Tag: Alex Avery
Avian Flu is Coming: Hide the Chickens Indoors
By cgfi | November 21, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery and Alex A. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—It’s time to quit playing the “organic and free-range” poultry game. Organic and free range birds carry higher bacterial risks—and now we know they could spread a deadly human flu pandemic.
British authorities have just confirmed a new outbreak of the virulent H5N1 strain of “bird flu” at a free-range poultry farm in eastern England. This avian flu has already killed more than 200 people across Asia, and millions of birds. The virus mutated through the close interaction between humans and domestic poultry in Asian villages and rice paddies. Wild birds then caught the new virus from the domestic poultry and have spread it to Europe and Africa. We’re probably next.
The Brits have already ordered the slaughter of the 6,000 free-range birds at the English farm. They’ve also ordered all domestic birds “isolated from contact with wild birds.” That means putting them indoors.
Authorities are dreading the possibility that this flu will mutate into an even worse form that could pass from people to people. This sequence caused the infamous Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918–1919, which killed more than 50 million people. The disease infected 20 percent of the whole world’s population. Our milder yearly flu epidemics are mostly dangerous to the elderly, the very young, and those with compromised immune systems. The 1918 pandemic instead killed mostly healthy young adults, causing economic and emotional disaster to vast numbers of families.
Spanish Flu survivors said they felt as though they had been beaten all over their bodies by baseball bats. Victims bled from their ears, noses, stomachs and intestines, and then died from bacterial pneumonia induced by the flu.
Most of humanity’s epidemic diseases have been created by the intimate relationship between us and our domestic animals. Microorganisms and viruses mutate back and forth between species, trying out new modes of attack. Historically, we got smallpox from cows; cholera from hogs; yellow fever—and, apparently, AIDS—from monkeys.
Our flu epidemics still evolve in Asia, where billions of chickens and ducks live side-by-side with billions of people in the villages and rice paddies. The World Health Organization is urging Asia to put its domestic poultry indoors.
In Germany, when authorities banned outdoor birds, organic farmers demanded an exemption to provide the “outdoor play-time” required under their special rules. German authorities relented, and said the organic birds could be outdoors so long as they were covered by net. Nets, of course, will do nothing to keep wild bird droppings from spreading the flu virus to domestic flocks. Then the disease can be spread across the countryside in the meat of the slaughtered birds. Duck meat can transmit the disease even if the live ducks showed no disease symptoms.
The organic game has been fun, and affluent consumers have enjoyed pretending that their chickens and ducks were “healthier” than the ordinary chickens and ducks purchased by their less wealthy and chic fellow citizens. In fact, the indoor birds are more comfortable than their free-range cousins because they’re protected from hot sun and fierce winter. They also suffer less predation from hawks and owls, and commit less cannibalism on each other. Most importantly, however, indoor birds are unlikely to get or spread the flu to each other, or to us.
That “free range” label chicken on your restaurant chicken or duck is mainly an excuse to charge more for the meal. Let’s give up that little thrill of “ignorant superiority” and protect our fellow Americans with birds that are protected from the avian flu. Keep them indoors.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. ALEX A. AVERY is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may write them at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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Biotech Deaths May Already Total Millions
By cgfi | October 25, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery and Alex A. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The global conflict over high-yield farming became even uglier last week when armed activists “for the landless” invaded a Brazilian biotech research farm. One activist and a security guard were killed and eight other people injured.
Unfortunately, the clash over modern farming technology has already had victims by the millions. New technologies that would save millions of lives every year are being held back by activist-scared regulators, using the excuse of “more testing.”
During the severe southern African drought of 2002, eco-activists told local governments that American food aid was “poison” because it contained genetically modified seeds. In at least one country, Zambia, the government locked up the U.S. food aid—despite the starvation of thousands in outlying villages. The food aid was later liberated by a mob that overwhelmed its armed guards.
Golden rice could provide enough Vitamin A to prevent millions of cases of childhood blindness and death from rice-dominated diets per year, but it is not yet available to farmers even though it was announced by the journal Science nearly eight years ago. Its developer, Ingo Potrykus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, says his rice can save millions of lives among the poor, with no threat to the environment, no cost to the poor farmers who will raise it, and no benefit to corporations. Nevertheless, Greenpeace and other eco-groups ardently oppose this and all other genetically modified seeds. Potrykus says they’d rather have people die than be saved by high-tech seeds.
African countries refused to allow the import of biotech corn seeds that could have helped overcome the parasitic witchweed, which infests 40 million hectares of African farmland. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center had to spend an extra 10 years conventionally breeding a natural tolerance for the herbicide imazapyr into African corn farmers’ varieties. The new seeds reliably yield four times as much corn, providing food security for farmers too used to facing starvation because the witchweed stole their grain.
The Irish government has refused to accept test plantings of a new biotech potato variety resistant to the deadly potato late blight. This is the same blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s when more than a million Irish starved and more than a million more were forced to flee the country. Researchers found resistance to late blight nearly 50 years ago in a wild relative of the potato, but it had never been successfully bred into a domestic potato. Now, three major universities have each bred blight-resistant tubers—and the country which suffered the potato famine won’t allow them to be grown. Nor will such African countries as Burundi, which are increasingly dependent on potatoes. An outbreak of a more virulent late blight virus continues unchecked in Britain.
How many people have to die before this travesty of Luddite worship runs its course?
How many helpless children will have to go blind before the endless testing of Golden Rice allows it to be distributed to the families who so critically need it?
When will the world realize that Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, for all their preaching about the rain forests, are trying to roll back modern civilization and its long life spans with thickets of overpriced solar panels and windmills? They willingly fail to see that without the high yields from the Green Revolution and biotechnology, hungry people will quickly clear the world’s remaining forests for low-yield crops.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. ALEX A. AVERY is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may write them at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
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Rachel Carson Syndrome: Jumping to Pesticide Conclusions in the Global Frog Crisis
By admin | December 31, 2005
A devastating and detailed review of four highly publicized case studies showing the deep anti-pesticide bias of ecologists. The report asks why ecologists continually chase chemical phantoms despite the scientific evidence and when ecology will become a science again instead of an antipesticide activist cheerleading squad.
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Meeting The Needs Of A Hungrey World—What Role Does Biotechnology Play?
By cgfi | April 29, 2005
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.
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Who Will Produce the World’s Food (and Pork) in the Next Decade?
By admin | February 4, 2004
Presented at the Hyologisk 25th Anniversary Conference Braedstrup, Denmark
Alex Avery
February 4, 2004
A dozen years ago, I retired from the U.S. State Department-and began a mission to convince First World farmers they had more to gain from free farm trade than they did from continued heavy government subsidies.
The Bullish Demand Forecast for Farm Products and Pork
My key point was that the world was rapidly increasing its demand for better diets, driven not only by population growth but even more by rising incomes. I predicted that world farm demand would nearly triple by 2050. I expected the demand for high-quality foods-meat, milk, eggs, fruits, and vegetables-to increase even more than three-fold.
I also pointed out that virtually all of the demand growth would be occurring outside the First World countries with heavy the farm subsidies, in the densely populated countries of the Third World.
Twelve years ago, I predicted that Asia, with its rapid economic growth, would be the key market for export farmers. However, I warned that without liberalized farm trade, First World farmers would see relatively little farm import growth in the Asian Tiger countries.
Was I right?
The Fading Specter of World Overpopulation
Back in the 1970s, I can understand why people were afraid of population growth. 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 death rates. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, wrote eloquently of human population rising above 20 billion.
Since then, 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 1.7 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 abandoned to Albanian and North African immigrants.
In the Third World, birth rates have fallen 80 percent of the way to stability, from about 6.2 births per woman in 1960 to about 3.1 births today with birth rates continuing to decline rapidly. Stability is 2.1. 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 enough of a population increase to ensure prosperity for European farmers.
That leaves income gains in countries not yet well fed as the farmers’ best friend, and such gains are continuing.
China, with its massive population of 1.3 billion people, had been increasing its GNP by roughly 8 to 9 percent per year, with virtually no population growth. That meant very rapid increases in consumer incomes. (The Chinese economy grew about 8 percent in 2003.) The “precious three” most-sought-after household consumer items in China progressed from a bicycle, a digital wristwatch, and a transistor radio in the 1970s to a telephone, a TV, and a refrigerator in the 1980s-and today, China’s “precious three” are a cell phone, a computer, and a car. (Yes, they will have cars, lots of them.) China has about 20 percent of the world’s population and about 7 percent of its arable land.
India has been expanding its GDP by nearly 6 percent annually since Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister in 1990 while its rate of population growth has declined from 3.2 percent to 2.9 percent. (India’s economy grew nearly as fast as China’s in 2003, at about 7 percent.) That means India’s per capita incomes are also rising rapidly. India has 17 percent of the world’s population and about 2.4 percent of its arable land.
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 annually, and household consumption has been rising by 6 percent per year. Indonesia has 3 percent of the world population and only 0.2 percent of the world’s arable land.
To date, my long-term demand growth forecast has been largely on target. 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. Unfortunately for the EU, China is supplying virtually all of that pork domestically, fostered by 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 at a pittance of 70,000 tons. China has become a member of the World Trade Organization, but the WTO farm trade rules are so inadequate that it is hard to see much expansion in Chinese pork imports in the foreseeable future.
India’s milk consumption increased by 14 million tons in the decade to 2001, and its poultry consumption rose by 80 percent. (Even India’s pork consumption has risen 43 percent in the last decade, though from a small base.) Again, the expansion in demand has been met through domestic price supports protected by import barriers, and much consumer demand has been constrained by high prices. India is a member of the WTO, but the WTO rules do not favor trade expansion. Moreover, India has always pleaded balance-of-payments problems to excuse its policy of not importing farm products. (India imports significant amounts of pulses and palm oil, but virtually no other farm products.)
Indonesian poultry consumption increased from 512,000 tons to 864,000 tons during the 1991 to 2001 period, despite the ravages of the “Asian Collapse” of 1997. However, Indonesia is a Moslem country and eats virtually no pork. (It does produce some pork on its northern islands to supply Singapore.)
Total world demand for farm products has been increasing, as we knew it would. 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. As in the past, most of the demand has been met domestically, behind trade barriers.
The strongest growth in pork imports has been in Mexico, where the U.S and Canada now get duty-free 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.
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. (Transport costs from the interior for fresh pork are still prohibitive.)
The Forecast for Farm Subsidies
The stifling of world farm trade by subsidies is a well-known story, and farm trade was stifled anew during 2003 by the collapse of the WTO farm trade talks in Cancun, Mexico.
First World countries with good farmland have a strong history of favoring their own farmers with import barriers, price supports, quotas and phony “health” requirements. Western Europe and the U.S. both have ugly histories of subsidizing their farmers in these ways.
On the other side of the equation, Third World countries still have lots of farmers who resent farm imports as an intrusion on “their” markets. To prevent unrest among their large numbers of small farmers, such important would-be importers as China and India have state policies of importing farm products only when that could not be avoided. This means their consumers are taxed at the grocery stores for import exclusion. Food prices are often much higher in countries that refuse to import farm products and their industrial labor costs are thus raised artificially.
Unfortunately, farm subsidies have only one guaranteed result: they raise farm land prices in the subsidizing country. Essentially, that means the subsidizing countries are raising their farmers’ costs, and gradually pricing them out of their markets.
Cropland prices in the U.S. Corn Belt today average about $6,000 per hectare, up nearly 10 percent since the 2002 farm bill was passed, but still far below typical cropland prices in Western Europe.
I recently saw a cost comparison for soybeans grown in the Corn Belt versus those grown in the Matto Grosso region of Brazil. The imputed land cost for Iowa soybeans was $140 per acre, while the land cost for Brazil was $23. (That implies an Iowa land value of $1,000 per hectare.) The Iowa farmers’ non-land costs were lower, especially transportation. But the high land costs put Iowa farmers at a disadvantage in export markets.
That’s why the U.S. in 1996 passed a different sort of farm bill that was supposed to phase its commodity subsidies down and then out. The farmers’ “golden parachute” payments were essentially to buy down U.S. land values.
In 2002, political events overtook the new farm policy. During 2001, the U.S. election split the country 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. The House and Senate were divided almost 50-50 as well. Control of the whole 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 buying the farmers’ votes. 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, which has some $25 trillion in unfunded obligations. 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 burden for our younger generation. Reforming Social Security and our old-age medical care programs to put them on a sustainable basis would require an 81 percent increase in our individual income taxes. We’d like to keep putting off the reform, but Social Security receipts will fall below payments about 2011, and the huge baby boom generation is starting to retire. A few years ago, any politician who mentioned Social Security reform lost. In the last election, those who talked of pension reform won - by big margins.
The reform of entitlements for the elderly and the costs of the “war on terror” pretty much ensure that when the U.S. farm bill comes up for renewal, probably in 2007, there will be cut-throat competition for federal dollars. The farmers will probably be in a much weakened position-to the point that some of our farm groups have actually proposed give-backs on the current program to help stave off cuts in the next farm bill. I predict that American farmers will lose a lot of their farm subsidy dollars in the years ahead.
You know the farm subsidy situation in Western Europe better than I. The EU is taking in 10 new countries, including Poland (4.2 million farmers and 14 million hectares of land); Hungary (490,000 farmers and 4.8 million hectares of land); Bulgaria (270,000 farmers and 5 million hectares of land, much of it disadvantaged); and Romania (1.5 million farmers and 10 million hectares of land, much of it fine quality in the Danube Valley.)
The two-tier farm subsidy structure now envisioned for the expanded EU is likely to last less than a year after the new member countries reach voting status. The new member countries will not be content with lower subsidies for their farmers. Germany, the traditional source of most EU farm payments, is now cash-strapped and unwilling to expand its farm subsidy obligations. The French feel they have an inherited right to their current subsidy levels. Something will have to give.
Meanwhile, the farmers in Poland, Hungary and Romania will soon catch up to their colleagues in the current EU 15, in both technology and yields. Poland and Romania, in particular, will be capable of major production increases, including pork production. There is nowhere in Europe to sell their additional output.
Nor does Western Europe’s capacity to finance 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.
My prediction is that EU expansion will at least dilute the subsidy payments of current EU farmers. It may even trigger a more fundamental Common Agricultural Reform keyed not to commercial production but to direct income payments that will favor small farmers.
All of this was apparently well-known to the participants at the Cancun meeting of the World Trade Organization last fall. The U.S. offered what it regarded as radical surgery on its farm subsidies-cutting them by nearly half as part of a deal for Third World countries to permit more farm imports. The EU was less forthcoming, but its proposal went beyond what it had earlier said it could do, especially in reducing export subsidies.
Both the U.S. and the EU thought they might have to give more as the WTO negotiations went forward, but hoped the concessions would not have to be too politically costly back home.
They reckoned wrong. India, speaking for a group of 25 developing countries, announced that the U.S. and EU must begin the negotiations by promising to eliminate all of their farm subsidies-without any promise of improved market access in the Third World. In other words, the Third World said the First World must drop all farm protectionism, while the Third World countries would be allowed to continue theirs.
It was breathtakingly naive.
Unfortunately, when the First World rejected the demand, the Third World packed up and went home. It refused to negotiate at all. A farm trade negotiation that had been scheduled since 1994 was terminated overnight with not a word of agreement on anything, or even a discussion. WTO and First World officials are trying to restart the Doha Round, but there is not yet any agreement to do so.
With the WTO round dead, First World companies will not be able to gain any additional Third World access in such area as services and government procurement. No doubt they find this disappointing. But, the average tariff on nonfarm manufactured goods has already been cut from about 40 percent in 1946 to 4 percent today. Much of the world’s nonfarm trade is already liberalized.
First World farmers are in much worse shape. The U.S. Special Trade Representative says the current average tariff on farm products is 65 percent. I don’t know how he can tell, since so much of the potential farm trade is barred completely by governmental non-import policies like those of China and India. Whatever the real farm tariff average, it is dauntingly high. The odds of bringing it down are hauntingly low.
After the new U.S. farm bill was passed in 2002, I hoped that American farmers would have the best of both worlds: They would have high government subsidies until a WTO liberalization allowed them to phase into a freer global farm market where increased exports would take up the slack when Washington could no longer afford the lavish subsidies.
Now, I see crash landings for both American and European farmers.
First World farmers waited one trade round too long to offer up reform. We thought the Third World would try to negotiate half a loaf. Instead, the Third World took us at our word, and decided they’d rather buy political peace at home by subsidizing their own farmers.
There will not be much farm trade growth in the next decade as a result.
Who Will Be the Winners in the Export Markets of the Next Decade?
The winners in the export markets of the next decade will be few, and they will not win very much. Mostly, they will be the farmers who do not currently get very much 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.
The other winners in farming for the next decade will be the farmers in China, India, and other Third World countries where economic growth is raising incomes for formerly poor consumers. Their governments are likely to continue to resist farm imports, both within and beyond the rules of the World Trade Organization. (China recently refused to accept biotech soybeans from the U.S. while continuing to grow biotech cotton and corn, and developing Chinese biotech soybean varieties.)
Brazil will almost certainly be the first claimant of any farm demand that is not domestically supplied. For some years now, the Brazilians have been expanding their production from the interior, essentially converting acid-soil scrubland into cropland through the addition of lime to the soils, planting acid-tolerant crop varieties bred in Brazil, and using no-till farming systems to prevent soil erosion on the rolling, volcanic soils.
Until recently, I believed that the Brazilian land available for cropland expansion was fairly limited-about 60 million hectares of acid savannah on its central-western frontier, far from markets and without railroads. Recently, however, the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service re-examined Brazilian potential. They note that America’s pasturelands cannot be converted to cropland; they are too arid or too steep. But Brazil’s pastureland has no such limitations. FAS believes that 70 to 90 million hectares of Brazilian pasture could be converted to cropland in the future, if international commodity prices are high enough to finance even paved roads, let alone railroads, into the interior. That would represent a very significant increase in the world’s cropping resources.
Turkey, too, is capable of major increases in crop production, partly through the development of its new irrigated projects in the Upper Euphrates Valley, but also by extending conservation tillage across its large tracts of semi-arid rainfed land. Conservation tillage radically reduces soil erosion, and retains much more of the rainfall in the root zone of the soils.
Biotechnology: Wave of the Future?
Europe is still blocking the advent of genetically modified crops and most biotech foods (though not the cheeses and wine made with biotech enzymes). Most of the world is taking quite a different approach, welcoming the improved productivity of genetically modified organisms.
I continue to believe that “golden rice” will be a major long-term benefit for the children and women of poor rice-eating countries, and I commend the EU for developing it.
I am impressed that Bt corn test plots in the Philippines outyielded farmers corn fields by 80 percent, and that biotech has given us our first victories over plant viruses (in bananas, papayas and sweet potatoes).
I note that, far from unleashing new allergens on the consuming public, biotech researchers have learned how to take natural allergens out of some of nature’s most allergenic foods: peanuts and soybeans.
I think I am most impressed-to date-by the new blight-proof potatoes bred in both the U.S. and Europe. The blight-resistance gene had been 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.
The biggest factor in spreading the acceptance of biotech crops around the world, however, has been Bt 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 last winter 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.
The Organic Path?
Many non-farmers have praised organic farming as the appropriate path for Europe’s agriculture. We can understand why they believe it. Non-farmers see modern agriculture as employing too few farmers and producing too much food. 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, the composting, being too often at the mercy of insects and crop diseases, and needing far more land (or imported manure) to get the same food production.
In America, organic has been increasingly taken over by agribusiness. A large proportion of our organically grown vegetables are now produced by four California farms. Horizon Dairy, the international conglomerate, provides 70 percent of America’s organic milk. Such major corporations as General Foods and ADM now have organic divisions.
Meanwhile, the organic premiums have often weakened in the face of increased production and a limited number of consumers willing to pay them. A significant percentage of the organic milk produced in Europe is sold as non-organic for lack of demand.
From a public policy standpoint, moreover, the major problem with organic farming becomes more pressing the more it expands: the large and global shortage of organic nitrogen. Buried in the 1999 report of the Bichel Committee, Denmark’s high-level technical assessment of organic strategies, is the reality 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 thje 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.
Dr. Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, says that organic farming could support only four billion people on the planet, even if we convert all the forests to fields.
The Environmental Movement
A great deal of the urgency behind the environmental movement has come from the fear of overpopulation. In the 1970s, the Green Revolution had just showed how to triple the yields on much of the world’s cropland-eliminating the famine constraint on human numbers. Then DDT came along, eliminating millions of deaths from typhus and malaria. Can we blame people for fearing that human population would soar to 20 or 50 billion?
Unfortunately, the fear of being overrun by third world babies also meant a fear that high-yield modern farming would foster overpopulation. This hasn’t been the case; the population growth overwhelmingly resulted because of a reduction in death rates. It is highly unlikely that the world would have quietly accepted massive famines if the Green Revolution had not occurred. But the environmental movement remains implacably opposed to virtually every aspect of modern food production, including pesticides, antibiotics for livestock, fertilizers, feed additives, and on down a long list.
In the U.S., the state of North Carolina has had a moratorium on confinement hog expansion for seven years, supposedly because confinement hogs were reducing the water quality in the state’s streams. Recently, under threat of legal action, our Center got the State water quality data for the “hog rivers” that drain America’s most intensive hog producing region. Thanks to “zero-discharge” hog management, an expansion from 2 million hogs to 9 billion has occurred with no reduction at all in the state’s stream water quality. The Black River, the major hog river, is still rated an outstanding resource with fine water quality. But the hog moratorium remains in place, because the urban voters of North Carolina do not like the idea of hogs in their state, even if they’re beyond the horizon and beyond smelling distance.
By the end of the next decade, Europeans will probably be far less sensitive to the population issue, and may be more flexible on environmental questions as well. But not yet.
European farmers can also expect that their eco-regulation will continue to become more and more invasive, and their costs in meeting these eco-restrictions will continue to rise.
Animal Rights Constraints
Animal rights constraints will continue to plague livestock producers in both Europe and America. People who eat meat but have not grown up on farms will never be fully comfortable in confronting the reality of livestock slaughter. As they treat their own pets more and more like children, they will be less and less comfortable with having your livestock not treated almost as well.
I note that in Germany, it is no longer legal to kill an ant colony if it invades your home. Instead, you must call a government ant warden who will come, trap the colony, and move it to some other location. The U.S. state of Florida recently amended its constitution to forbid farrowing crates for sows.
Never mind that the policies of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are a fraud. They would result in no domestic animals living at all, and would even deny people and their kids the right to have pets. The public will never allow its pets to be taken away, of course, just as they will never allow themselves to be driven to vegan diets. However, the more strident activists have no compunctions about imposing more and more and more regulations on how you raise your livestock, and the urban public will applaud.
Pig farmers in China and Brazil do not face these constraints. Their customers and neighbors are not yet nearly as sensitive as those in Europe and America.
The Next Decade for European Farmers
I cannot be optimistic about the next decade for commercial farmers in either the United States. or Europe. Their governments are faced with farm subsidy programs they will not be able to support. They remain sealed off from the world’s increasing food demand by trade barriers which will not be overcome during the decade. Their competitors have lower-cost land, and unused land on which to expand, and are beginning to use biotech seeds to further lower their costs. The farm cost structures in both the U.S. and Europe seem out of line with reality, and there is no visible way to rescue them.
I wish I could be more optimistic than this.
In the past, I believed that farm trade liberalization offered a new lease on commercial viability for the farmers in both the U.S. and Europe. It still might, but not during the upcoming decade.
It will take years to craft any meaningful change in the world’s farm trade barriers. The first problem is that the U.S. and EU have not yet “hit the wall” of unsupportable farm subsidy costs. The second problem is that China and India have not yet hit that wall. In the long run, all of these countries will want farm trade reform, especially under cover of an international mandate, but not yet. Even when they do, it will take more years to craft and phase in an agreement.
The “collapse at Cancun” was a disaster for First World farmers.
The answer to the question: Who will take the yellow jersey in global pig production is now simple-China. Second place will go to Brazil. Europe and the U.S. will suffer.
I wish you all good fortune, but I do not expect you will get it until the world has liberalized farm trade.
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Wages of Fear: The Costs to Society of Attacks on the Products of Human Ingenuity
By admin | July 2, 2002
Page 12 of this Lexington Institute publication features “Bogus Health Scares & the Costs to Society: GM Foods,” by Alex Avery. It is especially relevant in the context of today’s growing famine situation in southern Africa.
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The Deadly Chemicals in Organic Food
By admin | June 2, 2001
Originally Published in the New York Post, June 2001
June 2, 2001 — IF you buy organic food because you think it’s free of the cancer-causing pesticides used on other farms, think again. “Organic” farmers routinely spray their crops with naturally occurring pesticides - and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has classified pyrethrum, a top organic pesticide, as a “likely human carcinogen.”
Feeling paranoid yet? Well, in fact, the EPA made that call in secret, almost two years ago! The revelation about pyrethrum, with other recent findings, calls into question the superiority of organic farming.
For decades, activists have claimed that organic food is healthier and kinder to the environment than “chemically farmed” food. Organic farmers, for example, didn’t use synthetic pesticides.
What most people don’t realize - and activists try to hide - is that organic farmers are allowed to use a wide array of natural chemicals as pest killers. Moreover, these natural poisons pose the same theoretical (but remote) dangers as the synthetic pesticides so hated by organic devotees.
Last year, we learned that rotenone, a natural insecticide squeezed from roots of tropical plants, causes symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in rats. Now we learn of the EPA’s pyrethrum decision.
The EPA’s Cancer Assessment Review Committee based its 1999 decision on the same high-dose rat tests long used by eco-activists to condemn synthetic pesticides. Because no one knows just how pyrethrum causes tumors, the committee also recommended assuming that even the tiniest dose can be deadly. (The same logic is used to brand hundreds of other chemicals as carcinogens.)
Charles Benbrook, a long-time organic activist, notes that pyrethrum is applied to crops at low rates and that pyrethrum degrades relatively rapidly, minimizing consumer exposure. He’s right, but all this is true of today’s non-persistent synthetic pesticides as well.
Pyrethrum and modern synthetic pesticides break down so rapidly that consumers are rarely exposed to any at all. Two-thirds of all fruits and vegetables tested as they leave the farm in the U.S. have no detectable pesticide residues - despite our being able to detect chemicals at parts per trillion levels. (That’s equivalent to 1 second in 31,000 years!)
Pyrethrum is extracted from a type of chrysanthemum grown mainly in Africa. It is literally a nerve poison that these plants evolved to fight off munching insects. The dried, ground-up flowers were used in the early 19th century to control body lice.
In fact, many of the widely used synthetic pesticides are based on natural plant-defense chemicals. Synthetic versions of pyrethrum (known as pyrethroids) make it possible to protect a crop with one or two sprays instead of spraying natural pyrethrum five to seven times at higher volumes.
Organic activists hold to the twisted logic that if a toxic chemical can be squeezed from a plant or mined from the earth, it’s OK - but a safer chemical synthesized in a lab is unacceptable.
It is possible to farm without pesticides, as demonstrated by a farm family recently highlighted in Organic Gardening magazine. They use a Shop-Vac and a portable generator in a wheelbarrow to daily suck insects off crops. Talk about labor-intensive! And even that won’t fight fungal or bacterial diseases, or insects that eat crops from the inside out. Organic coffee growers in Guatemala spray coffee trees with fermented urine as a primitive fungicide.
Bruce Ames, noted cancer expert and recent winner of the National Medal of Science, notes that more than half of the natural food chemicals he tests come up carcinogenic - the same proportion as synthetic chemicals. These natural chemicals are collectively present in large amounts in the very fruits and vegetables that are our biggest defense against cancer.
Medical and health authorities are unanimous in their recommendation of five to seven servings of fruits and vegetables per day to ward off cancer - no matter how they are grown. Lesson: high-dose rat tests vastly exaggerate risks.
With global food demand set to more than double in the next 50 years and one-third of the planet’s wildlife habitat already converted to farmland, humanity must responsibly use pesticides to produce more per acre.
There simply are no compelling reasons to demand chemical-free farming.
Alex Avery is director of research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues in Churchville, Va.
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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 recently announced the success of its project to 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.
Saving Forests with Biotech Trees
The world could increase its forest harvest ten-fold if we planted just 5 percent of today’s wild forests in high-yield tree plantations. Such plantations are good-but-not-great wildlife habitat because they are not “fully natural,” but they could apparently take all of the logging pressures off 95 percent of the natural forests.
Trees have always been difficult to improve through crossbreeding because the time frames are so long. Biotechnology is already helping to provide the higher-yielding trees through cloning and tissue culture — which permit us to rapidly copy the fastest-growing, most pest-resistant trees in a species. When we master the tools of biotechnology more fully, we should be able to increase forest growth rates, drought tolerance, pest resistance and other important traits more directly, and even more effectively.
A Global Trend Toward More Activists
It is the nature of activists to push for something different.
In Peru, activists demanded an end to the chlorination of drinking water because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found chlorine, at high levels, could cause cancer in laboratory rats. Peruvian officials took the chlorine out of the water, and the cities promptly suffered a cholera epidemic that killed 7,000 people.
I don’t blame the activists. I blame the people who trusted the activists, and the people who should have represented the other side of the question. I also blame the press, which should have sought out the broader reality.
Like it or not, the world is on a trend to have more activists, in more countries. Democracy and affluence encourage activists and the free, open debate of public questions. The internet and instant global communication will also spur the creation of more activists. If modern agriculture is to succeed, it must learn to succeed in an activist-rich environment.
It’s not just agriculture, of course. Global warming activists have created global summits, an international treaty, and captured the political soul of a major U.S. presidential candidate — with less evidence than they’ve had of harm from modern agriculture.
But the activists have come so far, won so much power and prestige around the world that they can’t stop.
The Achilles Heel of High-Yield Agriculture—Regulation
It is true that the Green Movement has rarely won an election, anywhere in the world. But the desire to preserve Nature is so urgent in First World cities that the Greens haven’t needed to win elections. Environmental concern is so widespread that politicians race each other to embrace key points of environmental strategy. In America, Wirthlin polling a few years ago indicated that 75 percent of the public agrees with the statement, “We cannot set our environmental standards too high — regardless of cost.”
Because of the high public approval for the environment, we have an Environmental Protection Agency with virtually no Congressional oversight. The bureaucrats who work for EPA read newspapers and polling results. They assume that they can regulate “environmentally offending” industries, such as agriculture, in virtually any way they choose.
Modern farming’s reputation with the urban public is now so bad that it can no longer persuade the Congress to block unfavorable legislation, or force Federal agencies to modify unfavorable regulations and rulings. Not even farm-state politicians will commit political suicide on behalf of farming.
Betrayed by Modern Journalism?
Unfortunately, today’s mainstream media are not living up to their professional obligations for objectivity and resarch. Somewhere during the Vietnam era, journalists got the idea that refereeing the game of life was not as satisfying as playing on the winning team. Among the causes they have adopted as their own in recent decades is the environment.
Recently, our Center put out a press release noting that the water quality in North Carolina’s Black River has improved over the last 15 years, even though the hog population in its watershed had quintupled to one of the highest densities in the U.S. Of the 300+ media outlets we sent the press release to, one lone skeptical reporter called to inquire further. She asked whether the hog industry had sponsored the study. No, we told her, the data was from the State environmental agency. “But that’s not what my readers want to hear,” she lamented, then hung up.
That’s how far behind the public affairs curve modern agriculture currently finds itself. This is not a problem that can be dealt with by writing press releases, or by hosting community tours of farms and milk processing plants.
Can We Educate the Public on High-Yield Conservation — in Time?
Someone must tell the urban public about the environmental benefits of high-yield modern farming. 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 and its researchers also need to point up the high risks of organic food. The Centers for Disease Control has been afraid to publicize it, but their own data seem to show that people who eat organic and “natural” foods are significantly more likely to be attacked by the virulent bacteria, E. coli O157:H7. Consumer Reports wrote that free-range chickens carried three times as much salmonella contamination.
The facts are clear: organic food is fertilized with animal manure—a major reservoir of bacterial contamination—and composting is neither careful enough nor hot enough to kill all of the dangerous organisms.
We must analyze every eco-activist proposal in terms of its land requirements:
- Organic farming for the world would mean clearing at least 5 million square miles of wildlife for clover and other green manure crops.
- Free-range chickens for the U.S. would take wildlands equal to all of the farmland in Pennsylvania.
- Reducing fertilizer usage in the Corn Belt would mean clearing many additional acres of poorer-quality land in some distant country to make up for the lost yield.
- Blocking free trade in farm products and farm inputs will probably mean clearing tropical forest for food self-sufficiency in Asia.
It should not be solely up to agriculture to prevent such a needless disaster. Agriculture has no history of public affairs campaigns or any real experience in conducting them. However, I see no other entity with the knowledge, the financial requirements and the direct interest to do it.
I doubt that the National Academy of Sciences or the National Research Council can turn public opinion around. The NRC’s recent report, Carcinogens and Anti-carcinogens in the Human Diet, is a landmark. It essentially says pesticide residues are no threat to public health. But the public is not reading the document, and the media are not reporting it. Moreover, a significant number of NAS members are encouraging the attacks on high-yield farming.
How can we present the environmental case for high-yield agriculture if the journalists will not write it and politicians fail to support it?
Modern agriculture must take its case directly to the people, through advertising.
My model is the American Plastics Council, which spends about $20 million per year to keep plastics virtually out of the environmental discussions in America. The Weyerhaeuser Company is another good example of positive imaging; Weyerhaeuser has been telling me for decades that it’s the tree-growing company. Not the tree-cutting company, not the tree-using company, but the tree-growing company.
David Brinkley, the most respected journalist in America today, has also shown us the way. ADM, the big corn and soybean processor, sponsors the Brinkley ads and they are doing a fabulous job.
- Brinkley notes that farmers are still the most indispensable people.
- He shows a cute little girl in Taiwan, and points out that her mother wants her to have meat and milk in her diet so she will grow strong and vigorous. Who could oppose that?
- The ads show families of deer and wild birds, and note that “the higher yields achieved by modern farmers are providing food — and in some cases even shelter –for families around the world.”
Many of the firms with billions of dollars invested in modern agriculture are already talking to urban America. DuPont and Dow have whole rosters of consumer products and millions of dollars worth of consumer advertising. Cooperatives like Land-o-Lakes and Countrymark have consumer ad budgets too. Wildlands conservation would be a winning message with both their customers and their farmer members.
So far, agriculture has failed to accept the challenge, and the momentum for high-yield conservation is waning. We are not increasing public investments in high-yield research. We are not creating support for the farm community. The regulators are continuing to strangle farm productivity.
In the long run, of course, farmers and farm researchers will be vindicated even without a public affairs campaign. But that vindication could come too late for the wildlands and the wild species—and too late for most of today’s high-tech farmers and agribusinesses.
At this point, it looks as though we will fail to meet the food challenge of the 21st century—not for lack of time, but for lack of realism in our public life. Our forefathers would have been ashamed for us.
###
Alex Avery is Director of Research and Education at the Center for Global Food Issues. He received his bachelors degree in biology and chemistry from Old Dominion University. Previous to joining the Center, Alex was a McKnight research fellow at Purdue University conducting basic plant research. Alex represented the Center at the United Nations World Food Summit in Rome in 1996. He is co-author of the Hudson Institute briefing paper Farming to Sustain the Environment, which addresses issues of agricultural sustainability from a practical and global perspective.
Alex has written on agricultural, food safety, regulatory and global population issues for major newspapers, including The Washington Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Des Moines Register. He has also been published in USA Today magazine, Regulation magazine, Feed Management, and scientific publications such as Environmental Health Perspectives and the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. His article on international food regulations will appear in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Food Science & Technology, second edition.
In addition to his publications, Alex has spoken to a wide range of groups, including the Australian Weed Science Society, American Veterinary Medical Association, American Phytopathological Society, as well as numerous industry and university audiences.
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The War We Can’t Win Against Our Own Food System
By cgfi | October 25, 1999
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 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 18-20 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 the 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 mu