Tag: agriculture
New Year’s Goals For The Ag Community Focused On A Strong, Prosperous 2008
By cgfi | January 7, 2008
| by Dan Murphy | 1/7/2008 1:50:00 PM | |
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Has America Already Lost High-Yield Agriculture?
By cgfi | October 6, 2003
America has had a proud two centuries of world leadership in high-yield agricultural research and technology. It stretches back to George Washington’s farming experiments and Abraham Lincoln signing the Morrill Act to create the land-grant colleges and agricultural experiment stations. It includes the hybrid seeds, mechanization, and pesticides that produce ample American ample food-while retaining more forest than we had in 1900 with one-fourth today’s population.
America’s agricultural research leadership fostered the high-yield Green Revolution in the Third World. That Green Revolution saved billions of people from starving in Asia and Latin America, and preserved huge amounts of wildlands from being cleared for low-yield crops. My peer-reviewed estimate is that with 1950s crop yields, the world would have needed another 12 million square miles of cropland to produce the 1992 food supply. (If we factor in today’s larger demand and the land saved by high-efficiency confinement livestock, modern farming may well be saving wildlands equal to the world’s total forest area-about 16 million square miles.)
The American tradition of high-yield agricultural research lay behind this country’s recent world-leading investments in agricultural biotechnology, both public and private. Such biotech investments were once the best hope that the world could triple crop yields again in the next 40 years, to feed a peak population of 8 to 9 billion affluent people and their pets without clearing the world’s remaining wildlands. (We’re already farming half the land on the planet not covered by deserts and glaciers.)
America’s agricultural leadership should be one of this country’s proudest achievements.
The stark reality, however, is that this proud tradition may be ending now, just as the world is facing its biggest agricultural challenge of all time.
America’s high-yield agriculture no longer has the support and confidence of the urbanites that make up 95 percent of this country’s voters. In this affluent, risk-averse, farming-ignorant era, American farmers need an operating permit from the city folks-and they don’t have it.
Well-fed urban Americans are convinced that modern, high-yield agriculture is too risky to their health and the environment. They want farmers regulated back into the safety of low-yield organic production. After all, America has plenty of food and farmland. We don’t need to spray pesticides that “might someday be linked to cancer.” We don’t need even the perception of wastes from factory farms spewed into our rivers.
U.S. agriculture cannot get public approval for biotechnology, and every other element of high-yield agriculture is under regulatory threat as well. A vocal minority overwhelms the uncaring majority, and drives regulators toward more and more constraints on pesticides, confinement feeding, Diesel fuel, dust, water, and even plant food.
In 1958, I wrote a paper for a political science class at Wisconsin on the agricultural research and extension system. The professor criticized me for not listing the system’s opponents. I said, “Professor, there aren’t any.” In 1958, that was almost literally true. But that was long ago.
Recently, a consortium of foundations, The Collaborative for Health and the Environmnent, with total assets of $3.5 billion has reportedly begun talking of a ten-year campaign to convince medical students that pesticides must be banned. Their hope is that these impressionable students will ultimately develop into a condemning majority within the medical profession.
In the last decade, I’ve come to understand much more clearly how China in the 12th century and Japan in the 17th century could have closed their borders and frozen their technology levels. In both countries, the ruling class began to feel trade and technology getting beyond their control. Rather than let commoners run amuck with dangerous ideas about gunpowder and ships’ compasses,the elites shut everything down.
We’re seeing much the same sort of syndrome in Europe today, with the European elites putting up the “precautionary principle” as their response to “overpopulation,” immigration, urban sprawl, fast-food restaurants, and other discomforting trends. American elites are very much tempted to follow in their path.
Agricultural research and technology cannot survive the precautionary principle. No technology can prove the negative of doing no harm, ever, to any person or thing in the environment. Not electricity, not antibiotics, not fertilizer.
North Carolina’s Theft of Farmers’ Rights
Today, the state of North Carolina maintains a moratorium on new confinement hog houses that has been in place since 1997. The public reason is that factory hog farms threatened the water quality in local streams and rivers. However, the state has never released any water quality data supporting the claims of river pollution from well-run (and state-regulated) confinement hog farms.
Outdoor hog farms, as we all know, let their wastes wash into the nearest stream with every storm event. But confinement hog farms are managed essentially on a zero-discharge basis. There should be no stream pollution.
For more than a decade, however, activists have charged huge pollution levels from confinement hogs.A North Carolina State scientist, Dr. Joanne Burkholder, claimed that the hog manure fostered “the cells from hell,” fish-toxic dinoflagellates called Pfiesteria. Bobby Kennedy Jr. called confinement hogs a bigger threat than Osama Bin Laden.
Finally, this year, the Cape Fear River Assembly asked if our Center could do an objective analysis of the state’s water quality data. We agreed; but we had to threaten legal action before the state would release the water data. The pattern from the data was very clear. The quality of the rivers is good and not declining. (The primary “hog river,” the Black, is rated an outstanding resource water.) The nutrient levels in the North Carolina “hog rivers” are just about what they were 15 years ago before the hog expansion. The nutrient spikes in the rivers are not downstream from the hog farms, but immediately downstream from the sewage treatment plants.
For ten years or more, the government of North Carolina has been living a lie to the farmers in its poorest counties. These farmers weren’t able to grow affluence from cotton, tobacco, or peanuts. Until the hog expansion, they had to move to the cities to make money. Hogs have moved them up to the median income for all North Carolina counties.
But the city folks don’t like hogs in their state, even when they’re out of sight and beyond olfactory range. The city newspapers wrote alarmingly about the hog farms. In response to perceived voter opinion, the politicians decided to stop hog expansion. And for ten years, no one in the North Carolina governmental structure has been willing to tell the truth-that the confinement hog farms are fine for the environment, good for the state’s economy, and an asset to a bacon-loving nation. (Other academic researchers have been unable to replicate Dr. Burkholder’s toxic Pfiesteria, with or without hog manure.)
Are Farmers Killing the Salmon in the Pacific Northwest?
Out on the West Coast, for decades farmers have been accused of causing the decline of the region’s fabulous salmon runs. The myth is that farmers demanded dams to irrigate their crops; the crops stole the salmon’s river water while the dams and sediment from the crops stifled the salmon’s reproduction.
Today, seventeen eco-groups are suing to breach four federal dams on the Snake River, which they say are direct salmon-killers. This spring, a federal judge rejected a federal salmon rescue plan because it did not include breaching the dams.
Amid the debate, no one seems to notice that the salmon are recovering on their own. I predicted this three years ago. The salmon run last year was the biggest in a decade. The reason? There’s a 25-year cycle in Pacific salmon. For 25 years, Oregon and Washington have lots of salmon-while the salmon canneries in the Gulf of Alaska don’t. Then the cycle reverses, as it did in 1977. For the last 25 years, the Alaskan fishermen have had lots of salmon, but now Oregon and Washington’s turn.
Fishermen have known about this remarkable 25-year cycle for a century. Now, even the academics are beginning to write learned papers about “co-variance” between the Alaskan and Oregon fisheries, and the salmon’s linkage to the huge Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Did the Sierra Club know about the 25-year cycle before the suits were filed and not tell us? Or just not know?
The Mild, Unstoppable Global Warming That Will Be
Virtually all of the warming that’s occurred in the past 120 years occurred before 1940, before much greenhouse gas was emitted by human industries and autos. Thereafter, the climate stubbornly refused to warm for 40 years, despite huge greenhouse emissions.
The world’s known temperature history includes a Medieval Warming of perhaps 3 degrees Fahrenheit (950 to1300 AD), followed by the much-colder Little Ice Age, from 1300 to 1850 AD. History also tells us about a Roman Warming, from 200 BC to 400 AD, followed by an Ice Age from 400 to 950 AD. The world has been moderately warming and cooling for as far back in history as we have records.
Last year, an elegant and careful analysis of iceberg debris from the floor of the North Atlantic showed that the world has had nine moderate global warmings and nine global coolings in the last 12,000 years-coinciding exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. By this analysis, we are about 150 years into a mild, natural, global warming that will last another 500 years. The cycle will return us to what history calls the Medieval Climate Optimum-the finest weather humanity can remember.
The Great Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone Syndrome
During the Clinton Administration, a White House task force was all set to impose a 30 percent cut in farmers’ fertilizer use on half a billion square miles of the American heartland between the Appalachians and the Rockies- the most productive agricultural region in the world. They were willing to order this massive land-use change on the basis of 15 years of data from a single source: one annual small-boat voyage by a Louisiana scientist, Dr. Nancy Rabelais, to measure the low-oxygen zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Never mind that virtually all the nutrients for the Gulf of Mexico’s rich marine come down the Mississippi, and no one knows how much nitrogen the Gulf fish need. Or, that there are hypoxic zones at the mouths of some 40 major world rivers. (The laws of biology and physics dictate it.)
Never mind that huge loads of nutrients came down the Mississippi before Columbus, from 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds, and trillions of grasshoppers all munching and defecating on the grasses of the Great Plains.
Never mind that even Rabelais’ own data show the size of the hypoxic zone in the Gulf varying primarily with the river’s flow. It nearly disappeared in the 1988 drought year, and surged in size for three years after 1993’s “flood of the century.”
Never mind that nitrogen fertilizer use on Midwest farms plateaued two decades ago while corn yields have since risen 20 percent. That means more of the fertilizer is being harvested as corn, leaving less to leach into the river. More of the region’s poultry and livestock are being raised indoors, and their wastes applied as organic fertilizer in zero-discharge management. Where would the N come from to drive an expanding “dead zone” at the mouth of the Mississippi?
Even the Clinton White House Task Force could find no ecological or economic damage to the Gulf-but they were willing to force a huge constraint on modern farming because we’ve let modern farming be perceived as a problem in itself.
The Organic Illusion
Virtually every urban resident in the First World today has widespread praise for organic food and organic farming. Rachel Carson’s misinforming book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, played on our fears of lurking, man-made carcinogens. But in the intervening years, non-smokers’ cancer rates have trended down where pesticides have been used.
In fact, the British Advertising Standards Authority has forbidden the organic industry to make any claims about better health or better nutrition for organic foods. In the movement’s 60 years, it has never been able to provide any evidence of such benefits.
The U.S. media ignored the news when the head of the Foodborne Diseases branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the International Federation of Food Technologists both warned publicly that organic food is more likely to carry dangerous pathogens such as salmonella and E.coli O157 since it is commonly fertilized with animal manure. (Composting is an erratic process not guaranteed to consistently protect consumers from such bacteria.)
The real problem with organic farming, however, is the huge global shortage of organic nitrogen. The world has less than one-third of the organic N to produce today’s crops, let alone tripling food output for 2050.
A high-level technical committee appointed by the Danish government reported in 1999 that all-organic farming would cut Danish food production by 47 percent. Under an organic mandate, most of Denmark’s farmland would be planted to forage crops, to feed the cattle to provide the millions of tons of manure for crop nitrogen. Denmark would become a “manure landscape,” with the forage hauled to cattle feedlots, and then the manure hauled back out to be spread thickly over the countryside.
Dr. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba (author of Feeding the World: the 21st Century Challenge, MIT Press, 2001) estimates that the United States would need the manure from another 900 million to one billion cattle, at perhaps three acres of forage per beast. Since the United States has only 2.1 billion acres in its lower 48 states, America would have room for its cities and cattle forage, but no room for food production, forests, or Yellowstone National Park.
Yet the New York Times, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and a wide range of other urban “thought leaders” are falling over themselves to recommend organic farming. It vividly demonstrates the agricultural ignorance of today’s urban elite.
Trade and the Biggest Agricultural Challenge in History
In December 1999, activists took over the streets of Seattle to protest world trade. They demanded, among other things, that everyone have the “right” to produce their own food.
The world’s good farmland, however, is not well distributed to meet the challenge of feeding 9 billon affluent people and their pets in 2050. China, for example, has 20 percent of the world’s population, but only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, and a similarly tiny percentage of its water. Such densely populated tropical countries as Indonesia and Bangladesh, and such arid countries as Egypt and Morocco will have severe difficulty providing high-quality diets to their 2050 populations from their own farms.
Meanwhile, in many countries where high-yield agriculture has been especially successful, farmers are able to produce more food than their consumers want. The marriage made in economic and environmental heaven is between the unmet demand for high-quality diets in densely populated Asian countries and the surplus productivity of North America, South America, and Europe.
Yet, while the world trade organization helped cut the average nonfarm tariff from 40 percent to 4 percent since 1947, the average farm product tariff is still more than 60 percent. Agricultural trade has been stifled by more than $300 billon per year in rich-country farm subsidies that would be essentially unnecessary if we had free trade.
The eco-groups and “social justice” groups claim to be blocking farm trade to save small family and traditional farms from corporate monopolies. But most of Europe’s peasant farmers have already moved to the cities, and the American family farm has grown larger to match rising urban incomes. The real impact of the Luddites is to block the changes in global farming patterns that are urgently needed to protect the very wildlife they claim to revere.
Rich Countries Are Destroying the Environment - Or Are They?
One of the eco-movement’s biggest falsehoods is that affluent nations are the enemies of environmental conservation.
Jared Diamond notes in his Pulitzer-winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel, that when Stone Age hunters reached North America, they wiped out more than 40 of its large, huntable mammal species in a historian’s eyeblink. Similar surges of extinctions occurred when skilled hunters reached Australia and New Guinea.
Today, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling supposedly aphrodisiac rhinoceros horn and “bushmeat” from endangered gorillas and rare civet cats-harvested with AK-47s.
The International Conservation Union (ICUN) warns that more than one billion people are trying support families in the world’s biodiversity hotspots with hunting and low-yield slash-and-burn farming. 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; every few years, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.
Yet the eco-movement presents hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future.
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.
But there is hope for both 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 (due to lower death rates) and higher incomes (better diets) demand more farmland. 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 no additional land is needed for food. Diesel fuel substitutes for firewood, even as 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.
Dasgupta et al. find no hordes of high-pollution industries fleeing to unregulated Third World countries. (Such labor-intensive industries as garments, shoes, and computer services are not heavily polluting.)
Dr. Bjorn Lomborg’s widely publicized book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, has been fiercely condemned by eco-groups, but they have not been able to shake his key point: An objective analysis of the world’s available eco-data shows virtually all of the First World environmental trends are virtuous.
Biotechnology and the Biggest Agricultural Challenge in History
One of the most serious endemic problems for Africa farmers is a parasitic weed called witchweed. It invades Africa’s staple grain crops, corn, and sorghum, through their roots, so weeding doesn’t help. The farmers don’t even know witchweed is there- until their cornstalks sprout bright-colored flowers instead of grain. Witchweed can take half, or all, of a small farmer’s corn crop. But if herbicide-tolerant biotech corn is soaked in a systemic herbicide before planting, the witchweed invading the sprouting corn plant may killed internally.
This one off-the-shelf adaptation of a biotech transformation could add millions of tons to Africa’s annual grain production. The cost of the biotech corn seed would be low, and the amount of systemic herbicide needed to soak the seeds would be minimal. This one is waiting permission for field trials.
But, will African countries dare to permit biotech corn in their fields? Last year, the activists took their biotech scare campaign to drought-stricken southern Africa, and convinced the governments of some starving countries to ban the U.S. corn offered as food aid. The president of Zambia said he’d been told it was “poison.” Other African politicians feared that they would lose European export opportunities-and even European aid-if they permitted biotech crops to be grown or eaten.
Yet current food production and population trends would drive Africa to clear a Texas worth of its wildlands over the next 20 years, and still leave 200 million malnourished Africans.
Biotech firms have lost $30 billion in equity since the activists launched their biotech scare campaign. Public support for biotech crop research has been decimated. Europe is still banning the import of any biotech products, warning export farmers not to plant the biotech seeds. Any hope that biotech can lead us to re-tripled crop yields, eliminating hunger, and saving wildlands, is on hold.
Why do They Hate Farmers?
Actually, city folks don’t hate farmers. They just don’t understand farming. Our cities’ agricultural ignorance has gotten steadily worse as fewer of us grow up on farms, and modern agriculture transforms itself far beyond the postcard-friendly, traditional red-barn-and-white-fence pattern of the 19th century farm.
All today’s urban consumers know about farming is what they’ve been told by farmers and activists. Farmers tell them there’s a food surplus and that farm prices are too low. The activists tell them we should have organic farming to protect the environment. The city folks figure we can solve both problems with low-yield organic farming.
Professional agriculturists have never told the urban public anything coherent and consistent. We criticize the activists for telling falsehoods-but we don’t tell the public about our core motives: making sure that all the little kids in the world get high-quality nutrition while protecting the wildlands from expanded low-yield farming.
What Can Agriculturists Do?
In the beginning of the eco-attacks, agriculturists assumed that the eco-groups had done their homework and were focused on real problems in agriculture. Our response was to apologize. Now, we know that some eco-groups put their agenda before reality.
Agriculturists need to become more proactive. While giving eco-groups full credit for their conservation intent, agriculturists need to aggressively make the case that high-yield farming is the greatest humanitarian triumph in history; and, at the same time, mankind’s greatest environmental achievement. We must urgently remind the public of the billions of people not malnourished, millions of kids not starved, millions of pets well-fed, and millions of square miles of wildlands not plowed.
It may not be fair that agriculturists should have to take on this huge public service task. We aren’t really trained or equipped for it; and, we have crops to grow, livestock to feed and agribusinesses to run.
But the world has never before faced such levels of consumer ignorance on farming. Or the massive, amply-funded, media-connected phenomenon of non-governmental organizations completely lacking the checks and balances we put on governments, businesses, and academics.
If agriculturists-including all of the professional societies, all of the farm groups-and all of the companies do not become far more proactive, then high-yield agriculture in America will be truly lost.
Confronting the Organic Icon
High-yield agriculturists also need to ensure that organic food and farming is presented accurately to the urban public. We need to do this, not because of organic’s tiny fraction of the food market is important, nor because high-yield farmers are jealous of the organic price premiums. We need to confront the organic myths because organic food has been turned into an icon for both the public and its government regulators at the federal, state, and even local level.
The activists use the organic icon to promise not only “adequate” food, but better food even as they undercut the very basis of current world food output. They say organic food will be full to bursting with richer nutrients, and will bring the pink glow of health to our indoor children’s cheeks. It will disarm the dreadful, lurking cancer epidemic. And of course, it’s kinder to the environment, so we’ll have more butterflies and birds flitting through the fields. One shopper even told ABC-TV that her kids behaved better when she fed them organic food!
The activists’ real, oft-stated goal, is a world with fewer and less-materialist humans, living far lower on the food chain. When they talk about “adequate” food from organic farming, the diet may resemble the meager Cuban diet currently being produced mostly with organic farming-for the lucky two billion chosen to continue living on the planet.
The organic icon has already proven that it has the power to deny high-yield agriculture’s inputs and farming systems. Even where the farming changes reduce human food security and threaten to clear more farmland. (It might take the land area of Pennsylvania to put all our hogs outdoors, and the land area of New Jersey to put the chickens outdoors, but the city folks won’t believe it until the forest trees are actually being cut.)
The clincher on the organic sales pitch has always been fear: The lurking cancer threat of pesticide residues, key nutrients lost, massive soil erosion, lack of sustainability. None of these assertions is true, but the media cut scaremongers a lot of slack, and the assertions are repeated over and over.
Misrepresentation: Synthetic fertilizer poisons soils. The whole organic movement began with the falsehood that synthetic fertilizer (actually, natural nitrogen captured from the air through an industrial process) would poison the soil. No such soil poisoning has been documented. In fact, some of the plots at Britain’s famed Rothamsted experiment station have gotten inorganic fertilizers for more than 150 years with rising yields.
Misrepresentation: Pesticides cause cancer: The American Cancer Society says, “. . . the very low concentrations [of pesticides] found in some foods have not been associated with increased cancer risk. In fact, people who eat more fruits and vegetables, which may be contaminated with trace amounts of pesticides, generally have lower cancer risks than people who eat few fruits and vegetables.” When activists assert that pesticides are “linked to cancer,” they mean that high doses of the chemicals cause tumors in rats. So does over-feeding, and we overfeed the rats to maximize dosage. At high doses, half of everything tested, natural and man-made, causes tumors in rats.
Misrepresentation: Organic is better for the environment. If all-organic farming required the world to give up nitrogen fertilizer, and it took the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace it, every bit of forest and wild meadow on the planet would have to be converted to cattle pasture. That hardly seems “better for the environment.”
Is it time for a congressional hearing on the claims and merits of organic food and farming?
We have an official new U.S. Department of Agriculture Organic Seal. When Secretary of Agriculture Glickman announced the organic standards, he said, “Organic is about how it is produced. Just because something is labeled as organic does not mean it is superior, safer or healthier than conventional food.”
The National Food processors Association asked the USDA to require that the organic labels include a statement saying the products are no more safe or nutritious than conventional foods. Is such a disclaimer still needed to prevent the seal from misleading consumers? About two-thirds of U.S. consumers in polls say the USDA organic seal means organic is better.
Britain’s No-Nonsense Organic Advertising
You’ll be interested in some of the British Advertising Standards Authority’s recent rulings on organic:
Claim: “Organic. As natural as nature intended. It’s the environmentally friendly alternative to chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides that can damage the soil and kill off nature’s own nutrients.”
ASA ruling: Misleading. The EU permits organics to use chemicals including slag, crude potassium salt, elemental sulphur, and insecticides such as Derris dust. Most readers would understand these substances to be “chemicals,” “fertilizers” or “pesticides.”
Claim: “[Organic food] is the safe choice for your family.”
ASA ruling: Misleading. Implies, without proof, that non-organic food is unsafe.
Claim: “You can taste the difference [in organic food].”
ASA ruling: Misleading. The advertisers sent the results of a poll in which 43 percent of consumers who expressed a preference for organic food said they preferred it because it tasted better. However, the ASA said it needed more rigorous evidence, such as blind taste tests.
Claim: “It’s healthy.” [referring to organic food]
ASA ruling: Misleading. People’s health depends more on the composition of their diets than on the nature of individual foods. Moreover, the advertisers had sent no clinical evidence to show that a diet of organic products was more healthy than the same diet consisting of non-organic food.
Claim by a supermarket selling conventionally-grown chickens: “All our chickens come from good homes.” A complainant stated that many of the chickens were reared intensively in broiler houses.
ASA ruling: Acceptable. Even in confinement, the conditions for the chickens were carefully regulated and monitored, and the supermarket’s animal welfare specifications exceeded Government guidelines.
The Bottom Line:
High-yield agriculture’s first task is to convey to the urban public the massive benefits of high yields that have saved billions of people, millions of pets and millions of square miles of wildlife.
I see in my mind’s eye a set of full-color magazine ads, showing kids around the globe with their pets and some wild babies (a baby elephant, lion cub, baby egret). The cut line would say, “Let’s be sure we can feed them all in the 21st century.”
Then, we must make certain that the public understands the real limits of organic food and farming.
This is all outside our job descriptions. But there is no other line of defense for today’s American society against a future of hunger, malnutrition, and environmental desolation.
Posted in Speeches |1 Comment »
Engineering A Sustainable–and Sustaining–World Food Supply
By cgfi | July 29, 2002
This speech was given before the American Society of Agricultural Engineers in Chicago, IL
The Declaration for High-Yield Agriculture
On April 30, 2002, a new “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature With High-Yield Farming and Forestry” was signed in Washington, D.C. The founding signers included two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the famed British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, the President of the World Conservation Trust, the 2001 World Food Prize winner and two noteworthy former Senators—one from each major U.S. political party.
The Declaration says in part:
It is clear that modern high-yield farming – the Green Revolution – has been a significant environmental and humanitarian triumph. Since the 1960’s it has led to better lives and prevented the malnourishment of billions of people.
Additionally, the Green Revolution’s higher yields made it unnecessary to clear millions of square miles for food production, thereby saving large amounts of natural habitat and biodiversity from the plow. In short, producing more food per hectare helped save large areas of land for nature.
WHEREAS:
- More than one-third of the earth’s total land area is already devoted to food and fiber production.
- The most productive and sustainable land is already being farmed.
- The world’s population will likely rise to nine billion people before 2050, a level 50% higher than year 2000 levels.
- As in China, where meat consumption more than doubled in the 1990’s, worldwide per capita consumption of meat, dairy products, fruits and vegetables is increasing rapidly as living standards rise throughout the world.
- Global demand for forest products is increasing rapidly and may double over the next half century.
- The greatest threat to the Earth’s biodiversity is habitat loss through the conversion of natural ecosystems in developing countries to agriculture.
Therefore, we, the signatories to this declaration, hereby declare that additional high-yield practices, based on advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology, are critically needed in agriculture and forestry not only to achieve the goal of improving the human condition for all peoples but also the simultaneous preservation of the natural environment and its biodiversity through the conservation of wild areas and natural habitat.
We invite all organizations and individuals concerned with human welfare and the conservation and preservation of our planet’s rich biological heritage to join us in support of high-yield agriculture and forestry by adding their names to this declaration.
The founding signers of the High Yield Declaration include;
- Dr. Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner;
- Dr. Oscar Arias, former President of Costa Rica and the 1986 Nobel Peace laureate;
- Dr. Patrick Moore, forestry expert and co-founder of Greenpeace;
- Dr. James Lovelock, British chemist and author of the Gaia Hypothesis;
- Eugene Lapointe, President of the World Conservation Trust;
- former U.S. Senator and “UN Ambassador to the Hungry” George McGovern (D-SD);
- former Senator Rudy Boschwitz (R-MN); and
- Dr. Per Pinstrup-Anderson, winner of the 2002 World Food Prize for his work at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
I call these people ‘high-yield heroes,’ because they’re willing to put their enormous reputations behind a politically incorrect strategy. They argue for intensive farming and tree plantations. They’re worried about the negative environmental impacts of traditional, low-yield farming systems, and letting trees burn instead becoming timber. Most of all, they agree that high yields are vital for humanity and the planet.”
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.
The world must nearly triple its food production by 2050, for a human population that may reach 9 billion before it stabilizes. Wood is the most renewable and environmentally friendly building material, and paper will be vital for literacy and economic growth all over the world. Without higher yields from the farmlands and managed forests, the world could still lose much of today’s wildlands and biodiversity.
The Age-Old Search for a Sustaining Food Supply
Getting enough food has been mankind’s first and foremost concern for millions of years. Fortunately, mankind has shown enormous ingenuity in achieving food-sufficiency, from the early invention of clubs, spears and flint skinning knives through the development of agriculture, and right up to today’s pursuit of virus-resistant (and thus higher-yielding) crop varieties through biotechnology.
The problem for early man was that hunting and gathering provided a healthy diet rich in meat, eggs, fish and shellfish, fruits and vegetables—but not for very many people. Game animals were elusive, their travels unpredictable, and their populations cycled up and down. When the first human hunters arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they quickly wiped out dozens of huntable species, including North America’s versions of the elephant, camel, horse and ground sloth.
Mankind searched millions of years to overcome the limitations of hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, when we finally discovered how to domesticate plants and animals, and created agriculture.
Farming created, for the first time, a stable, sustainable food supply for large numbers of humans, but there was still a problem: Farming didn’t provide a very good diet for humans who had evolved as hunters of meat.
“It’s easy to tell from the skeletons of our ancestors whether they were agriculturists or hunter-gatherers,” says Arthur de Vany, an expert on Stone Age diets at California State University. “The agriculturists have bad teeth, bone lesions, small and underdeveloped skeletons teeth, and small craniums, compared to hunter- gatherers.”
Experts now believe humans spent 2 million years as hunters and scavengers, eating diets that were about 65 percent livestock calories and 35 percent plant calories. Early farmers who ate mainly plants lacked key vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. This led to higher infant mortality, shorter life spans, more infectious diseases, widespread iron deficiency anemiam and bone mineral disorders.
The U.S. Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) reports “where intakes of animal products are low, increases in meat (in particular), milk, and eggs in the diets of toddlers and school children have resulted in marked improvement in growth, cognitive development and health.”
Only in the last century, through the high-yield wonders of modern plant breeding, industrial fertilizers, and integrated pest management, has society been able to broadly support high-quality diets for large groups of people.
The animal-plant balance in the American diet today is 38 percent livestock calories and 62 percent plant calories. It is roughly similar in Europe. This is probably the highest percentage of livestock calories in 10,000 years. Worldwide, however, only about 17 percent of the human calories come from livestock.
Supporting High-Quality Diets for the 21st Century
The world’s population growth is rapidly tapering off. Births per woman in the Third World have fallen from 6.2 in 1960 to less than 3.0 today, and are still declining strongly. Population stability is 2.1 births per woman. The First World is at 1.6 births per woman, and showing no sign of resurgence. It is entirely reasonable now to expect the world’s human population will peak at less than 9 billion people, about the year 2040, and trend slowly downward after that.
The big challenge for farming, and for wildlands conservation, in the 21st century will be supplying humanity’s innate hunger for high-quality protein. Reflecting the world’s strongly rising income trend, we will apparently need to provide high-quality diets for nearly 9 billion people by 2050, instead of today’s 1 billion affluent consumers.
There will even be a pet challenge. America has 112 million companion cats and dogs among its 270 million people. A rich, one-child China in 2050 may well have 500 million companion cats and dogs—and woe unto any politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food!
CAST expects world meat demand to rise about two-thirds in the next 20 years, with 90 percent of the increased consumption in the Third World. Ultimately, we must expect that Third World per capita consumption of livestock products will equal that in the First World today.
Sheep, goats, and cattle in the Third World produce more than a kilogram of human food for each kilogram of grain consumed. However, we’re already using most of the world’s grasslands, and they have limited potential to produce more grass, due to poor rainfall and/or soil quality. In the First World, it takes about three pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat, and a bit less than one pound of grain to produce a pound of milk or eggs.
Worldwide, there are only small amounts of additional good land that can be brought into production; for example, parts of Brazil and Sudan. There are low-yield farming systems that can be improved through economic and societal reforms in a few places such as the Ukraine and Bangladesh. Overall, however, it is appropriate to say that good farmland is the scarcest resource in the world.
Development economists say that the world will need at least 250 percent more farm output by 2050, and perhaps three times as much. Since the world is already farming 37 percent of its land area, we cannot contemplate simply extending today’s crop and livestock yields to supply tomorrow’s food needs. If we want to save the world’s wildlands for future generations, we should be thinking how to quadruple today’s yields on the high-quality land.
Agricultural Engineering and Sustainable Farming
An Historical Overview. The earliest agricultural engineers were probably the practical men in the Fertile Crescent of the Eastern Mediterranean who thousands of years ago invented the plow, the harrow and the irrigation ditch. Those three advances, along with selective plant and animal breeding, powered the early era of agriculture. (The harrow was necessary for weed control as early farmers used only half the land each crop season and clean-fallowed the other half.)
There were problems, of course. Irrigation built up salts in the irrigated fields. The famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon, after several centuries of careless irrigation, became what they are today—a salt-rimed swamp in southern Iraq. The plow led a surge of higher yields across much of the ancient world—but also encouraged the heavy soil erosion that plagued the Old World, especially in the Mediterranean Basin.
Famine, however, dominated the farming world from the inception of farming until after World War II. Any advancement that provided more food, immediately, got precedence over something that might protect future yields.
What rescued humanity from unsustainable farming and ultimate, massive famine was the development and application of science and engineering.
Engineering’s first and biggest contribution to a sustainable high-quality diet was the Haber-Bosch process for taking nitrogen from the air, invented in 1908. Until that time, nitrogen for crop growth was the key limiting factor in global food production. We could only sustain as much crop production as we could nourish with animal manure. There was lots of phosphate and potash in rich deposits around the world. The air we breathe is 78 percent N, but until the Haber-Bosch process, we couldn’t get the N out of the air and into our fields except through ruminant animals.
The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s represented in a very real sense the huge failure we must expect if we try to feed a modern society using traditional farming. America used John Deere’s new steel plow to break the rich soils of the Great Plains after 1870. But decades of farming gradually used up the nutrients that had accumulated in those soils under centuries of heavy grazing and defecating by bison, antelope, birds, and grasshoppers.
America had a severe drought in the 1930s—but we’d had severe droughts before, and have had equally severe droughts since. But, we’ve had only one Dust Bowl—when the natural plant nutrients in the Great Plains soils ran out. Soil organic matter declined with repeated plowing and cropping.
The Dust Bowl created the Soil Conservation Service, pushed farmers to use contour farming, and the new chemical nitrogen available because of Haber-Bosch—and launched agricultural science and engineering on a new path toward increasing sustainability for farming. The new rising yield trends produced by hybrid seeds and industrially fertilized fields began to be amplified by the more timely field work done with lightweight gasoline tractors and by millions of acres of horse pasture suddenly freed for food crops because they were no longer needed for draft animal fodder.
Urban American is currently suffering through an unrequited love affair with the traditional farming practiced in America before 1900, with its horse-drawn sleighs, wood-handled pitchforks, and big red barns full of loose hay. They somehow think modern life would be better if 90 percent of the population spent its time milking cows and pulling weeds by hand. (So long as they themselves remain in the urban 10 percent, of course, enjoying the computers, cars, entertainment centers and modern medicine.)
The reality, of course, is that the farming of 1875 could not produce enough food and fiber to sustain today’s world’s human population, let alone get high enough yields to save the wildlands. In fact, my peer-reviewed estimate is that high-powered seeds, center-pivot irrigation, tractors, fertilizers, no-till planters, pesticides, and confinement feeding systems have prevented the plow down of an additional 16 million square miles of wildlands to produce today’s food supply.
That number, 16 million square miles, is significant because it represents the world’s total forest area. What this means is that virtually every forest tree and creature on the planet today owes its existence to high-yield farming, agricultural researchers, and farm input suppliers!
The Soil and Water Conservation Society of America, no friend of agribusiness, has declared modern high-yield farming the most sustainable in history in large part because of its unprecedented ability to minimize farming’s land requirements while sustaining soil fertility, preventing soil erosion and controlling pests through integrated pest management.
Recent Science and Engineering Contributions to Food Sustainability
Saving Wildlands with Fossil Fuel. Eco-activists condemn modern agriculture for using “too much fossil fuel.” in agriculture. However, modern farming in the United States accounts for only 2 percent of the country’s petroleum use, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Energy. Historically, farmers use the same energy sources as non-farm industries (horses, steam, gasoline, diesel). If engineering provides a cleaner, more sustainable power source in the future, farmers will adopt it. If we went back to horse-drawn farm equipment, we’d need to clear another 100 million acres of land for their fodder.
One of farming’s major fossil fuel uses is unique. Farmers use natural gas to capture 80 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year from the air. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency estimate that America has only about one-fourth of the organic N needed to support its current crop output. Countries like India, where the crop biomass is burned for cooking fuel and used as animal fodder, are even more seriously short of organic matter to maintain soil quality.
Vaclav Smil, author of Enriching the Earth (MIT Press, 2001), estimates that a worldwide organic farming mandate would require the manure from another 7–8 billion cattle to replace the elemental nitrogen high-yield farmers currently take from the air. The best-quality land could support no more than one animal unit per hectare, and low-quality land might need 15 hectares per animal unit. The forage needed for so many cattle would take most of the world’s scarce farmland.
The United States would need the manure from nearly one billion additional cattle to replace its current N fertilizer use. There are only 2.1 billion acres in the whole lower 48 states. The U.S. could not even feed that many cattle, let alone having land for food production, parks, and national forests. (The extra cattle might be used as draft animals, replacing tractors and lowering farm fuel needs—but at the expense of shortening the growing season because of the draft animals’ slower speed).
On the other hand, the world has no looming shortage of fossil fuels. It has perhaps 200 years worth of probable petroleum and orimulsion reserves. (Huge deposits of orimulsion, which can be burned in power plants, lie unused in Venezuela.) There are centuries worth of coal for clean-burn technologies.
African farmers use virtually no fertilizer on their food crops, and in many cases their bush-fallow periods have been cut from 15–20 years to two or three years. Africa is locked in a downward spiral of declining soil fertility, declining yields, and declining soil organic content. The International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that, unless their agriculture becomes more productive, sub-Saharan Africa will likely double its number of malnourished children (to 49 million) by 2020 and the reality could be even more disastrous. Is this the “sustainable” farming that the activists recommend?
Radically Reducing Soil Erosion. Modern farming has reduced soil erosion to the lowest rates in agriculture’s history. Today, it is primarily the world’s peasant and organic farmers who suffer the high rates of soil erosion. Peasant farmers get yields one-tenth or one-hundredth as high as the modern farmers, so they must extend their fields onto steep slopes and into tropical monsoon climates where erosion risks are ten times higher than in Iowa.
High-yield farmers increasingly use some form of conservation tillage, which eliminates plowing, cuts water runoff and soil erosion by up to 95 percent, retains up to twice as much water in the soils, and encourages far more soil microbes and earthworms. Conservation tillage is now being used on hundreds of millions of acres in North America, South America, Australia and, most recently, in Asia.
Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA recently performed ‘soil archeology’ on one of the worst Dust Bowl soil erosion sites, the Coon Creek watershed in Wisconsin. In the 1970s and again in the 1990s, he re-did an old 1938 Soil Conservation Service soil survey. Trimble concluded that, thanks primarily to chemical fertilizers and conservation farming systems, the Coon Creek watershed currently has only 6 percent as much erosion as it suffered during the Dust Bowl days. Its topsoil is now fully sustainable.
Dr. Trimble says his data show that the U.S. Department of Agriculture overstates U.S. erosion. He says anyone now claiming widespread unsustainable rates of U.S. soil erosion “owes us the evidence.” The high soil erosion claims of Dr. David Pimental, for example, are popular among activists, but Pimental has no field data to support them.
In Argentina, I visited a farm yielding four tons of wheat per hectare from no-till, with no erosion. Across the fence, a farmer who still plowed was getting one ton of wheat per hectare, with lots of erosion. Much of Brazil’s rolling acid-soil Cerrados Plateau could not be sustainably farmed without no-till. No wonder Latin America’s no-till acreage has expanded from 670,000 hectares in 1987 to more than 29 million hectares in 2001. The latest surge of no-till is in South Asia’s irrigated rice-wheat lands, where no-till lets farmers harvest their summer wheat three weeks earlier (before the fiercest heat can shrivel the grain) with half as much water used.
More Efficient and Sustainable Irrigation. Agricultural engineers have created a far more water-efficient and cost-efficient irrigation system than the traditional dams and ditches. The center-pivots put water from wells directly onto the crop fields, so no rivers are drowned. Whereas water efficiency with dams and ditches averages less than 40 percent, modern center-pivots with trailing tubes instead of sprinklers (less evaporation) can easily top 80 percent. With computer-controlled water application, high-efficiency center-pivots could irrigate the land with half the current water use, making the currently dwindling Ogallala Aquifer fully sustainable. The new computerized center-pivots would do this with half their current electricity use.
Such high-efficiency center pivots will take on even more importance in the years ahead to provide supplemental irrigation on current rain-fed land as we strive to quadruple the yields on the best soils.
Preventing Biodiversity Losses. Eco-activists complain that high-yield farming destroys biodiversity. Again, they ignore the largest conservation triumph in world history—the millions of wild species protected in the 16 million square miles of wildlands not plowed.
Dr. Michael Huston, an ecologist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories and author of Biological Diversity (Cambridge Press, 1994) told a Hudson farm policy conference in 1995, “Fortunately for both humans and nature, the world’s best soils support the most productive agriculture, but relatively low biodiversity. The world’s poorer soils are terrible for crop production, but harbor our largest reservoir of wild plant species and their genes. There is no inherent conflict between sustainable farming and biodiversity conservation at least on a global basis.” Dr. Huston recommended that we farm the best land for the highest sustainable yields, and thus leave more of the poorer, more biodiverse lands, for Nature.
The activist complaint may be based on the fact that lots of small farmers, all over the world, have shifted from traditional low-yield seeds to high-yield Green Revolution-type seeds. Some activists demand that we keep the Third World half of the planet’s arable land as a gene museum—thereby sacrificing millions of wild species to preserve “man-made biodiversity.” Wouldn’t gene banks and small gene farms accomplish the goal without locking the entire Third World in perpetuity-poverty?
Organic farmers constantly brag that their fields contain somewhat more weed and insect species than high-yield fields. However, all farming is an intrusion on nature. Even an organic field has probably lost 98 percent of its wild biodiversity. If organic farmers need nearly twice as much land to produce the global food supply, then we would lose huge numbers of wild species to an organic farming mandate.
Confinement Meat Production. Indicting modern confinement meat production for water pollution is the most ludicrous element in the current activist litany against modern farming, though it is a popular theme with activists and the media. In the first place, feeding birds and animals in confinement saves millions of hectares of land that would otherwise be used for barren hog and poultry yards. Secondly, the confinement feeders save the creatures’ wastes and apply them to growing crops as organic fertilizer. Otherwise, they would wash into the nearest stream with every storm event—as the wastes from outdoor livestock and poultry producers do now.
The birds and animals suffer less from weather extremes. Hogs, for example, can’t sweat in the summer, or grow fur for the winter. Indoor hogs are far more comfortable, and this is reflected in feed conversion ratios about 20 percent higher than for outdoor animals. High feed conversion rates mean less land must be planted to crops to nourish them.
North Carolina’s Black River, which drains the most intensive hog production region in America, is still rated an “outstanding resource water” by the state. The nutrient spikes found in North Carolina streams are not associated with hog farms but with its urban sewage treatment plants. (Current sewage treatment methods take out only about half of the N from human wastes.)
The quarterly reports from North Carolina’s Department of Water Quality consistently show that 99 percent of the state’s hog farms have no discharges to surface waters at all. The total gallonage discharged is miniscule.
At a 1999 seminar, marine scientists reported that nitrogen, phosphorous and chlorophyll trends in North Carolina’s Tar-Pamlico and Neuse River Estuary Basins do not support a claim of increased eutrophication over the past 30 years, despite rising livestock numbers.
The best hog production facility I have ever seen used deep pits under concrete-slatted hog houses to accumulate the manure, phased feed rations to minimize odor-causing elements in the manure, and soil injection of the wastes to minimize both nutrient losses and odors. Fifty years away, downwind, I could not smell it was a hog farm!
Activist lawsuits against confinement hogs have now been thrown out of North Carolina courts and out of a federal court. The federal judge took the unusual step of requiring Bobby Kennedy, Jr. and his fellow “eco-lawyers” to pay the court costs of a big hog producer! The Federal judge said, “No reasonable attorney . . . could reasonably believe that [the lawsuit] had any reasonable chance of success.”
Desalinating Crops–The Latest Breakthrough in Food Sustainability. Forty percent of today’s food supply comes from irrigated land. For centuries, however, we’ve known that irrigated farming was unsustainable in the very long term due to salt buildup. Now, biotechnology has given high-yield farming the biggest sustainability breakthrough in 100 years. The University of California/Berkeley has created tomatoes and canola that not only grow in saline conditions, but also actually take salts out of the soil. The plants store the salts in their leaves during the growing season. After the tomatoes and oilseeds are harvested, the farmer can go back and harvest the leaves (and salts) for industrial use. One canola plant can remove 12 grams of salt, and there can be 20,000 canola plants per acre.
Biotechnology is also giving humanity its first victories over viruses, overcoming aluminum toxicity in acid soils, providing the gene maps to find useful genes from wild relatives of our crop plants, and generally promising to become a huge asset in creating the still-higher farm yields that will be needed in the next 50 years.
Low Yields From Alternative Agriculture
The Swiss Research Institute of Organic Agriculture just published in Science the conclusion that organic farming is “practical,” since their 21-year side-by-side tests showed the organic crops yielded “only” 20 percent less than the conventional crops.
However, a 20 percent worldwide increase in cropland requirements would force the plow-down of another 1.2 million square miles of wildlife habitat—equaling one-fourth of Europe’s land area.
Moreover, the Swiss organic results are actually much worse than reported: Their wheat averaged only 4 tons per hectare, compared to the Swiss national average of 6–7 tons per year. Their potato yields were even worse compared with the Swiss national average. Clearly, the yields from all the Swiss organic research center’s test plots compare poorly with the yields of conventional Swiss farmers.
The Danish government’s Bichel Committee reported several years ago, after examining dozens of yield comparisons, that an organic farming mandate would slash Danish grain and pulse production by 62 percent, cut pork and poultry production by 70 percent and reduce potato output by 80 percent. Virtually overnight, Denmark would cease to be a country producing an abundant, high-quality food supply for its own population, plus billions of dollars worth of high-value farm exports (pork, cheese, frozen French fries) for sale to the rest of the world.
With organic-only farming, Denmark would barely be able to feed itself. Danish consumers would be forced into lower-quality diets, with far less pork, poultry, and potatoes. Denmark’s current export customers would have to clear millions of acres of their existing forests for additional farmland.
Only Denmark’s dairy production would survive the organic shift with its output virtually intact—because dairy cows can eat grass, and they would need lots and lots of cows to create fertilizer for their remaining crops.
Britain’s Rothamsted experiment station has been growing wheat with inorganic fertilizer for 158 straight years now—and is getting twice the wheat yield the Swiss organic researchers recently reported in Science. Organic farmers claim that chemical nitrogen “poisons the soil.” When will this “soil poisoning” set in?
Britain’s Cooperative Wholesale Association, which farms about 80,000 acres in both mainstream and organic modes, told a hearing of the British House of Lords in 1999 that it gets 44 percent less wheat from its organic fields. If that is the valid yield number for organic field crops, then producing Europe’s current food supply organically would require clearing additional farmland land equal to all the forests in Germany, France, Denmark, and the UK. Current EU exports to arid countries in the Middle East would be eliminated, so still another cropland penalty would be incurred somewhere on the planet.
The Small Farmer Diversion
Some eco-activists assert that “sustainable” farms are small and diversified. This reflects either idealized nostalgia or ignorance. The size of the farm has nothing to do with sustainability or environmental value.
Farmers have been migrating to the cities for centuries to get better pay and working conditions. The proportion of farmers in the United States and Europe has dropped from more than 80 percent in the early 19th century to well under 10 percent today. Asia is repeating the same pattern as it creates urban jobs that takes farmers away from stoop labor in the rice paddies.
It is doubtful that enough First World people would accept the hard work, harsh weather exposure and low pay of small, labor-intensive farms in the years ahead to supply its food. Britain’s Cooperative Wholesale Association says most of its hired organic farm workers leave within a few weeks.
Modern farmers get incomes as high as city workers by increasing their output. They produce more food by farming more acres, and/or more animals and/or getting higher yields. Often, high-yield farmers buy land that would otherwise be sold to developers.
High-yield farmers have an outstanding record of good stewardship and good environmental husbandry. When Auburn and North Carolina State University assessed the hog industry in North Carolina, they found 95 percent of the farms fulfilling their environmental responsibilities. The erring 5 percent were almost all small farms, with older farm operators who had little interest in making new investments in manure handling and animal comfort. This “careless 5 percent” is characteristic of the farming community, and has been for generations.
Sustainability on a Broader Scale
Global Warming: Late in 2001, Gerard Bond and a team from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University published their analysis of sediment cores from the floor of the North Atlantic Ocean going back 12,000 years. They were looking for iceberg debris, the little bits of rock ground off Canada and Greenland, and floated out to sea on icebergs. They found nine moderate global coolings and nine moderate global warming, in a cycle that averaged 1340 years. The cycle coincides exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. By that evidence, we are about 200 years or so into another moderate warming like the Medieval Climate Optimum—the finest weather humanity can remember. It will be followed by another Little Ice Age, starting somewhere around the year 3100 AD.
Salmon Returning to Pacific Northwest. Last year, Oregon fishermen caught four times as many salmon as they caught two years earlier. The state manager of the Oregon salmon fishery says, “The ocean is alive with baitfish.” The return of the “disappearing salmon” to the Pacific Northwest has nothing to do with logging, dams, or irrigated farming. It’s part of a known 25-year cycle of Pacific Ocean nutrients. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents push nutrients toward Oregon and Washington (while the salmon fishery in the Gulf of Alaska declines). Then, for the next 25 years, the salmon nutrients go to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon-Washington salmon fishery declines. The fish catch data clearly reveal four such cycles in the last 100 years.
Did the Sierra Club not know about the 25-year cycle when they predicted extinction of the Snake River salmon? Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us?
Letting the Forests Burn. For 30 years, the eco-activists have been against Smokey Bear and his campaign to prevent forest fires. Even after half of Yellowstone National Park burned up in 1988, they kept assuring us that fire was the best manager of forests. Yet wood is the most eco-friendly building material, and the most renewable.
If we leave the wood in the forest to burn, then we must make our buildings out of concrete and steel, while huge forest fires destroy millions of trees and the habitat for billions of wild creatures. The 3 million acres of U.S. public forest that have burned this year are a stark testament to the high environmental cost of the “let it burn” policy—yet the Sierra Club is now demanding an end to all tree harvest on U.S. public lands. They want even more fuel for the fires!
Witnessing for High-Yield Conservation
The Western world owes the environmental movement a debt of gratitude for alerting us to the potential loss of natural ecosystems much earlier than we might otherwise have recognized that danger.. However, we must also recognize that the policies recommended by the movement are skewed against the technological abundance that is the hallmark of the modern world. Their policies are biased in favor of the “mud hut” model of economic growth, which means suppressing human births and reducing our standards of living.
The eco-activists are not experts in agriculture, or climate science. Even their recommendations on fish and forest management are based on urban armchair idealism.
More than 17,000 scientists in climate-related fields have signed a petition sponsored by the Oregon Center for Science and Medicine denying any human-caused global warming on the planet today. We hope to gather a similarly impressive roster of witnesses to the high-yield conservation miracle wrought by science and engineering in modern agriculture. Please sign the High-Yield Declaration at www.HighYieldConservation.org and urge your colleagues to do the same.
Dennis T. Avery was formerly the senior agricultural analyst with the U.S. State Department. He holds outstanding performance awards from both State and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983. His book, Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastics: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming, is available for $19.95 from the Center. You can also get high-yield bumper stickers that say “Growing More Food Per Acre Leaves More Land for Nature,” for $3 each, $25.00 for ten.
Visit us on the web at cgfi.org or contact us at:
Center for Global Food Issues
PO Box 202
Churchville. VA 24421
Telephone: 540-337-6354
Fax 540-337-853; E-mail cgfi@rica.net
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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The World Really Needs High-Yield Ag: It Just Doesn’t Know it Yet!
By cgfi | June 26, 2000
The Rev. Thomas Malthus’ famous question about whether humanity can continue to feed all the people was posed exactly 200 years ago.
It has taken us nearly all of that 200 years to be sure of an affirmative answer. Only recently have we been certain that the opening of the 21st century should see a new and fully-sustainable balance between food, population and the environment because of:
- Radically-declining birth rates virtually all over the world;
- Enormous advances being made in the scientific knowledge of how to boost food production;
- Vastly more affluence than any generation before has had, and thus more capital to invest in the roads, storage facilities, ships and research labs that encourage food production, distribution and preservation;
- An array of technologies—contraceptives, biotechnology, computers, satellite communications, cryogenics and a host of other technical advances—that can help to achieve a constructive balance between human needs and the ecology.
Compare this situation with any year before 1960. Before that year, massive famines seemed certain for much of the world; poverty was the global norm; the Green Revolution had not yet demonstrated its power.
By comparison, the world today has a virtual certainty of food production success. If humanity is to starve or displace wildlife in the 21st century, with today’s technology and a declining population growth rate, it could only be because we lack the political will.
However, that may be the case.
Today, the real question is not whether the world can produce enough food for a peak population of 8.0-8.5 billion people. It can. We could already produce enough to satisfy minimal caloric requirements for that many people if known technologies were fully extended, and production was divided equally among all consumers.
The world’s recent famines have been due to “mistakes of government,” such as civil wars and Mao Tse-tung’s ill-considered communal farms. Little hunger has been due to the lack of available food.
Forty percent of the world’s current crop output, in fact, goes to livestock and poultry feed so that affluent people can eat high-quality diets full of meat, milk, and eggs. In a hunger emergency, we can eat both the feedstuffs and the livestock, and later worry about rebuilding the flocks and herds.
The Food Challenge is Affluence
The food challenge of the 21st century, in fact, is not the challenge of population growth, but the challenge of affluence. Virtually all the people of the 21st century will be affluent by today’s standards and able to afford education, nice clothes and TV sets. Such people are unwilling to accept minimal diets.
The same modern couples who are willing to practice family planning, with two children instead of 15, demand that their two children get rich diets high in meat protein for growth, and milk calcium for strong bones. Affluent people insist on fresh fruits and vegetables all year round. Such diets take far more resources than boiled rice or corn-flour tortillas.
There is no vegetarian trend in the world; instead we are seeing the strongest surge of demand for resource-costly foods in all history. Currently, only about 4 percent of the First World’s population are even vegetarian, and most of these vegetarians consume lots of resource-costly eggs and dairy products.
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 one-child policy is stimulating pet ownership. It is reasonable to project that China in 2050 will have more than 500 million cats and dogs. And, woe unto the public official who stands between a pet owner and Fluffy’s favorite food.
The debate in development economics is whether the challenge of affluence requires a 250 percent increase in the world’s food output, or a 300 percent increase. The universal human hunger for high-quality protein, combined with the pet factor, convinces us that the world must be able to triple, certainly more than double, its farm output in the next 40 years.
Land—the Scarcest Natural Resource
But this intense increase in food demand will force even greater competition between farming and wildlife for land.
· 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.
· 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 pesticide use, fertilizers, confinement meat production and modern food processing, modern high-yield farming has already saved millions of square miles of wildlife habitat.
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, while leaving room for nature, will depend on our ability to continue increasing the yields per acre from plants, animals and trees on our best land, and transporting 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 and forestry.
Hamstringing High-Yield Conservation
Yet the world’s most advanced societies are attempting to legislate low-yield agriculture. All over the First World, government funding for agricultural research is being cut back, or shifted to low-yield “sustainable” farming. Governments in affluent countries subsidize low-yield organic farming, while regulators respond to public opinion by depriving the world’s high-yield farmers of time-tested pesticides and raising the safety hurdles to unjustifiably high levels.
In Africa, which has not yet had its Green Revolution, aid donors are demanding that farmers increase food production without modern pest protection or plant nutrients.
Large numbers of well-fed, affluent, influential people are opposing biotechnology, the most important unexploited advance in humanity’s knowledge of how to increase food production rapidly. There is serious question whether the power of biotechnology will be marshaled in agriculture soon enough to make its undoubtedly huge contribution to simultaneously saving people and wildlife.
Are modern societies attempting to surrender the planet back to hunger, malnutrition and massive losses in wildlife habitat? And if so, why?
The Environmentalist Campaign Against Modern Farming
The opponents of modern, high-yield agriculture and biotechnology are, ironically, gathered under the banner of environmentalism.
§ With the help of Rachel Carson’s brilliantly-flawed book, Silent Spring, eco-activists long maintained that modern farmers are poisoning children with cancer-causing chemicals. After 50 years of widespread pesticide use and billions of research dollars, science is still looking for the first case of cancer caused by pesticide residues. The U.S. National Research Council, the Canadian Cancer Institute and other medical authorities are trying to tell the public that the cancer fears are unfounded.
§ For fifty years, wildlife groups have universally claimed that modern farm chemicals were poisoning wildlife on a massive scale. However, the wildlife losses to today’s narrowly-targeted and rapidly-degrading chemicals are trivial — especially when compared with the millions of square miles of wildlife habitat saved by farmers’ high yields.
§ Eco-activists claim that more food means more people. But we are clearly in the first era of human history when more food has not meant more population. Births per woman in the Third World are down from 6.5 in 1960 to 3.0 today, and the birth rates have fallen fastest in the countries where the crop yields have risen most rapidly.
§ Environmentalists claim that modern farming is destroying the soil with rampant erosion. But farmers have used herbicides and tractors to invent conservation tillage, which cuts soil erosion per acre by 65 to 95 percent. A recent soil erosion study in Wisconsin finds that the farmers there are suffering only 5 percent as much erosion as they did during the “Dust Bowl” days of the 1930s.
§ Environmentalists oppose liberalized farm trade, though this is the only hope for much of Asia’s wildlife.
We must now realize that modern agriculture is being targeted, not because it is bad for the environment, but because modern farming 1) represents the greatest success of technological abundance; and 2) because farming controls much of the world’s land and water. The environmental movement seems to want managed scarcity for a few people. It seems to want more bison and prairie dogs—and fewer corn plants—on American land even if that sacrifices wildlands and biodiversity elsewhere.
The New Global Campaign Against Plant Nutrients
The latest eco-campaign is against plant nutrients. The U.S. supposedly has a crisis in water quality. The public is being told that vital plant nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus are environmental threats.
· Blue Baby Syndrome. Some environmental groups are demanding that the nitrogen limit in drinking water be lowered to from 10 parts per million to 5 ppm, apparently just to make it more difficult for modern agriculture to function. Never mind that the incidence of blue baby syndrome fell drastically during the very period when the use of chemical fertilizers and confinement feeding of livestock and poultry flourished. Never mind that the latest research indicates it is gastrointestinal inflammation and irritation which causes blue baby syndrome — not nitrates.
· Hypoxia. A White House task force has been appointed to resolve the hypoxia problem in the Gulf of Mexico. The hypoxic, or low-oxygen, zone in the Gulf doubled after 1990, from 3,500 square miles to 7,000 square miles. Agriculture, again, is being blamed. The presumed solution is to make Midwest farmers radically cut their use of fertilizer, and to “crack down” on big livestock and poultry farms. Never mind that hypoxic zones are characteristic of rivers that drain fertile lands all over the world. Never mind that the nutrients support rich fisheries. Never mind that cutting fertilizer use on the world’s good farmland would mean significantly lowering yields — and clearing forest for low-yield crops somewhere else in the world.
§ Manure as Toxic Waste. For 50 years, the critics of modern farming have held up organic crops fertilized with animal manure as the global ideal. Now the same critics are saying that “organic fertilizer” is “toxic waste”—if the animals or birds are being raised in a big confinement facility. Never mind that the big confinement feedlots and poultry houses protect the environment by collecting their wastes, and using them constructively to more sustainably raise the yields of feed crops.
· Volatilized nitrogen. Recently, the activist magazines — and even Science –have carried articles about the dangers of “too much fixed nitrogen.” (The Science article was authored by Peter Vitousek, a former graduate assistant of Paul Ehrlich, the ill-famed population scaremonger) They’re claiming that too many crops are being fertilized, and too many meat and milk animals are producing too much manure. They claim that too much fixed nitrogen might even change the global climate and our ecosystems. The U.S. National Research Council has already studied this possibility and dismissed it. The best recent study finds “surprsingly little change in the deposition of nitrogen.” The biggest negative impact is likely to be a slight disadvantage for wild legume plants.
· Complaints about Wonder Wheat. Recently the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center announced a major re-breeding of the wheat plant — done without biotechnology. CIMMYT says the new wheats have yielded up to 18 tons of grain per hectare, 50 percent more than any other wheats! The initial reaction cited in Science was distress that this would encourage high levels of fertilizer use. Never mind that it takes about 25 kilograms of fertilizer to grow a ton of wheat. We can grow 18 tons of wheat on one hectare with 400 kg of fertilizer, or we can clear another 17 hectares of wildlife habitat to grow one ton of wheat on each of 18 hectares.
The Future with Biotechnology
The world is in the early phases of exploring biotechnology’s potential—the “biplane stage,” to draw the analogy with airplanes. But already we see enough to know that biotechnology will be enormously important to conservation.
Saving Wild Species with Aluminum-tolerant Crops
Two researchers from Mexico discovered a way to overcome the aluminum toxicity that cuts crops yields by up to 80 percent on the acid soils characteristic of the tropics. Noting that some of the few plants that succeed on the world’s acid savannas secrete citric acid from their roots, they took a gene for citric acid secretion from a bacterium and put it into tobacco and papaya plants. Presto, they had acid-tolerant plants. The acid ties up the aluminum ions, and allows the plants to grow virtually unhindered. The Mexican researchers have since gotten the citric acid gene to work in rice plants, and hope that it can be used widely in crop species for the tropics.
Acid-soil crops have enormous potential for wildlife conservation. Acid soils make up 30 to 40 percent of the world’s arable land, and about 43 percent of the arable land in the tropics. Thus far, they have been one of the major barriers to providing adequate food in the very regions that are critical to wildlands conservation, the Third World tropics. These are the very areas where the populations are growing most rapidly, where incomes are rising most rapidly, where the food gaps are expanding most rapidly — and where most of the world’s biodiversity is located.
Raising Yields with Wild-Relative Genes
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 yield potential by 20 to 40 percent.
Improved Meat Animals with Biotech
Heretofore, methods for introducing new genes into livestock had a low efficiency — less than 10 percent. However, in the 24 November issue of The Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report a new method for producing transgenic animals that approaches 100 percent efficiency. Researchers put the foreign gene into the animal’s egg before it was fertilizer rather than shortly after. Obviously, this is another important step in creating animals with greater tolerance for pests and diseases, better feed conversion ratios and other practical advantages.
Fighting Human Malnutrition With Genetically-Modified Rice
The Rockefeller Foundation rec