Farmers, along with the rest of us, could get hit with a triple jolt of regulatory shock if the Environment Protection Agency goes forward with its announced controls on carbon emissions. Consumers are already paying heavily for the federal mandate that puts a huge chunk of our corn crop, as ethanol, into our gas tanks instead of into our meat, milk, and eggs. While food costs soar, along with fuel costs, it is a waste of good corn as it contributes almost zero to our energy independence.

Now, the EPA is moving to impose tough limits on carbon emissions from the big power plants across the country—and then plans to screw the new carbon limits down tighter and tighter. Farmers’ fuel and electricity costs would go through the roof, along with everybody else’s.

The goal, after all, is to make the coal, oil, and natural gas that power most of our power plants too expensive to use. They need to make all our electricity at least slightly more expensive than the ultra-costly solar panels and wind turbines that have failed to produce “Green power” in Europe and, thus far, fail to provide much energy here at home.

After the power plants are stymied, then the farmers will be subject to EPA operating permits for any livestock enterprise emitting more than 100 tons of greenhouse gases per year. Since each cow emits about four tons of methane per annum. 90 percent of the livestock farmers are expected to be over the limit. The EPA estimates the operating permits for livestock farmers would cost the farmers $866 million per year, certainly a low-ball figure. Counting the farmers’ paperwork time, this will add more than $1 billion to our annual food costs.

Who will pay the added billion? We will. And, expect by that time to be paying for $8 gasoline and tripled electric bills too. They are paying $3.70 at the pump in California this week.

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill), of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, recently told the Illinois Farm Bureau that the claim the Supreme Court had “required” the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases “is a myth.” The Supreme Court actually said EPA should regulate greenhouse gasses “if they could make a determination that the gasses ‘significantly endanger human health.” Shimkus says the EPA simply repackaged the theoretical risks from the IPPC’s computer models, with no other evidence. The EPA is set to act on guesses about the future to regulate our taxes and energy costs in the present.

The little Ice Age ended in 1850, but after 1940, global temperatures trended downward for 35 years—during the first and biggest surge of human-emitted greenhouse gasses that has ever occurred. (We’ve had a net warming of only 0.2 degrees C since 1940). The IPCC itself says the first greenhouse emissions are theoretically the most powerful—but the post-1940 emissions produced a global cooling! The computers models can’t forecast the snowfall over Chicago in 2011, let alone the climate 100 years out. Does the EPA know about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, that shifts our temperatures up and down in 30-year spurts? Or about the 1,500-year climate cycle that has given us more than 500 global warmings in the last million years?

If the cooling trend resumes after the current El Nino/La Nina interruptions, we can expect the planet to cool until 2037. By that time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may have picked up their billions of pre-printed energy-rationing coupons and gone elsewhere.

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—Today, farmers are accused of “tampering with Nature.” But farmers have been doing such tampering for thousands of years. We had to, for survival. As one dramatic example, wild sheep didn’t have wool. Rocky Mountain Big Horn Sheep still don’t! Nature gave sheep a long, coarse hair coat instead. In the beginning, the wool was just a short insulating undercoat with fuzzy fibers too short to make thread. For the first 4,000 years we herded sheep, it was only for their meat.

But, as farming spread out into colder climates, humans had trouble keeping warm. The supply of bearskins, for example, would quickly have become inadequate as farming supported more people and the local bear population was reduced by hunting pressure.

Wooly sheep are a mutation of nature, which probably occurred naturally. It may have happened as sheep were taken into more northern climates were they weren’t native, such as the highlands of Iran and Turkey. Once longer wool occurred, generations of farmers encouraged it by selectively breeding their sheep for longer and longer wool fibers.

Wool fabrics seems to have appeared about 3350 BC, in northern Syria, Iran, and in what’s now Turkey just before cities were invented, We know this partly because that’s when the languages started to have words for wool, says David Anthony in his excellent book, The Horse, the Wheel and Language.

We also know this from the pattern of sheep bones found in archeological digs. When sheep were raised only for meat, they tended to be butchered at a young age, and the number of sheep and goats in the herds tended to be about equal. The sheep were eaten, and the goats were kept mostly for milk. In one region of southern Russia about 4000 BC, sheep were the dominant domesticated animal, and outnumbered goats by 5 to 1. That was the classic wool-sheep harvesting ratio, but this early pattern appeared in only a few settlements.

Then, however, the numbers of sheep began to radically outstrip the number of goats. The wool mutation had arrived and spread. And many more of the slaughtered sheep were older animals, apparently retired wool-producers. In the upper Euphrates Valley of Anatolia, herds were dominated by cattle and goats before 3350—and then sheep suddenly outnumbered both of the other species. More than half of these sheep lived to maturity and must have had wool-producing careers.

Woolen thread was spun on hand spindles, kept spinning by a trick of the wrist. Then the woolen threads could be woven into fabrics that were much warmer than linen or cotton. They also took dyes better, and gave us brighter-colored clothing.  Woolen textiles were widespread by 2800 BC. The fabrics, however, were so expensive that even later generations of parents deeded wool clothing to offspring in their wills.

The wool could also be made into felt, one of the early “miracle fabrics.”  Felt became the material of choice for making the winter yurts that housed most of the steppe nomads as they herded their animals across 4,000 miles of Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. Felt was lightweight, durable—and very warm.

The felt was made by pressing wool fibers into a loose mat. Then the mat was rolled up, pressed tightly, wetted, and then rolled and pressed again, over and over until the curly wool fibers interlocked. It was far warmer than an American Indian teepee.

The next time you hear the “tampering with nature” charge, remember the old nursery rhyme, “Black sheep, black sheep, have you any wool?” What if the sheep answered, “Sorry, never heard of it”?

Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., 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 Years. Readers may write to him at PO Box 202 Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net.

Resource

David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language:  How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press, 2007

CHURCHVILLE, VA—When people hear that I’m an advocate of high yield farming to feed the world and protect the environment, assertions of farm runoff into the rivers are raised to support  charges against modern farming methods. Urban dwellers, even some of my rural neighbors, tell me their concerns about large-scale farming ruining our rivers “because the rivers are muddy.” They worry about even more soil erosion as farmers gear up to double food production over the next 40 years to feed a peak population of 9 billion people.

Certainly, the rivers in the world’s farming areas run brown. Muddy rivers generally mean the surrounding soils are good enough to farm. But the farmland sustains high yields despite the brown rivers. The mountain streams produce no food—even though the water coming down the mountainside travels at much higher and more dangerous speeds and run crystal clear. Why? The soil from the mountainsides has mostly eroded long since.

Fortunately, you don’t have to just take my word for that. A research team sponsored by Minnesota corn and soybean farmers just carried out an airborne laser scanning study of the Minnesota River above Mankato, MN. The study found that 56–95 percent of the sediment in the river came from the natural erosion along the riverbanks—which has been going on for centuries.

Dr. Satish Gupta of the Minnesota Department of Soil, Water and Climate was the lead author on the study. He says, “Some of these [river] banks are 150 feet high. They are very steep, not very stable, and they slough into the river.” Gupta also emphasized that the sediment load in any farm-country river will be a combination of bank erosion and runoff from the farm fields. The proportions vary with the soils, slope, rainfall patterns and farming systems. Thanks to the laws of hydraulics, however, any stream will get enough sediment to slow itself down, one way of the other—as it flows brown.

Dr. Gupta notes that in addition to bank erosion, the Minnesota River has also been impacted by a Corps of Engineers dredging program. The Corps takes 20,000 cubic yards of sediment per year out of the river to maintain a nine-foot depth for barges and towboats. The dredging makes the river flow faster and straighter. So does the extra water from urban rooftops, streets, parking lots and airports running into the river instead of infiltrating the surrounding soils. What happens to the dredged sediment? Beneficial public uses include wetland creation, bird nesting creation, and upland habitat development.

Even though the Minnesota River study show up to 90 percent of the sediment coming from bank erosion, best-farming practices are still helpful in minimizing crop and soil losses. No-till farming, contour farming, grassed waterways and buffer strips at field edges all help reduce sediment loss. Fencing cattle from the creeks has also become a popular conservation policy in many areas (including my rural Shenandoah Valley.)

Continuous research and innovation has made today’s farmers the most sustainable in history. Their high crop yields mean they need to farm less cropland to supply food demands. They restore the soil nutrients taken up by the growing crops with chemical fertilizers. This keeps the plant root structures strong, so they resist erosion. No-till farming by itself can reduce soil erosion from the fields by 65–95 percent. But don’t expect to ever see crystal clear rivers in good farming country.

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 U.S. Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 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—My wife is complaining about our increased costs at the supermarket. I remind her that every pound of meat, milk, and butter we buy requires several pounds of corn to produce—and biofuel mandates have shoved the corn price up from about $ 2 per bushel to $3.60. Many hog producers, dairymen, and egg farms have gone bust due to the inevitably higher cost of feed for livestock.

 

The higher food costs come on top of the already-higher prices we pay at the pump for the lower-energy ethanol being mixed with our gasoline.

 

Now, comes word of another failing biofuel “miracle.” Thousands of farmers in the developing world were told that biofuel from an oily tree fruit, jatropha, could be grown on marginal land. Thus it could produce massive amounts of renewable fuels without competing with food crops.

 

Now it turns out the experts were wrong about jatropha growing well on marginal land. Jatropha will grow on marginal land, but it needs good land to produce economically viable yields. Indian farmers, for example, find the forecast yields of 2–5 tons per hectare are actually less than 2 tons.

 

Meanwhile, millions of jatropha trees are being grown instead of food on farms from Ghana and Guatemala to Mozambique and India. EU companies have reportedly leased 5 million hectares of land for biofuel production, much of it in Africa, where it will compete with already-inadequate food production and threaten unique wildlife. 

 

Major question: In the name of all that is environmentally holy, why are we trying to grow fuel crops on “marginal land”?  Marginal land is where the world’s wild species live. There isn’t any “spare” land anywhere in the world.

 

Fuel crops are a fundamentally bad idea because we get so little fuel per acre. The U.S. burns 135 billion gallons worth of gasoline per year, and corn produces about 90 gallons worth of gasoline-equivalent per acre per year. How many million acres of corn ethanol would it take to make a significant difference in our “energy independence”? 

 

We’re already farming 37 percent of the earth’s land area, and unless research double per-acre food yields again, we’ll need to clear another 30–50 percent of the earth’s land surface just to feed ourselves in 2050. Count on at least 8 billion people, with at least 7 billion of them affluent enough to demand meat, milk, and pet food.

 

Europe is making biodiesel out of its rapeseed crop—but also importing lots of palm oil from Indonesia. There, thousands of Great Apes (orangutans) are being slaughtered to make room for the palm seedlings. This is conservation?

 

Ironically, some of the farmers who have planted jatropha are finding no one wants to buy it because the costs of refining and distribution are too high. The oil giant BP, for example, has pulled out of a planned $50 million jatropha joint venture in Africa. “As other technologies came up,” said a spokesman, “we looked again at whether jatropha was going to be the best biofuel source that could be scaled up. We have decided to look elsewhere.” 

 

Thus far, no alternative energy source works well. Nuclear power seems to be the best hope and the Obama administration is finally adjusting to that reality. Even inadequate, erratic sources such as solar panels and wind turbines are less destructive to conservation than using scarce land for biofuels.   

 

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 global warming trade war has started—quietly, but just as surely as we knew it would. The Obama Administration is now subsidizing U.S. milk and cheese exports in a way that will punish New Zealand—which depends on its efficient grass-fed dairy exports for close to one-third of its total income. The reason? U.S. corn ethanol mandates have pushed American feed grain prices so high that the Administration felt it had to “give something” to U.S. dairy farmers.

 

Unfortunately, the dairy export subsidies will make little difference to American dairymen, but they could have harsh impacts on New Zealand’s farm-dominated economy. Thus far, New Zealand has escaped the higher grain prices because they feed their cows mainly grass and turnips.

 

Our excuse on dairy export subsidies is that the EU did it first. But the real dairy problem is that both the EU and the U.S. have jacked up their own dairy production costs by diverting corn and rapeseed from feeding livestock to making biofuels. The ethanol and biodiesel games have doubled world feed grain prices and caused food riots in Mexico and Egypt.

 

The dairy export payments should be a huge red flag to the world. When push came to shove, the U.S. and the EU immediately fell into the old trap of punishing trade from innocent countries. That’s actually how we launched the Great Depression—with the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930.

 

People have actually been predicting the “green trade wars” for years because developing countries have no obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. All the affluent countries are thus terrified that their carbon-emitting industries will flee to less-developed countries. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu told a Congressional committee in March that America might well consider a “carbon tariff” on imports from China, India, and other developing countries if they “undercut” U.S. manufacturers. .  

 

Gary Huffbauer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics recently told National Public Radio, “Countries say, well, if we’re going to take measures [to combat global warming] we have to do something at the border to prevent the same product being produced abroad and just imported by our country. So those thoughts trigger potential for trade wars. So lawmakers here have added a provision to the greenhouse gas legislation that echoes the EU approach. It gives energy intensive companies like steelmakers, chemical plants, and paper mills the right to demand tariffs on imports if after five years they can prove unfair carbon competition” 

 

Environmentalists say the worries about China and India picking up high-carbon jobs are exaggerated—that most of America’s energy-intensive imports come from Canada or the EU. But they’re saying that today, before the carbon taxes have been imposed. With carbon taxes in place, the developing countries will look more attractive, Canada and the EU less so.  

 

Without low-cost imports from China and Colombia, meanwhile, the cost of shopping at Wal-Mart will escalate—even as U.S. exports are increasingly barred from both Kyoto member and non-member countries. Our investments in productive assets will be wasted, even as the U.S. jobs totals decline.

 

A carbon tariff would conflict with a U.S. pledge not to violate international trade rules, but Obama’s promise to cut greenhouse emission might easily override the vague “no trade war” commitment.

 

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

 

Alex A. Avery

Presentation at the American Phytopathological Society’s World Food Crisis Symposium

The world agricultural community has focused on fighting hunger and meeting the needs of humanity for decades. It has been the rallying cry of farmers in all lands. The good news is that the world currently experiences the lowest overall hunger and malnutrition rate as a percentage of the population in human history. Per capita average food supplies are at an all-time high. But while the percentage of hungry and malnourished are low, the total number of hungry and undernourished people is still near an all time high. The often cited figure of 800 million hungry or undernourished people offered in 1996 at the World Food Summit in Rome is a troubling figure indeed. That’s 15 percent of the world’s people. It is unacceptable from anyone’s perspective. But what are the root causes of this tragedy? Why do these people go hungry?

The great Irish potato famine of the 19th century, the textbook example of famine due to crop disease, is today but a distant memory. Of course crop disease still takes its share from our fields. But instead of these losses being counted in the numbers of dead, they are tallied mostly in economic losses for farmers. This is because while any region of the planet can suffer a devastating crop disease or yield robbing drought, the world’s overall agricultural production is relatively stable. Global trade in commodities and an active world market in farm products mean that adequate food is available even when crop failures are widespread in an area. Famine and hunger are mostly the result of factors other than food supply.

The vast majority of hunger and malnourishment seen this century has been the result of non-agricultural factors, such as poverty, government policies and civil war. Decidedly human factors.

North Korea has experienced terrible hunger and malnutrition in recent years, according to many accounts. Some have compared it to the great Chinese famine of 1958-62, which killed over 30 million people. But the bitter irony is that North Korea’s direct neighbors, South Korea and the Jilin Province of China, have enjoyed more than adequate harvests in recent years. South Korea has experienced near record food consumption and dietary quality. Before the recent Asian economic crisis, South Koreans were in the midst of the largest increase in high-protein foods consumption in that nation’s history.

The difference between the two obviously wasn’t climate or disease pressures-the country is a peninsula abut the size of the state of Kansas. It was economic and political structure.

All of the major famines of this century-the terrible famines in China between 1914 through 1949, the Soviet famine from 1917-21, the horrifying Chinese famine following Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward, and the African famines in Ethiopia, Chad, Sudan, Mozambique and Somalia, were caused by war or disastrous collective farming policies. In China, for example, it is estimated that over 30 million died between 1958-62. As in the earlier Soviet famine, Communist bureaucrats confiscated too much grain based on the inflated yield statistics of regional party leaders eager to please Chairman Mao. Unfortunately, Mao was deceived by Soviet propaganda about crop improvements and yield increases fostered by the fraudulent science of Trofim Lysenko.

Civil conflict and the use of hunger and famine as tools of war are the root causes of the major African famines. In Somalia, food rotted unharvested in the fields because they were patrolled by snipers from both sides.

We will likely never be able to eradicate human stupidity or viciousness. But the marked trend toward democracy witnessed over the second half of the twentieth century offers hope.

By far the biggest cause of hunger and malnutrition in the world is poverty. There’s plenty of relatively cheap food available in the world today. Unfortunately, too many still haven’t the means to access even these low-cost food sources. This economic poverty is often related to and worsened by the lack of stable political and governmental structures and poor infrastructure support.

But the food challenge ahead is more daunting, requiring contributions from many sectors of society. World population as we all know is expected to increase by an additional 50 percent before it peaks. However, this is likely to account for less than half of the coming food demand increases. Dietary changes in developing countries will add even more to the world’s future food demand than population growth. Animal protein consumption is already increasing at unprecedented rates and reasonable estimates of global farm product demand indicate at least a doubling of overall food demand over the next 50 years. It well may end up being closer to a tripling of world food demand.

Yet agriculture already utilizes 37 percent of the earth’s land area, with 11 percent devoted to crops and pasture, and rangeland taking another 26 percent.

Certainly, with rapidly rising food demand and limited farmland available, there is an increased potential for hunger and malnutrition. Food prices will no doubt rise in the long term above the means of the world’s poorest consumers. Conflicts over irrigation and other agricultural resources may indeed become more commonplace. But instead of hunger and malnutrition, we feel that there is a much more eminent threat from population growth and dietary changes-wildlife habitat destruction.

I’m not trying to downplay or minimize the scope of hunger and malnutrition on the planet today. There is obviously too much. In a world in which the number one diet related disease in America and many other developed countries is overconsumption, any hunger in the world is too much. But as I have already stated, most of the hunger in the world today is due to non-agricultural factors, and I don’t expect that will change drastically in the future.

The fact is, the world is in the midst of the largest increase in food demand in human history. And while population growth will account for a portion of that increase, more than half of it will be due to dietary changes.

Population Growth

Instead of the continuing, exponential population growth forecast by Malthus, and later by Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown among others, it appears that we are seeing a one-time surge. This is first the result of a reduction in death rates in the early 20th century, followed later by a reduction in fertility rates as economic and social stability reduce the need for large families.

Currently, the world’s global population is about six billion people. With the current rate of population growth of 1.5 percent, another 90 million consumers are added each year. That’s the equivalent of an additional Mexico added to world food demand each year. Or another New York city added each month. While this rapid current population growth has led many to predict malthusian disasters in past and no doubt coming years, there is good reason for optimism.

The good news is that this rate of growth will not be long lived. Like a train, population growth has momentum. It changes pace slowly. During the rapid growth of the 70s, it appeared as though the world was headed for 15 or 20 billion people. However, what was not realized at that time was that the brakes were already being set on population growth, partly as a result of the Green Revolution of the 1960s.

Societal and economic forces have led to a dramatic decline in fertility rates in most areas of the world, save for portions of Africa and some Muslim countries.

The most realistic projections of population growth now predict a peak world population of well under 10 billion. Some place the peak at below 8 billion. While this may at first seem unrealistic, consider that only a few years ago the World Bank and United Nations each predicted a peak of 12-15 billion. For 20 years, both the World Bank and UN have had to continually pare down their population predictions. They now predict between 9-10 billion. However, other groups, such as the Winrock Foundation, using the same numbers predict between 7.5 and 8.5 billion. Roughly a 50 percent increase over current levels.

To begin with, the World Bank and UN are not truly forecasting population growth. They conduct “scenario analysis.” This means they set the circumstances and illustrate the outcome. Different circumstances, different outcome. But more than that, their projections are based on a faulty assumption that all countries will stabilize at exactly replacement level fertility (about 2.1 children per couple). Countries above replacement level will make a “soft landing”. As they approach replacement level fertility, the rate of fertility decline will slow until it eventually stops at 2.1. Countries currently below replacement level fertility will increase their fertility rates back up to 2.1. This is because logic says that if a country stabilizes at lower than replacement level, its population will eventually fall to zero. Long-term, that logic is, well, logical. But assuming that this will occur within the next 20 or 30 years, let alone the next five or ten, makes no sense.

The average fertility rate in developed countries is now 1.7 – well below replacement level. And in some developed countries, the fertility rate continues to drop. Italy and Germany, for instance, now have fertility rates of only 1.2 children per couple. This means that without immigration, these countries population will shrink to half its current size over the next 50 years. And many of these countries have averaged below replacement level fertility rates for decades, essentially stabilizing at a below replacement level fertility rate. The developing countries are rapidly reducing their fertility rates further as well, as their economies grow and their populations transition away from an a rural, agrarian base.

Population forecasters have also misjudged the power of the forces affecting fertility rates and this, too, has caused their forecasts to remain on the high side of reality. Hardly anyone but the most ardent optimist predicted that the world would experience the widespread and rapid economic growth it has seen over the last 20 years. The fall of the Soviet Union and the end to the Cold War were a key factor. So was the explosion of new technologies. However, the biggest factor was the explosion of global markets and trade fostered by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), now the World Trade Organization. Since its inception following World War II, world non-farm trade has increased more than 16-fold. This has been the driving force behind the economic growth in much of Asia. It’s unfortunate that the rapid growth of the region is now experiencing substantial growing pains, however, this is as much a sign of success as it anything else. Literally, there were bankers in countries, such as South Korea, who had never seen the consequences of a bad loan. These economies have grown themselves past bad debt for nearly 30 years.

The resulting increase in relative affluence of these countries has resulted in the assumption of more affluent lifestyles as well, including a move toward smaller families. Literally in one generation, these countries have gone from an average of over six children per family, to three. Another way to look at it is that the world has come 75 percent of the way to direct-replacement level fertility in only 30 years. And if Japan and other developed countries are any indication, instead of a soft landing at 2.1, the fertility rates in these countries are likely to continue dropping until they reach 1.8. Thus, the most accurate forecasts of world peak population are now between eight and nine billion.

However, the same forces which are lowering national fertility rates throughout the world, are also increasing the demand for better diets. The first thing that poor 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. 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 to see what to expect from the region.

As recently as the late 1950s, Japan was a food aid recipient. Today, Japan is the world’s largest food importer. And the economic growth in Japan brought about a fundamental shift in Japan’s dietary habits. Since 1965, Japanese consumers have reduced their rice calories by 37 percent while they have increased their dairy consumption by 123 percent and their meat calories by 220 percent.

In all, the average Japanese consumer now eats about 55 grams of animal protein per day. And if Japan would reduce its import tariffs, they would probably be eating closer to 65 grams of animal protein per day. For comparison, Americans eat about 75 grams per day. These farm products take three to five times as many farming resources to produce as a calorie of cereals – but there is an innate human hunger for them.

Meat demand in Asia has been skyrocketing alongside the rise in personal incomes:

• In China, meat demand has increased by 10 percent each of the last eight years. China ate 6 million tons more meat in 1996 than it did the year before — and permanently added more than 20 million tons to world annual feed grain demand.
• India’s consumers have been adding 1-2 million tons of milk and dairy products to their national diet each year, despite feed shortages, high prices and poor quality.
• Indonesia expanded its broiler flock by 25 percent (and 150 million birds) in 1995 alone!

And despite these recent trends, Asians still consume an average of less than 20 grams of animal protein per day. By 2030, it is likely that the world will have to supply at least Japan’s current 55 grams of animal protein per day for 4 billion Asians. That’s nearly a 400 percent increase in the region’s total meat consumption!

Thus, the world’s biggest food gap is opening in the region least able to meet that demand — the densely populated nations of Asia. That region will have eight or nine times as many people per acre of cropland as North America.

With such realities, you may be asking yourself why hunger and malnutrition will not increase in the future. They may, especially for poor consumers. But I am obviously optimistic about the economic future for the world’s developing nations and people.

There are several reasons why we feel that habitat destruction is a bigger potential threat than widespread hunger and malnutrition. First off, the dietary changes themselves reduce the likelihood of true famines. When significant percentages of dietary calories come from meat, in times of shortage feed normally fed to livestock becomes an emergency food supply. Second, the world now has a well established international trading system with significant capacity. Japan, the United States largest agricultural importer, insures its food security with one month’s supply of grain reserves on the main island and another month’s supply in ocean transport.

But because of pervasive agricultural trade barriers, there isn’t enough global agricultural trade. Instead, we’re seeing serious habitat destruction to expand farmland. Increasingly, the expansion of farmland is not for subsistence farming for minimal food needs, but for feed production to produce meat, milk and eggs. For example, Indonesia recently completed clearing 1.5 million acres of tropical forest intended mostly for soybean production to support their rapidly expanding domestic chicken and poultry industry.

This doesn’t mean putting third world farmers out of business at the hands of American corporate farmers. With at least a doubling and likely closer to a tripling in global food demand, the world will need all of its good farmers. The question is where we intensify and which technologies are appropriate.

Opposition to Farm Technologies

Despite the concern voiced by some that world food supplies are inadequate, many in the developed world have seen no need for new farm technologies. For decades world market prices for key agricultural commodities have remained low. Food surpluses have been a chronic problem for many Western countries. As a result, the argument is often made that there is no compelling reason to take risks with new food producing technologies. “We already have enough food, so we don’t need biotechnology. The risks outweigh the need.” This is apparently the position taken by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, and many other wildlife and environmental conservation organizations.

But the global need for increased food production capacity is obviously far greater than these groups are willing to admit. In fact, the environmental groups are leading the opposition to the new farm technologies which will be desperately needed to save wildlife habitat. Why does Greenpeace support the use of biotechnology to help save human lives, while opposing the use of biotechnology in food production? Saving human lives will only increase the burden humanity places on the environment, while using biotechnology in food production will likely allow us to lower our impact on the natural world. It makes very little sense to me.

Desperate Regions: The Food Gaps in Africa and Asia

The world’s traditional pattern of agriculture has always featured small farmers supplying nearby consumers with seasonal fresh foods. Unfortunately, tripling the world’s farm output on this model for the 21st century would likely mean sacrificing at least half of the world’s tropical forests to slash-and-burn farming. Such farming is cheap and effective for low levels of population density. But Africa’s population is projected to grow from 200 million to at least 400 million. Asia’s population will rise from 3 billion to 4 billion. Neither region is yet fully providing its consumers with the high-quality diets they increasingly demand and can afford.

India is getting one-third of the fodder for 400 million dairy animals by literally stealing leaves and branches from its richly biodiverse forests.

Africa has already dangerously shortened its bush fallow periods, from the optimal 15-20 years down to as little as 2-3 years in some regions. It cannot support the expanded population and rising dietary expectations.

None of this is environmentally sustainable. The world must have still-higher yields of crops and livestock, and free trade, or it will lose most of its tropical forests, and perhaps three-fourths of its 30 million wildlife species.

If the world could somehow create 5 billion vegans in the next several decades, then there would be no need to increasing farm output. But the prospects of creating all those vegans are poor. The reality is that the world must prepare itself for lots of hamburger and French fry-eating people in the near future.

Thanks to biotechnology, the prospects for tripling the world’s crop yields are much better. In fact, biotechnology may be the only compassionate answer to the world food challenge in the 21st century — for poor people, for children, and for the billions of wild creatures on the planet.

Land Area and Competition Between Opposing Needs

Already, farming occupies fully one-third of the earth’s total land area. Eleven percent of the earth’s land is devoted to crops, another 26 percent is in grazing and pasture. This leaves roughly another third of the land area in forests and woodlands, and roughly one-third is deserts, glaciers, marshlands and “other” land categories. Most of the land devoted to farming has been so since the 1940s, although some additional land has been cleared within the last 20 years. By the way, cities currently occupy only about 1.5 percent of the land.

The increase in productivity ushered in by the Green Revolution was achieved almost entirely through intensification. Essentially the world’s farmers tripled the yields on the best farm acres through increases in irrigation, better crop varieties, and increased use of fertilizers and pesticides. Environmentalists often claim that these gains are illusory – that we have simply exchanged fossil fuels for food. This is valid only in the sense that the vast majority of the world’s cropland is fertilized with nutrients extracted from the atmosphere using energy-intensive methods, mostly using natural gas. However, this accounts for only a small fraction of humanity’s overall energy consumption, and the alternatives (fertilizer from legume crops or animal manure) are land intensive and have a higher ecological price.

In fact, research has clearly demonstrated that the current varieties of crops utilize the nutrients and other inputs more efficiently than older varieties. In essence, our agricultural car is getting much better gas mileage for us, allowing us to produce more food with less resources.

Tripling the Crop Yields Again

The naturalists and ecologists are telling us the big environmental threat is neither population nor pesticides, but the loss of wildlands with their unique species, food webs and contributions to climate patterns.

Moral concerns aside, famine is not an option for saving the environment. Poor people in the newly-emerging countries are clearly willing to chop down forest and kill wildlife to get adequate calories — or even to get high-quality protein.

Forest requirements will rise even more sharply than food needs. Industrial wood demand is likely to rise ten-fold, unless we shift toward more environmentally-damaging wood substitutes such as steel and concrete.

Land is the Scarcest Natural Resource

The world’s population today is 80 percent bigger than in 1960. The environmental wonder of the 20th Century is that today’s farmers are feeding better diets to almost twice as many people from virtually the same cropland base. We used 1,394 million hectares of land for crops in 1961 — and only 1,441 million hectares in 1992 to get twice the grain and oilseeds.

In addition, the average Third World citizen is getting 28 percent more calories, including 59 percent more vegetable oil (twice the resource cost of cereal calories) and 50 percent more animal calories (three times the resource cost of cereals).

Producing today’s world food supply with 1960 crop yields would probably require an additional 10.9 million square miles of land, or more than the total land area of Europe and the U.S. combined! This is no precise estimate — but it underscores the enormous environmental importance of continuing to raise crop and forest yields if we are to have wildlands in the future.

In forestry, Roger Sedjo of Resources for the Future says the world should be able to provide the industrial wood needs for 9 billion people from less than 6 percent of the current wild forest area, planted to high-yield tree plantations. But eco-activists oppose “unnatural” monocultured forests, and we aren’t planting enough tree plantations for the wood we will need when today’s tree seedlings are ready for harvest in 20 years.

The Best Land Has the Fewest Species

For biodiversity, it is even more important to save poor-quality land than prime cropland. Ecologist Michael Huston points out in his book Biological Diversity that the poorest lands harbor the greatest variety of wildlife species, all over the world. Good quality land typically has thriving populations of a few wild species. In rain forests and swamps, the tough conditions force wildlife into narrow niches — producing lots of species.

Huston notes that America cleared about 100,000 square miles of wild forest in Ohio and Indiana during the 19th century, and apparently lost no wildlife species. Neither Ohio nor Indiana today harbor any unique native plant species. In contrast, Florida has 385, Texas 389 and California 1517 — because those states have lots of poor-quality land.

The world’s big reservoir of biodiversity is the tropics, where tropical forests harbor 60-80 percent of the world’s various wild species. (Estimates of tropical species keep rising.) This is hugely important for agricultural policy, because the world’s big food gap is in the fast-growing, densely-populated tropic countries.

Sustainability from Technology

Agricultural research is the most important sustainability component under humanity’s direct control — and we are failing to make the appropriate investments. Remember, we don’t have to keep tripling farm output every 50 years into the future. We only have to do it once more.

Can we realistically expect to triple farm productivity again? The accepted expert on the theoretical crop yield limit is C.T. deWit of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He estimated the limit at about 15-22 metric tons per hectare of cropland. The top U.S. corn yields are already over 20 tons per hectare. However the current world average crop yields are far lower — only about 2.6 tons per hectare of wheat, 3.5 tons per hectare of rice, and 3.7 tons per hectare of maize. Crop yields in the Third World have lately been rising by about 3.5 percent annually and in the U.S. by more than 4 percent per year.

We can expect that biotechnology and other technologies will continue to raise the yield potential of more of the world’s land toward their full potential. Moreover, as more countries become more affluent, we can expect more of the land to be supported with the capital, fertilizer menus and intensive management which have already produced high yields in the U.S., Europe and China.

deWit saw agriculture not as a matter of diminishing returns but as the serial elimination of constraints. When we can plant early in the season, using seeds with high potential, provide the complete roster of nutrients, eliminate weed competition, control insects and diseases, and take fuller advantage of the sunlight and moisture, then a high proportion of the world’s cropland should come far closer to deWit’s maximums.

To show how this plays out in the real world, new U.S. corn hybrids can tolerate being crowded at 50,000 plants per acre, five times as densely as we used to plant. This raises yield potential to 19 tons per hectare (300 bushels per acre). It also helps shade out weeds and reduce soil erosion. The new varieties have shorter stalks that put more of their energy into grain. They also “flex” — in dry years they produce smaller ears instead of barren stalks. At such high yields, researchers are finding they must add more chlorine; the chlorine that normally comes with the phosphate is not enough.

When we can feed the resulting ample supplies of grain and forage to livestock and poultry that have added growth hormone, comfortable surroundings, and protection from diseases, the resulting feed efficiency will have the effect of raising crop yields still further. Bovine growth hormone will safely increase the world’s dairy feed efficiency, making it possible to provide more milk for India without plowing down wildlife. Pork growth hormone will cut feed grain requirements per pound of lean pork by more than 25 percent. This is exactly what a more crowded and affluent planet will need!

Can Biotechnology Permit More Compassion in the 21st Century?

Much of the productive power of nitrogen and hybrid seeds has already been applied to get today’s farm output. Tripling yields again will require us to apply more knowledge, more effectively.

Biotechnology seems to be the most promising way to ease the land conflict between people and wildlife in the 21st century. Biotechnology is the big new knowledge breakthrough that is just beginning to be applied to agriculture. It apparently has more conservation potential than any agricultural technology in human history.

Here are just a few of the exciting new developments in agricultural biotechnology:

§ Two researchers in Mexico have found a way to unlock the productivity of billions of hectares of acid-soil lands in the tropics. The acidity liberates toxic aluminum ions which cut crop yields by up to 80 percent, on 30 to 40 percent of the world’s arable land, most of it in the tropics. Huge tracts of otherwise-good land in Brazil and Zaire have simply been left unused, growing only stunted brush and poor-quality grasses. But a gene from a soil microbe has given crop plants (tobacco, papaya and now rice) the ability to secrete citric acid from their roots. (This is a success strategy used by some of the wild plants growing on the acid soils.) Apparently, the new biotechnological intervention will overcome much of the “tropical disadvantage” which has kept regions like central Africa and South Asia so poor for so long.

§ Genes from wild relatives of our crop plants appear to be one of the most promising avenues for achieving safe, sustainable yield gains for the 21st century. Scientists have gathered hundreds of thousands of such wild relatives for the world’s gene banks. However, these wild relations are too different from the crop plants to cross-breed. The wild-relative genes can only be used through biotechnology. But what promise they contain! Researchers from Cornell University have recently used wild-relative genes to get a 50 percent increase in yields of tomatoes! (Tomato yields in standards cross-breeding programs have recently been rising by only about 1 percent per year.) The implications for phytopathology are obvious and enormous.

§ The same Cornell research team inserted two promising wild-relative genes into the top-yielding Chinese rice hybrids. Each of the new genes produced a 17-percent yield gain. Together, they offer the world’s rice breeders a sudden 20 to 40 percent increase in rice yields. It is no accident that China recently announced a new rice variety that yields 13.5 tons in test plots—more than double that nation’s 6-ton national average yield.

These are all examples of “high-yield conservation.” Since 1950, the rising yields of the Green Revolution have permitted farmers all over the world to triple their yields (and more) on the world’s best farmland. That is permitting the world to feed better diets to twice as many people, without taking any more land for farming (except in Africa).

The challenges ahead, both in humanitarian and environmental terms, are enormous. We must find a way to supply higher quality diets to a 50 percent larger population; preferably without destroying more of the world’s wildlife habitat. Our immediate challenge is convincing the public that this challenge warrants significant public investment. Agricultural researchers have justified their work in humanitarian terms. However, the stakes are much higher. The public seems to place as much if not more importance these days on environmental conservation. Agricultural research in productivity and disease resistance have at least as much conservation value as humanitarian and it’s our job to communicate this to the public.

Because if we don’t, the costs in lost biodiversity and wildlife habitat will be the legacy of our inaction.

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Alex Avery is Director of Research and Education at the Center for Global Food Issues of the Hudson Institute, a think-tank headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry from Old Dominion University. From May of 1992 to December of 1994 he was a McKnight research fellow in plant physiology at Purdue University working on a project to develop drought-resistant sorghum varieties for the Sudan of Africa.

He represented the Center at the 1996 United Nations World Food Summit in Rome and was co-author of Farming to Sustain the Environment, a Hudson Institute briefing paper which addresses issues of agricultural sustainability from a practical and global perspective. This paper is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format at the Center’s web site under “Key Publications” or by contacting the Center for Global Food Issues at (540) 337-6354.

[1] United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization statistic, UN FAO Production yearbook: 1996. And World Bank, World Development Report 1997.

[2] C. J. M. Musters, H. J. de Graaf, and W. J. ter Keurs. Can Protected Areas Be Expanded in Africa? Science Mar 10 2000: 1759-1760.

[3] How Efficient are Modern Cereal Cultivars, CGIAR News Vol. 4, number 2, pgs. 2-3, April 1997. Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, Washington, DC.

[4] Dr. W.R.J. Sutton, Tasman Forestry Ltd., “The Need for Planted Forests and the Example of Radiata Pine,” paper presented at the symposium “Planted Forests — Contributions to Sustainable Societies,” Portland, Oregon, June 28th, 1995.

[5] FAO Production Yearbook, 1976, Table 1, “Land Use.”

[6] FAO Production Yearbook, Vol. 47, 1993, Table 1, “Land Use.” Note: most of the expansion was on productive and sustainable land in places like Canada, Australia, Paraguay, eastern Bolivia and Brazil. Most of the Brazilian expansion was not in the rain forest but in southern and central savanna regions. This is not to excuse the expansion of cropland in some rain forests (Ecuador, Indonesia, Brazil) or other fragile environments which should not have been needed.

[7] FAO Production Yearbook, Vol. 46, 1992, Table 3, “Population;” Table 106, “Calories;” Table 108, “Fat.”

[8] Roger Sedjo, personal interviews, 1992 and 1996.

[9] Dr. Michael Huston, Biological Diversity, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

[10] Gogerty, “More Plants, More Corn,” The Furrow, Deere & Co., Moline, IL, Jan. 1996, pp. 7-8.

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Conservationists and farmers, traditional antagonists, now demonstrate a remarkable degree of consensus: improving productivity and sustainability of agriculture on existing farmland is urgent for the survival of both wildlife and mankind.