The world’s farm pesticide death toll has been cut radically with biotech seeds that carry their own internal pesticide. A new study in India has found that biotech cotton has reduced pesticide spraying by 50 percent, and spraying of the most toxic poisons by 70 percent. The reduced spraying is helping avoid “several million cases of pesticide poisoning in India every year.”

This is important progress—which should be enough by itself to embarrass Greenpeace and the other anti-technology groups opposing biotech. But the big news on the biotech crops is that they’re slashing the toll from farmer suicides, perhaps by a million deaths per year. Suicides have been the primary cause of the WHO’s estimated 10 million annual deaths from pesticides. The most frequent cause of rural suicides is debt, often because the farmer’s rice or cotton crop has failed and he has no way to pay back loans or feed his family. All he has is his ruined fields, which lie there mocking his attempts at success.

Even though the vast majorities of accidental farmer pesticide “poisonings” are mild, and pass quickly, they are unpleasant and some have lasting effects. Some professionals say about two-thirds of the acute pesticide poisoning deaths in the developing countries are intentional. The World health Organization tells us that in Sri Lanka, 70 percent of the farmers who commit suicide choose pesticide poisoning. In China, the percentage of farmer suicides by poison is 60 percent, in India 30 percent. And these are only the victims treated in hospitals. We have poor statistics on the number of farmer suicides because the farmers are rural, often far from medical care; and, there is always family reluctance to admit the shame of suicide.

Bollworm losses in India typically take half the farmer’s crop and often 90 percent. When Bt cotton was introduced, the insects were showing resistance to parathyroid, organophosphates, carbomates and cycledienes. India seemed likely to lose not just its cotton farmers, but the millions of textile jobs for its urban workers too. The suicide potential was vast.

A study in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry reported that pesticide self-poisoning had “become a fashion in the entire Sunderabad region [in the center of India], and is fast replacing hanging and immolation [setting oneself on fire].”

The Bt cotton contains a natural pesticide found in soils around the world. The bollworms are more likely to be killed by the biotech application because it’s not just sprayed in their general direction, they swallow it. That sharply reduces the development of resistance. Ultimately, if Bt resistance does develop, other pesticides could be delivered through similar biotech seeds.

Crop failures have always been a widely recognized problem for all farmers, but in the old days, farmers diversified their crops and spread their risk the low-yield way. Mostly, they could barely feed their own families, but family food security was the top priority. Today’s high-tech farming requires special seeds and purchased inputs to deliver the higher per-acre yields—but that feeds more people, saves more land for wildlife, and provides a better life for the families in the farming community.

The new problem is the concentrated financial risk for the farmers. This risk became intolerable for many when insects began to develop resistance to the more common pesticides. Indian cotton farmers found themselves spraying a dozen times per season, spending far more for the chemicals—and still losing their crops. Chinese rice farmers were faced with similar epidemic problems of such insects as stem borers and leafhoppers.

Will the quadruple benefits of fewer crop sprayings; lower costs, higher yields, and more financial security—plus reduced misery that leads to suicide—finally soften the hearts of anti-technology activists? Stay tuned.

Churchville, VA—The death toll from recent “extreme weather events” has been sharply declining since the 1920s, as my valued colleague Indur Goklany has valorously pointed out. Air conditioning, flood control, earthquake proofing and better weather forecasting have all helped. Despite vast media coverage, extreme weather now causes only a half-percent of global deaths. A large part of the gains came through crop production increases using fossil-fueled industrial fertilizers and irrigation pumps. This meant the world had fossil-fueled food to share with countries suddenly caught by devastating (but short- term) drought or flood.

But Indur neglected one aspect of extreme weather events—the “little ice ages.”  They are the flip side of the 1500-year warming cycle. The last one began in 1300 AD and ended in 1850, recent enough that many of our great-grandparents had to cope.  We don’t know when the next one will come, perhaps not for another 300 years—but when it does, “Look out!”

As an example, civilizations collapsed around the world, simultaneously, 4200 years ago—in southern Green, Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, and China. The nomads on the Asian steppes gave up their seasonal farming, put their huts on wheels, and simply followed their herds seeking ever-scarcer grass. This massive drought—driven by a “little ice age”— lasted 300 years!

Egypt had more food security through its early history than anyplace else, but it collapsed in famine and political chaos three times between 4200 and 1000 BC—all of them during “little ice ages.” The Nile floods were also far below normal during the cold Dark Ages (450-950 AD) and during our recent Little Ice Age.

How many people would starve if agriculture failed again, suddenly and simultaneously in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, India, and China—for 300 years? What future Huns would come knocking on the city gates? Would plague-infected rats again move in?

The “little ice age” climates are inherently less stable and more violent than the warming intervals. The Netherlands was hit by massive sea floods three times in 50 years as the Little Ice Age began. Each of these floods drowned more than 100,000 people. Will the Dutch levees hold in the next “little ice age”? What about New Orleans in a far less stable climate?

As we today enjoy the stable weather of a sunlit interglacial global warming, we had best not forget the massive disasters during the cold phases of the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle. In the last 160 years, we have not only become, used to the piddling “disasters” of a global warming phase, but smug that we have been able to rescue small countries with our technology.  Fossil fuels have competently carried food aid to famine victims during small, short famines. But, in a future Little Ice Age, the summers will cloudy, cold, interrupted by early frosts and hailstorms—for several hundred years.

We invented high-yield farming at the end of the Little Ice Age, to reduce the death toll from the persistent crop failures. But the world’s population since 1850 has risen from perhaps 1 billion to 6.6 billion, and may rise by 2 billion more before it peaks about 2050. Where would we move the at-risk populations?

Global vegetation has sharply increased with today’s additional sunshine and favorable rain patterns—plus the added plant fertilization due to more CO₂ in the atmosphere.    What if the climate turns suddenly cold and unstable and the oceans suck more of the CO₂ out of the atmosphere?

We should take full advantage of the favorable climate we have been granted to increase research on high-yield agriculture, biotechnology, water conservation and other advances now only dreamt of. We must make true improvements in energy technology (not erratic windmills and solar panels that will be even less effective in a cloudy little ice age than today).The greatest danger to the future population is to be unaware that the good period will not last.

For a million years, humans have been using the warming periods to advance civilization. We are comfortable, well fed, and not competing for caves because those who came before us advanced human society each time the climate provided a few hundred years of safety. Should we do any less for those who will come after us?

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Churchville, VA—Stanford University recently startled the world with its conclusion that conventional high-yield farming is far better for the planet than low-yield farming. And this includes the First World’s current icon, organic farming. We know that high-yield farms need less land to produce the same amount of food, protecting the huge amounts of soil carbon that would be gassed off if we plowed more land for low-yield crops. However, the Stanford study says that  high-yield farming may have saved 600 billion tons of CO₂ emissions. That’s equal to one-third of the greenhouses gasses emitted from the whole industrial revolution since 1850!

“Our results dispel the notion that modern intensive agriculture is inherently worse for the environment than a more “old-fashioned” way of doing things,” said Jennifer Burney, lead author of the Stanford study.

And, that’s not all: Confinement feeding of livestock—that favorite whipping boy for Greens—also helps sharply reduce greenhouse emissions. I recently estimated it would take the land area of New Jersey for chicken “playgrounds” if we put all our birds outdoors. It would take the land area of Pennsylvania to raise our hogs on free ranges. Stanford should now estimate the soil carbon losses if we plowed those millions of additional hectares for animal “playgrounds.”

Indoor animals are also more comfortable, and thus need about 15 percent less feed per pound of protein produced, saving still more acres of land for Nature and still more carbon left in the soil.

Feedlot cattle, eating grain from high-yield fields, produce less methane in their guts than cattle digesting grass—because grass is harder to digest. Studies on beef cattle show methane emissions reduced by 38 to 70 percent.

Jude Capper of Cornell University reported last year (Journal of Animal Science, March 13, 2009.) that more milk, from higher-yielding cows that are fed more grain and less grass, have helped reduce the carbon footprint of the U.S. dairy industry by 43 percent since 1944.

“Interestingly, many of the characteristics of 1940s dairy production—including low milk yields, pasture-based management and no antibiotics, inorganic fertilizers, or chemical pesticides—are similar to those of modern organic dairy systems,” Capper notes.

Capper’s study also found that supplementing dairy rations with genetically modified rBST would use 2.3 million fewer tons of feedstuffs, need 540,000 fewer acres of land for crop production, and require considerably less chemical fertilizer and pesticides

Confinement feeding also protects our streams and rivers. The manure from outdoor animals washes into the nearest creek. The wastes from confinement animals are collected and used as organic fertilizer on crops.

Are confinement animals less happy?  Probably not. Cattle, hogs and chickens are all  prey animals, and they see safety in numbers. They like being together. Cattle graze and travel in herds. I’ve watched free-range turkeys, which always seemed to be huddled together in a corner of their pasture.

If the environmental movement really believes humans are warming the planet, these studies tell us that Greens must recant on their criticisms of high-yield farming and confinement feeding. They need to stop demonizing the chemical fertilizers, the pesticides, the confinement feedlots and the biotechnology which will be needed to produce twice as much food—from today’s farmed acres—in 2050.

Or is demonizing modern farming too important to fund-raising in the cities?

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC,  is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Resources:

Jennifer Burney, et al, “Greenhouse Gas Mitigation by Agricultural  Intensification,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0914216107; 2010.

Jessica Marshall, “Grass-Fed Beef Has Bigger Carbon Footprint, Discovery News, Jan. 27, 2010.

Jude Capper, et al., “The Environmental Impact of Dairy Production: 1944 Compared with 2007,” Journal of Animal Science, March 13, 2009.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—People and wild species are at more risk in Africa than on any other continent. Huge numbers of people are trying to subsist on hunting scarce animals and unsustainable slash-and-burn farming. If this continues it will undoubtedly trigger a Dust Bowl like that of the American Midwest in the 1930s along with massive famine.

The Midwest had a drought—but the real problem was that all of the nitrogen had been “farmed out” of the region’s soils. The organic content of the soils had dropped sharply from pioneer days, leaving little root structure to hold the soils against wind and water. The Dust Bowl soils blew as far east as Washington D.C. startling the Congress into creating the U.S. Soil conservation Service.

One of the world’s top soil scientists is now warning that, without more chemical fertilizer, a similar fate could befall Africa. Pedro Sanchez, of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, says Africa’s traditional “bush fallow” farming system is unsustainable at today’s higher population densities. The “rest periods” for the soil have gotten too short to restore the soil nutrients. There are few livestock and, therefore, little manure. Each season the farmers’ yields decline further, triggering the plowing of more land to feed more people.

Sanchez praises a government program in Malawi that permits farmers to buy small amounts of N fertilizer and improved seeds at a discount, with the government paying the difference. In 2005, Malawi’s corn harvest had been only half what was needed. Yields were below a ton per hectare. In 2006, farmers armed with fertilizer and better seeds doubled their yields and produced a small surplus. By 2007, yields almost tripled, up from 0.8 tons to 2.2 tons per acre.

The high-yielding seeds are already available from regional research centers and Norman Borlaug’s Mexican plant-breeding center. Can a fertilizer and improved seed boost triple African crop yields and free the continent from its  hunger/soil trap—before it becomes a “Dust Bowl”?

Africa has tried fertilizer subsidies before, but the governments too soon ran out of cash. It worked, however, in India, where chemical fertilizer and the Green Revolution’s high-yield rice and wheat seeds tripled national yields in little more than a decade. That led to more stable government, better roads, more investment—and India’s Asian Tiger economy. A radical drop in birth rates followed, along with huge gains in India’s incomes and health. The fertilizer subsidy probably got too big and went on too long, but, compared to Africa, it’s hard to argue with the fabulous long-term results..

Sanchez says ten African countries are now trying to triple their yields by emulating Malawi’s progress—backed by promises of $20 billion in funding from the G8, including the United States.

If the aid donors honor their commitments, Africa might be able to break out of its unsustainable low-yield farming pattern. Roads will be built, to bring in the fertilizer and then export white corn to African countries that didn’t get rain that year. Surplus food would fund off-farm jobs and economic growth. A virtuous circle may start, as it did in India.

Organic enthusiasts claim their cover crops could provide all the nitrogen needed for expanded African food production—but their key report overstated the nitrogen available from green manure crops by threefold. Africa can’t afford more land in low-yield crops.

America’s “summit” fertilizer commitment to Africa is one that must be kept.

Report noted: Catherine Badgley et al. “Can Organic Farming Feed the World” Renewable Ag & Food Systems; July 2007.

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Churchville, VA—I lost a debate on organic food last week—to the city of New York.

Intelligence Squared, a philanthropic foundation, which brings Oxford-style debating to American issues, invited me to be part of a debate on whether the organic food movement is a scam. The invitation was a big deal, with the audio carried nationwide by National Public Radio and the TV shown repeatedly on Bloomberg TV.

Each of us six debaters got seven minutes to present our best arguments.

Lord Krebs was formerly head of Britain’s Food Standards Authority.. He quietly pointed out that the UK bars its organic farmers from making any claims of greater food safety or better nutrition—because in 80 years they’ve never documented any such benefits.

The elite New York audience yawned.

Blake Hurst, a farmer from Missouri, noted that most of America’s organic food is produced on giant farms in California, where they avoid using pesticides by having Mexican immigrants pull the weeds by hand. With the subtraction from organic of every “unnatural” additive, the fungi, molds and bugs increase, Hurst said. His biggest environmental sin had been letting too much nitrogen run off his fields and down the Mississippi River—until he adopted no-till, the soil-safest farming system ever. With no-till, there is virtually no runoff from the fields.  Organic farmers still commit “bare earth farming,” he warned, because they refuse to use herbicides. Their plowing and mechanical cultivation encourage erosion.

The New Yorkers didn’t care.

I pointed out that high-yield farming has saved millions of acres of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield organic crops.  We’re farming 37 percent of the land area now, and we’ll need twice as much food when human populations peak about 2050.  To prevent mass starvation and wildlands destruction we’ll need to double yields again—with nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and biotechnology.

The New Yorkers barely restrained themselves from booing.

On the other side were Jeff Steingarten,  the Vogue food critic; a cheerful frequent traveler on the organic talk circuit  named Chuck Benbrook; and Urvashi Rangan of Consumer Reports.

Benbrook professed to be puzzled why nobody cares about the tiny and intermittent differences in nutrient levels between organic and conventional foods.

Ms. Rangan starred, drawing cheers and applause as she complained about “pools of pig poo the size of the Great Lakes” and “chickens that didn’t have room to turn around in their cages.” Apparently animal welfare arguments are resonating louder than pesticide scares in New York this season.

On our side, Hust remembered when the mother pig rolled over and crushed his 4-H piglets; gestation crates prevent that. His neighbor’s free-range turkeys often got their throats slit by weasels.

I said the best argument for confinement livestock was human disease risks. I quoted physiologist Jared Diamond, best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, that most of humanity’s epidemic diseases came from microbes shuttling between humans and their domestic critters. They mutated into cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox, among other deadly risks. Today, Asian flu mutates every year in Asia’s outdoor village poultry flocks, and wild birds spread it worldwide.

Urvashi said she’d never heard of such a thing. But then, she didn’t really want to concede another valid, scientifically documented reality.

When the debate opened, 21 percent of the audience had agreed organic was “marketing hype,” 45 percent said no, with 34 percent undecided. At the end, our side still had 21 percent for “marketing hype”—but all the “un-decideds” had swung against us.

New York may be hopeless. Will the rest of the country continue to back organic food if it takes 80 percent of the earth’s land area to produce our basic food supplies organically?

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Vegetable growers in the Philippines are finding that no-till farming not only saves their topsoil but may even lessen the danger of landslides!

Four years of experiments in the Cordillera—the “salad bowl” of the Philippine highlands—show a 50–70 percent reduction in soil erosion because the farmers neither plow nor hand-weed. The region specializes in vegetables because its 6,000-foot elevation keeps the soil cooler and less humid than at sea level hear Manila. However, the steep slopes also mean high risks for both soil erosion and landslides.

Gil Magsino, of the University of the Philippines at Los Banos, says that even hand-weeding breaks up and loosens the soil structure. Then heavy tropic rains come to wash away the soil, its nutrients, and any fertilizer the farmers have been able to afford.

During 2009, in fact, Typhoon Pepeng caused landslides that killed some 200 people in the Cordillera region and U.S. military helicopters were sent in to help rush rescued landslide victims from the cut-off city of Baguio to regional hospitals.

A similar mudslide phenomenon hit southern Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2007, after a 12-inch rain. Four people were killed, small towns had to be evacuated, and soil sloughed off any unprotected hillsides. As it happens, that sand-hill region holds the second-largest concentration of organic farms in the U.S.—and organic farmers don’t allow no-till because it needs herbicides.

Sediment expert Stanley Trimble of UCLA had long studied the region’s Coon Creek watershed, and returned after the 2007 storm to view the impacts. “It was amazing,” Trimble reported. “I saw a narrow valley with no-till corn on one shoulder, no-till soybeans on the other shoulder, and in the valley was a sediment basin that had collected no sediment at all. The no-till had done a fabulous job.”

While U.S. no-tillers rely heavily on Roundup, Gil Magsino has been recommending that Filipino farmers spray between their crop rows with a mild solution of the herbicide paraquat. He says using strong herbicide solutions would kill the weeds and also their roots. The mild herbicide solution suppresses the weeds long enough to give the crops a head start—while keeping the weed roots intact below-ground. That helps hold the soil and its nutrients so the crops can benefit from them.

The farmers also gain from no-till’s low input costs. The herbicide costs far less than the diesel fuel otherwise needed to plow the fields. American farmers invented no-till during the first OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s for exactly the same initial reason—to cut fuel costs. Green manure crops, planted to cover the soil surface when no crops are growing, cut down on the need for commercial fertilizer. Then the herbicides kill the cover crops when the grain or vegetables are planted; otherwise the cover crops become weeds themselves.

No-till is currently being used on more than 100 million acres of crops world-wide. Among the biggest users are the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Indonesia. In Canada, no-till has replaced the old clean-fallow system on the semi-arid prairies. The fallow system left the soils open to wind and water erosion most of the time. With no-till, yields are higher and soil losses have been radically reduced.

Soil erosion is man’s most ancient and implacable enemy; no-till practically eliminates it.  No-till often doubles soil moisture in the fields; water sinks in rather than running off, and the crop residue on the surface keeps soil temperatures cooler. And no-till achieves all this while keeping crop yields high.  It is the most sustainable farming system that will sustain both the people and the wildlife in the 21^st century.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Churchville, VA—A new study by Dr. Shahal Abbo of Israel says the invention of farming wasn’t due to climate change because farming depends on a relatively stable climate. Dr. Abbo isn’t looking at the picture broadly enough. 

The ice cores tell us the invention of farming came about not long after the end of the last Ice Age, one of the earth’s key climate changes. Modern Homo sapiens had been around for over 100,000 years—but we’ve found no evidence of farming until after the last big ice sheets melted about 10,700 years ago

Before then, humans had been stealing birds’ eggs, digging clams, gathering seeds and picking berries. Stone Age man also learned that his hunting bands could drive big carnivores away from their kills with stone-tipped spears, then feasting on meat they couldn’t catch themselves.

Wondrously, the ice disappeared. The earth’s climate warmed more than 10 degrees C. Chicago, for example, shifted from mile-thick glacier to sunny Corn Belt. That’s certainly climate change in my book. And since the big ice sheets have been gone, the earth’s climate has indeed been relatively stable.

Mostly, the temperatures over the last ten millennia have ranged up and down about 2–4 degrees C at the latitude of Paris or Washington. The major variations have been the moderate 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles documented in the ice layers and seabed sediments. Our Modern Warming is apparently the sixth such warming cycle in 10,000 years. The warmest of the recent warming cycles began 9,000 years ago, and was 2.5 degrees warmer than today.

Humans probably continued their traditional hunting and gathering in the first years after the ice receded. But in the Middle East of 9,000 years ago, the Stone Age hunters apparently began to notice recurring seasonal crops of wild cereals. At first, they probably gathered some of the grain to eat, and perhaps some more to lure sheep near enough for killing.

But as human numbers expanded under the basking sun, there may not always have been enough wild game in the Judean hills to feed everybody. The idea of deliberately planting more of the cereal seeds, domesticating livestock and shifting their diets more heavily to grain would gradually have become attractive. And, humans of 10,000 years ago were fully as intelligent, curious, and anxious to survive as we are today.

Once the idea of controlling food production ignited, the rest is history. Farmers have taken over every part of the world that can readily grow crops, and even some difficult eco-systems that are right on the margin, such as Asia’s terraced mountainside rice paddies.  

Many alarmists have warned that today’s “unprecedented warming” would bring poorer crop yields. However, a Chinese research team reported recently in Climate Research that China’s food production has increased during the Modern Warming. Credit for the food production gains goes both to the longer, warmer growing seasons—and to the fertilization effect of higher CO₂ levels have on crop plants. Higher CO₂ levels both stimulate crop growth and increase the plants’ water use efficiency.

Chinese rice and wheat production have expanded north with the 1.1 degree warming of the past 50 years, displacing lower-yield short-season crops. In addition, the extended growing seasons have permitted higher cropping intensities: three crops in two years for many areas where before there was only annual cropping.

Logic should have told us to expect this increased food production—but logic has been in short supply among the global warming alarmists.

 

Resources:

Shahal Abbo, et al., 2010, “Yield Stability: An Agronomic Perspective on the Origin of Near East Agriculture,” Vegetation History and Archeobotany 19: 143-150.

W. Dansgaard et al., 1989, “The abrupt termination of the Younger Dryas climate event,” Nature 339, 532-534.

Dong, et al., 2009, Effect of Post-1980 Warming on Cropping Systems in China,” Climate Research 40: 37-48.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued new report that attempts to forecast the impact of climate change on American farming in the next 50 years. USDA seems to expect serious climate-related farming problems ahead, but the recent changes in global climate have been tiny—and in the “wrong” direction! The earth’s temperatures are now slightly cooler than when NASA’s James Hansen first warned the U.S. Senate about “runaway global warming” in 1988.

 

Senior climate researcher Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research recently admitted to colleagues “we have no idea why the earth isn’t warming, and it’s a travesty that we don’t know.” That’s a quote from one of those e-mails leaked at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

 

That pretty much tells us how much faith we dare to put in the new USDA climate-change forecasts.

 

The USDA report’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Since 2007, the earth seems to have passed a “tipping point” into global cooling—at least temporarily. NASA told us in 2008 that the Pacific Ocean had shifted into a cool cycle, after strong warming both globally and in the Pacific from 1976-1998 and cooling from 1940-1975.

 

What does USDA predict from its new computer-generated look into the future? 

 

• Grain and oilseed crops will mature more rapidly, because of shorter, warmer winters—although rainfall may be more variable, perhaps even with more drought. (Seems reasonable and generally beneficial—but hardly earth-shaking.)

 

• Horticultural crops may be more vulnerable to climate change than field crops, since climate factors impact appearance and quality of the produce. (How much did this big report cost) 

 

• Livestock mortality will decrease with warmer winters, but USDA claims this will be more than offset by greater death losses during hotter summers. (More cattle die in blizzards than in summer pastures equipped with shade opportunities)

 

• Weeds may grow more rapidly with elevated levels of atmospheric CO₂. (But so do crop plants. It’s a wash.)

 

• Disease and insect prevalence will escalate as a result of shorter, warmer winters.

(Vaccines and medications have been more important than modest temperature changes—for both human and livestock diseases.)

 

• The trends toward reduced mountain snowpack and earlier spring snowmelt runoff in the western U.S. imply changes in the availability of irrigation water. (We’ve had lots of snowpack since 2007. Can the USDA tell us when that will change back again, and why?) 

 

USDA left out the most important information about CO₂ and farming’s future: More CO₂ in the atmosphere raises crop yields substantially, acting like fertilizer for the plants and increasing their water use efficiency. Doubling CO₂ in the air raises the yields of herbaceous plants 30–50 percent, and of trees by 50–80 percent, based on hundreds of studies in dozens of countries.

 

Higher CO₂ levels should mean higher crop and livestock yields! Talley ho!

 

Resources: 

 

B.A. Kimball, 1983, “Carbon Dioxide and Agricultural Yields: An Assemblage and Analysis of 430 Prior Observations,” Agronomy Journals 75, pp 779-788.

 

K.E. Idso and S. B. Idso, 1994, “Plant Responses to Atmospheric CO₂ Enrichment in the Face of Environmental Constraints, A Review 0of the past 10 years’ Research,” Agriculture and Forest Meteorology 69, pp 153–203.

 

R.R. Nemani et al., 2003, “Climate-Driven Increases in Global Terrestrial Net Primary Production from 1982 to 1999,” Science 300, pp 1560-1563.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

The Environmental Protection Agency, in a George Orwellian move, has just announced that it has suddenly decided to put the herbicide atrazine through yet another regulatory wringer, despite having just completed a comprehensive, multi-year regulatory review of the safety of atrazine begun in 1994. Only three months ago the EPA announced that after reviewing hundreds of scientific studies, atrazine “is not likely to cause cancer in humans” and does not affect the reproductive development of frogs and other amphibians. Atrazine has been used safely for more than 50 years in the U.S. and has been upheld as safe by the World Health Organization and the governments of Canada, France, the UK and others.

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The timing suggests that politics is the overriding concern. Atrazine was already slated for a 2010 human health review, but no such headline impact has ever been found. The new team didn’t dare bet on finding a human health flaw now. Instead, they decided to re-do the just-completed review process, betting that they can produce enough new smoke to deregister atrazine on some lesser charge. Since the review process still requires a series of expert review panels, EPA needed to start immediately or risk losing their Obama chance.

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Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides, helping farmers control weeds while protecting topsoil from erosion via no-plow and other conservation cropping methods. Without herbicides, farmers must use plows and other bare-earth weed control methods that lead to far greater soil erosion and far more fossil fuel use. Atrazine is a critical tool in the no-plow revolution: it helps combat resistance to other weed killers, maintain high soil organic carbon levels in our fields (supposedly something the EPA promotes) and protects rivers and streams from sediment pollution (another environmental good). Economic studies show atrazine provides more than $2 billion in direct economic benefits to our nation, even beyond the benefits in soil sustainability and stream pollution prevention.

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So why should you care if farmers lose atrazine? Because it will mean higher food costs, more soil erosion, less sustainable farming, and more environmental degradation. It’ll mean putting more of our farming eggs in fewer baskets. As we’ve learned with the unwelcome but inevitable return of bed bugs to our major cities, needlessly eliminating pesticides from society’s toolbox leaves us more vulnerable to the scourges of nature.

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With world population still growing and overall food demand set to double over the next 40 years, we need all the farming tools we have (and more) just to keep our heads above the rising tide of farm product demand. We’re all in this struggle together and the farmer’s loss hits our environment and pocketbooks.

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The atrazine witch hunt is being driven primarily by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a powerful eco-activist group that simply won’t take no for an answer. Review after review by the EPA, starting in the 1980s, has found that atrazine poses no health risk to humans or other risk to wildlife. Yet the NRDC knows that actual evidence is simply unnecessary; all they need is enough concocted public fear to cow the EPA into reacting to the politics.

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They’ve done it before. Nearly twenty years ago, the NRDC perpetrated one of the biggest scams ever on the American public, claiming that a product called alar, used in growing apples, was the “most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply.” NRDC ranted that alar was a “cancer-causing agent used on food that the EPA knows is going to cause cancer for thousands of children.” Alar, it turns out, was far less a cancer risk than tap water or peanut butter, as the EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Panel finally ruled.

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Why did NRDC perpetrate the fraud? According to boasts from the NRDC’s public relations firm, it was all an elaborate (and highly successful) fundraising scheme. When their lies were exposed—sadly too late to save mass parental anguish over supposedly poisonous apple juice or to save apple farmers tens of millions in market losses—the NRDC equivocated. “We never said there was an immediate danger,” they said as they laid blame on journalists who “muddled” their report and the public who “overreacted.”

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The NRDC is now trying to do to atrazine what they did to alar. Make no mistake, the NRDC (and current political operators within the EPA) will continue to go back to the scientific wishing well until they “frighten” the EPA into banning atrazine.  This time around, the herbicides makers and corn farmers aren’t backing down. Will we stand up with them for sound science, or allow the further politicization of our regulatory agencies?

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DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. Alex Avery is director of research and education at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may email them at cgfi@hughes.net

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CHURCHVILLE, VA—“Environmentalists are standing in the way of feeding humanity through their opposition to biotechnology, farm chemicals and nitrogen fertilizer”—straight talk from billionaire Bill Gates at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines October 15^th  

 

Gates could have said with equal truth that the same environmentalists, by demanding organic-only farming, are risking the future of the planet’s wildlife. The world will need more than twice as much food by 2050 to feed a peak population of 8 billion affluent humans and their pets. Gates believes we should get that additional food from higher yields on the 37 percent of the earth’s land area we already farm, not by threatening massive numbers of wildlife species by clearing more land for low-yield crops.

 

Gates has thus delivered the most important speech on food and the world’s future since Dr. Norman Borlaug accepted his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Borlaug’s “miracle wheat” had made him the symbol of the original Green Revolution, which tripled yields on the world’s best cropland through scientific research after 1960. Dr. Borlaug spent the last years of his amazing life trying to extend the Green Revolution to Africa and many farming regions with marginal lands, where today more than 1 billion people try to feed their families with hunting and slash-and-burn farming.

 

Now, Gates has committed more than $1 billion of his personal fortune to improving crop yields in Africa and marginal farming regions. He announced in Des Moines another $120 million in gifts for additional farm productivity research, including support for drought-tolerant corn and pest-resistant sweet potatoes. Until this moment, Gates had not spoken out on the use of biotech and chemicals to continue raising world crop yields.

 

Britain’s Royal Society has also just produced a study, Reaping the Benefits:  Science and the Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture. Led by Dr. David Baulcombe, this report also concludes that biotech crops are one of the technologies urgently needed to avoid a global food crisis.

 

The eco-activists have claimed that organic-only farming could provide all the food needed—but only if humanity became vegetarian. Otherwise, there’s a severe global shortage of cow manure and “extra” land and water to plant vastly more nitrogen-fixing green manure crops. However, history tells us that only a tiny percent of humans voluntarily choose to be vegetarian.

 

The Center for Global Food Issues and the reports of the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology say even going vegetarian wouldn’t save enough land from the plow.  More research must be brought to the farms in the coming decades to avoid wildlife disaster. The saving grace to date is that we’ve farmed the best land, which had large numbers of a few species; expanding onto the poor soils will threaten huge numbers of species.

 

Ironically, another speaker at the World Food Prize Symposium—economist Jeffrey Sachs who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University—criticized agriculture as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Sachs, of course, was implying that either the world’s people must somehow sharply cut back on food and manufacturing, or cut human numbers by some enormous percentage.

 

It was an ironic reminder that the first Green Revolution lost its momentum after its funding from the Rockefeller Foundation had been drastically cut back. Ethicist Garrett Hardin tells us that Allan Gregg, a Rockefeller vice president, was one of the first to refer to population growth as “a cancer on the earth.”  The government agencies that took over support for the international agricultural research network after Rockefeller dropped it have not been able to stand up to the political clout of the green movement.

 

Once again private philanthropy may provide the final step toward a world of adequately fed people and abundant wild-lands, as it did during the first Green Revolution.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net