Tag: Birth Rates
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 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 eight times as 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 fact is that 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.
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