Soil Erosion

In a piece of elegant “soil archeology,” Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA went back to the highly-erosive Coon Creek watershed in southern Wisconsin, and redid the 1938 Soil Conservation Service surveys, in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. What he found is that the Coon Creek watershed is currently losing only 6 percent as much topsoil as it lost during the Dust Bowl era. Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and especially to conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history. Dr. Trimble says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. The fact is that they lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.

Overpopulation? Farmers Produce too much Food

Those who hate people, Ted Turner being a prime example, claim that modern farming is the root cause of global overpopulation. The reality, however, is that the food security produced by high-yield farming helped bring about the first major decline in human birth rates the world has ever seen. In 1960, the average woman in the Third World had 6.2 children. Today, she has 2.7, and since population stability is 2.1 births, the poor countries have come 75 percent of the way to stability in 34 years. No one in 1960 would have dared predict such a radical drop in birth rates. After 2050, the world’s human population will begin a slow decline.

Modern Farming is Destroying the World’s Wild Plant Species

Eco-activists like to claim that high-yield farming is destroying the world’s biodiversity. By that they mean that farmers in the Third World tend to plant better seeds when they can get them, forsaking the thousands of “farmer varieties” they used to plant. But those aren’t species. They couldn’t even survive in the wild. And we have most of those varieties saved in seed banks.

The real challenge is to save the truly wild species, and to do that we need to save the wild lands. Understand that the modern farming you represent has saved virtually every tree and wild creatures on the planet today.

Recently, the UN Environmental Program published a new edition of The Atlas of Biodiversity. In it, they mention that the current rate of species loss-20 birds, fish, and mammals in the last third of the 20th century-is half the rate of wildlife extinctions in the last third of the 19th century. In fact, the rate of species extinctions today is as low as it’s been in 500 years.

Why? Primarily because high-yield farming eliminated the need to clear more land for food production.

Today’s farmers are feeding 6.3 billion people on the same cropland that used to be inadequate to feed one billion in 1940. With the crop and livestock yields of 1950, the world would already have had to plow all 16 million square miles of its remaining forestland to get today’s food supply. If we extend high-yield farming to Africa and the world’s currently-marginal farmlands, we shouldn’t have to clear any more land for farming ever again.

Organic Farming is Kinder to the Environment

Organic farming is an environmental fraud. The first and foremost rule of organic farming is that ‘thou shalt not use industrial fertilizer.” This means organic farming needs more land to make up for its lower yields (typically 10 to 40 percent lower) and it needs more land for green manure crops or more cattle to produce more manure.

In Denmark, a high-level technical committee reported in 1999 that an all-organic mandate would cut Danish food production by 47 percent. Most of Denmark’s farmland would have to be planted to forage crops and fed to feedlot cattle so their manure could then be spread thickly over the whole Danish landscape.

Dr. Vaclav Smil, an award-winning science author from the University of Manitoba, says all-organic farming for America would take the manure from another 900 million to 1 billion cattle, at 3 to 30 acres of forage per beast. There are only 1.2 billion acres in the whole lower 48 States. We’d have to eliminate half our citizens, or plant all the forests to pasture grass. The world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of nitrogen we take from the air each year. (The air is 78 percent N.)

Modern Farming is a Major Contributor to Global Warming

Eco-activists hate the fact that American farmers burn diesel fuel and put nitrogen fertilizer on their crops and they’ve gotten the whole world excited about global warming. Everyone knows about CO2 and Global Warming and the push for the Kyoto Treaty that would sharply raise the cost of both diesel and fertilizer for American farmers and destroy the economies of the first world. But wouldn’t it be worth it? Who wants a fried planet?

Unfortunately, the Kyoto Treaty would bring about a bigger collapse in human standards of living than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Solar and wind power couldn’t possibly provide all the power a modern society needs, nor could nuclear power plants. (We don’t have enough uranium ore.) But would it influence the warming trend?

Researchers around the world are giving us a new reality. This reality is that the Earth’s climate has always been in a state of flux and will continue in its ordained cycles farther into the future than man can fathom. We didn’t cause it, we can’t “fix” it, but we can live with it and modern farming can help.

Global Warming and the 1,500 Cycle of the Sun

History tells us of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1400 AD to 1850. Before that, there was a Medieval Warming, which lasted from about 950 AD to 1400. The temperatures during the Medieval Warming were about 2 degrees C. warmer than today in Northern Europe, and during the Little Ice Age they were about 2 degrees colder. Before the Medieval Warming, the Romans enjoyed a moderate warming period from 200 BC to 400 AD, and the Roman Empire began to disintegrate when the Dark Ages cold period began (600 to 950 BC).

Now, cave stalagmites and ice cores and seabed sediments and fossilized pollen are allowing us to go back into the temperature record of prehistory-and we’re finding dramatic findings that the eco-activists don’t want you to know: the Earth is governed by an irregular 1500-year cycle. It’s natural, it’s moderate, and it’s unstoppable. But we can adapt, as humans have been adapting through the centuries. The North American Pollen Database testifies that there’s been a major reorganization of this continent’s vegetation nine times in the past 14,000 years. That’s an average of once every 1650 years. The seabed sediments say these long-term cycles have been occurring for at least a million years.

We first learned of the cycles from a Greenland ice core in 1984. By that time, lots of people were already committed to the idea of man-made global warming. Al Gore had already held his first congressional hearing on the problem. Greenpeace had already announced that mankind must give up fossil fuels (and send in money).

Fortunately, it doesn’t look as though our current warming is due to CO2 from factories and auto exhausts. In the first place, most of it took place before 1940, and thus before the big increase in CO2 emissions. We’ve had very little global warming since 1940.

More important, the Greenhouse Theory says the additional CO2 will collect heat in the lower atmosphere, from the Earth’s surface up to 30,000 feet. Then the heat of the atmosphere will radiate down to heat the Earth’s surface itself. The problem is that for the past 25 years, we’ve been getting the most accurate temperature readings of the atmosphere ever taken, from satellites and high-altitude balloons. They show virtually no warming at all. The Earth’s surface is warming faster than the atmosphere that is supposed to warm it! That can’t be Greenhouse warming.

There’s more. The ice cores in Antarctica clearly show CO2 and global temperature tracking closely together through 250,000 years and three Ice Ages-but the changes in CO2 lag behind the changes in temperature by 200 to 800 years! CO2 is a lagging indicator of temperature change, not the forcing agent for global climate.

The physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate says we’re 150 years into a moderate, cyclical warming being caused by the sun. We used to think the sun was a constant. But now that we can send satellite measuring devices out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of the Earth, we find that it varies by fractions of a percent.

And we have the linkage. We’ve known for 400 years that when the number of sunspots is low, the Earth’s climate will be cold. When the number of sunspots is high, the Earth will be warmer. And the number of sunspots is higher now than it has been in 1200 years.

We also have beryllium. Beryllium is created when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. When the sun is weak, we get hit by lots of cosmic rays, and lots of beryllium is created. (When the sun is active, solar winds protect us from cosmic rays.) In the last 50 years, researchers find there’s less beryllium in our atmosphere than for the past 1150 years.

Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly at least 600 million years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species. But over the past 100 years, we’ve already had that much warming-and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result.

Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.

Will there be more and worse droughts? Maybe, we don’t know, but there are always droughts. California should perhaps start serious water conservation efforts. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. In either case, conservation tillage and water management will become even more important.

Will malaria sweep over Illinois? History says malaria was rampant in Illinois until after World War II, when window screens and DDT helped us eradicate it. If the temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, we’ll still have window screens and pesticides.

It’s not your pickup trucks, your tractors or your fertilizer. It’s not my Chevy Suburban. It’s the sun, and we’ve got to adapt to a moderate warming, probably at least for the next 500 years. If it’s any comfort, the Medieval Warming was also known to history as the Medieval Climate Optimum – the finest weather humanity can remember. The following Ice Age will be the true challenge.

The Strange Anti-Human World of the Late 20th Century

For the past 40 years, human society has been in a unique anti-human mode. “Saving the planet” has been the watchword. For the first time in human history, kangaroo rats and flowerhead weevils are deemed more important than people.

This orgy of anti-humanity was almost certainly driven, not by Rachel Carson and her erroneous 1962 book Silent Spring, but by people-hating Paul Ehrlich and his equally wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.

I think people cared about the environment before Rachel Carson, and will continue to do so in the future. However, much of our eco-fervor has been due to an irrational fear that our ways of living would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion additional poor brown and yellow people who might grab all the resources away from us.

In Southern Africa, in 2003, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. They convinced African government leaders not to distribute U.S. corn donated as food aid. America co-mingles corn that is genetically altered with conventional corn, since both are equally nutritious and approved as safe by three U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The president of Zambia said the activists told him the U.S. corn was poison. People who were boiling poisonous roots because they had nothing else to eat were denied access to an abundance of their favorite food staple. And remember, this is the same corn that everyone in this room eats as corn flakes, tacos, and chips.

The environmental movement has been broadly involved for many years in an even more deadly effort-to ban the use of DDT on the planet. The campaign against DDT has cost at least a million malaria deaths per year in the Third World-and tens of millions of lives ruined by the disease, the suffering it causes, and the disability it inflicts. There is no evidence that DDT harms humans, and very poor evidence that it harms birds. Nevertheless, the eco-movement has tried to ban even the indoor use of DDT in malarial regions, which could not possibly harm wildlife. On the inside walls of homes, it’s by far the most cost-effective mosquito killer, and also the longest-lasting and most effective mosquito repellent. Fortunately, the World Health Organization has so far blocked the final ban, but just barely.

Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior? Does nature-worship always push society over that thin line?

The same moral codes that say humans are responsible for protecting Nature also say we’re also responsible for helping our fellow men. They don’t say we can become Druids, worshiping trees and practicing human sacrifice.

It would certainly be easier to leave room for wildlife if we eliminated all the humans. But killing off our fellow men or forcing billions of forced abortions are not moral solutions when we have the intelligence and societal skills to save both people and wildlife.

Rich Countries Are Better for the Environment

Paul Ehrlich said the affluent people of the First World were: (1) the worst polluters in the history of the world; (2) would destroy half the world’s wildlife species in the next few decades; and, (3) would bring about the ruin of the whole planet.

The reality, however, is that most of the Third World is already in the most polluting phase of industrialization-burning huge amounts of coal to smelt massive amounts of iron, cooking food with wood from trees that aren’t replanted and caring too little about water pollution.

Meanwhile, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling rhinoceros horn and “bushmeat” from endangered gorillas – harvested with AK-47s.

Mexico is losing three million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farming. More than half of the forestland cleared in Honduras in recent decades has been “steepland,” with a slope of more than 30 degrees; at least once a decade, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.

How can the eco-movement present these hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future?

But there is hope for humanity and nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. A World Bank staff team has documented a bell-shaped curve in environmental protection. In the early years of industrialization, forests die and pollution surges. Rising populations and higher incomes demand more farmland and better diets.

But when per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) a different set of factors take over. People are already well-fed and birth rates fall rapidly. With better inputs and management, crop yields rise, so less land per capita is needed for food. Diesel fuel, taken from under the land or sea, substitutes for firewood and forests are replanted. Affluent people want cleaner air and are willing and able to pay for it. They begin to demand clean rivers, for both health and aesthetics.

Richer Means Fewer Wildlife Extinctions

The biggest reasons for the low rate of wildlife extinctions today are high-yield crops and high-efficiency meat production. High-yield farming has tripled the yields of crops on the world’s best farmland in recent decades. High-efficiency meat production has doubled the pounds of meat produced per acre of pasture and cropland in the past 30 years. While some activists rail against confinement feeding, moving the birds and animals indoors has made them more comfortable and increased their feed efficiency by 15-20 percent. It has also prevented the clearing of millions of acres of wildlife habitat for hog and chicken playgrounds.

We tend to forget that man has been using and abusing wildlife for eons. Stone Age man used to hunt birds and animals to extinction. North America lost more than 40 species of huntable birds and animals within a few years after the human hunters arrived from Asia some 14,000 years ago-including North America’s horses, camels, and elephants.

Equally dangerous, we’ve forgotten how vicious people were to other people when food was scarce. Paleontologists tell us that up to 25 percent of the males (and perhaps 15 percent of the females) in primitive communities showed signs of violent death. They were essentially fighting over food: good hunting grounds and good farmland.

Only in the last 100 years, (thanks to nitrogen fertilizer, plant breeding, and integrated pest management) has man been able to support high populations of both people and wildlife in the same region. Only after World War II, when the Green Revolution extended high-yield farming over most of the world, did human society free itself from “food wars.” (Just before WWII, crowded Japan invaded Manchuria, in part for its soybean fields; Nazi Germany invaded Poland for “living room.”)

The World Conservation Union today warns that more than one billion poor people are living in the world’s biodiversity hotspots (particularly tropical and mountain rain forests)-and trying to feed their children by hunting bushmeat and doing slash-and burn farming. We must give these people higher-yield farming if we hope to prevent massive wildlife extinctions in the next 50 years.

Yet the eco-movement holds up primitive hunters and farmers as the environmental models for the future.

Richer Means a Cleaner Environment

Remarkably, the waste volume from American homes today is one-third less than the waste volume from Mexican homes! This is due in sizeable part to the centralized processing of our food supply. Our broiler chickens, for example, arrive at the store wrapped in sanitary, lightweight plastic-wrapped trays-with the feathers, heads, feet and many of the unwanted internal organs already separated out for recycling at the processing plant.

These poultry waste products are then turned into livestock feeds and many other products, far more effectively than they could be handled without the centralized waste management.

The U.S. rendering industry is one of the world’s most successful and most critically needed recyclers, treating 50 billion pounds per year of waste that urgently needs to be treated, even if it were only going into a landfill. However, it would take millions of additional acres of farmland to replace the nutrients salvaged and put to use through rendering.

The rest of America’s vaunted recycling effort has pretty much collapsed. Most of our carefully-sorted urban trash is all dumped together in the local landfill, because it takes more resources to produce useful things with recycled stuff than it takes to start from scratch.

21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable in History

Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago, with good reason: soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human society.

Environmental activists today rely on our long-held and valid fear of soil erosion to undermine our confidence in the sustainability of modern high-yield farming. They tell us that today’s farmers are “mining the soil.” That’s not the truth.

Thanks to chemical fertilizer, modern farmers no longer need to “wear out” their soils. In the traditional farming of the 19th century, growing crops often took more nutrients out of the soil than farmers could replace with manure. As yields and soil organic matter declined, the farm would be abandoned as “worn out.” (On a broader scale, the depleted soils combined with drought to give us “Dust Bowls.”) Today’s farmers use soil testing and industrially supplied nutrients to keep their soils rich and productive.

In addition, modern farmers invented conservation tillage and no-till. These farming systems cut erosion by up to 95 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria. Organic farmers can’t use conservation tillage because they don’t allow themselves to use herbicides. Thus, organic farmers are still forced to use bare-earth, erosion-inviting plows and rotary hoes.

Industrial fertilizers and conservation tillage are two of the major reasons why the Soil and Water Conservation Society of North America calls modern high-yield farming “the most sustainable in history.”

The End of the Population Surge

The absolute best news for the planet is that the world’s recent population surge is nearly over. Farmers won’t have to feed many more people, but instead of having one billion affluent people eating meat and cheese, we’ll have at least 7 billion affluent consumers. Most of them will demand hamburgers, fish, salad bars and fresh fruit year round.

There’ll even be a pet challenge. America has 112 million companion cats and dogs today. A rich, urbanized China in 2050 may still have the one-child policy, but it will also have perhaps 500 million companion cats and dogs; and, woe unto the politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.

The New Surge of Support for High-Yield Technologies

After the success of the Green Revolution became clear in the 1970s, a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation-founder of the key agricultural research stations in Mexico and the Philippines-spoke of his profound regret. He said that agricultural research had turned humanity into a cancer on the earth. We now know he was wrong.

Now, with the end of the population surge, high-yield farming is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.

In May of 2001, our Hudson Institute presented (at the National Press Club in Washington) two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the then-latest winner of the World Food Prize, and the British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, as signers of our “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry.”

This remarkably broad coalition was led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, Chairman Emeritus of our Center, and the 1970 winner of the Peace Prize for his work on high-yield crops for the Green Revolution.

The Declaration doesn’t endorse any agricultural technology or system. It simply states that the world urgently needs higher yields based on sustainable advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology-to save room for wildlife.

At the time of the Press Club event, we feared it had been a failure. The biggest media outlet to feature the event was the American Farm Bureau News. But in the months since that event, the concept of high-yield conservation has been praised by columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October, 2003, issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly carried an article lavishly praising both high-yield farming and biotech. More startling by far, the editorial page of the New York Times recommended the Atlantic Monthly article to its readers-in a newspaper which has been editorially praising organic food and condemning high-yield farming for decades.

In October of last year, the journal Science carried an editorial by Dr. Donald Kennedy, the magazine’s editor. Kennedy states that world hunger is now the overarching issue for world health-and concludes:

“Unless agricultural production is increased on the good lands, population pressures will cause farmers to move upslope and deforest the hillsides. That’s a double whammy: a loss for those families, and a loss for the environment. And on already marginal lands, GM technology may offer the best hope for producing crops that can withstand drought, impoverished soils and disease. For both these reasons, we’d better resolve the GM controversy.”

Half Again As Much Meat Demand in 2025

All of that comes in the nick of time because the worlds’ demand for meat and livestock produce will continue to soar. The Third World is raising its meat demand three times as fast as the First World. No vegetarian societies are emerging anywhere. (India has always consumed lots of milk, and now they’re eating chicken and yearning for mutton.)

Meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. We project that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025.

This meat increase will be good for children, since it provides them with high-quality protein and key micronutrients. Without livestock products, children do not reach their full genetic stature, and may lag in cognitive learning. It will also be good for adults, who need calcium and protein. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, since birds and animals can nourish themselves on grass and other things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat and milk is just about the same as for the same amount of non-meat proteins and calories.

Such a major meat production increase will require higher grain yields (perhaps 30 percent higher), higher oilseed yields (25 percent higher?) and still-better feed conversion ratios. These will only be possible if we continue to invest in research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted.

The current regulatory war against farmers, renderers, fertilizer makers, and virtually anyone else involved in high-yield farming must stop if we are to sustain the kids, pets, and wild animals in the 21st century.

It looks now as though agricultural biotechnology is winning its place in the 21st century. I’m thankful, since I do not know how we would triple the world’s crop yields again in the next 50 years without it. And unless we triple the crop yields again, we risk losing most of the world’s wildlands.

More Globalization, Not Less

The world also urgently needs farm trade liberalization. Obviously, most of the increase in global meat consumption will occur outside of North America. It is also true that much of the meat consumption gain will occur in densely populated countries that will be critically short of land and water to produce their own livestock products cost-effectively.

Liberalization of farm trade remains a strong imperative, despite the recent collapse of the World Trade Organization talks at Cancun. I say this because the world’s big agricultural players will all need farm trade reform in the coming decades.

The EU is now admitting it will have to change its Common Agricultural Policy as it takes in millions of additional farmers and farming acres in 10 new member countries that include Poland and Romania. The EU should be exporting more livestock products to Asia.

The United States recently passed a lavish farm bill-but did it during a period of supposed budget surplus. Now the budget surplus has disappeared (economic slump and war on terror). Worse, we are rapidly approaching the time when the federal government must begin to pony up the money for Social Security reform. The Congressional Budget Office says the costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the baby boomers’ retirement will force a 36 percent increase in all federal taxes-or a 91 percent increase in the payroll tax and 81 percent increase in the individual income tax. The next farm bill will have to cost far less than the current one.

Meanwhile, China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and 7 percent of its arable land. Three-fourths of India’s Hindus say they will eat meat when they can afford it, and their GNP is now rising twice as fast as their population. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Egypt are other major population centers which are likely to bid happily for farm imports in the decades ahead.

The world urgently needs both high-yield farming and the liberalization of global farm trade to meet the population and conservation challenges of the 21st century. I think the time is now ripe for American farmers to present their credential more forcefully, and more successfully than when the First World was fleeing in terror from “overpopulation.”

You might start by joining the thousands who have signed the High Yield Declaration, at www.highyieldconservation.org.