Tag: Feed Industry
How Should the Feed Industry View the Consumer Confidence Challenge?
By cgfi | September 9, 2004
It’s happened again. The food industry has once again allowed activists and headline-hungry journalists to turn the safest food system in human history into a house of horrors. Once again, there has been no effective answer or strategy on behalf of the food system to the unwarranted public attack.
The Mad Cow Media Circus is probably over - for the time being — but we’ll be paying the price for the public’s admission to that media circus for decades - in tighter regulations, heavier inspections and lost public confidence. In cattle, the cost may be $40 per head - which would make the annual cost of BSE non-confidence close to $1.5 billion per year. In the case of confinement hogs and poultry, the regulatory costs of defending indoor production are equally substantial, and continuing to rise.
Modern agriculture has lost another round to the know-nothings who pretend that organic and natural is the best way to feed a more-populous world that urgently wants to keep its wildlife.
Today, the cattle and feed industries are just praying that the USDA will find no additional cases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy as they test hundreds of thousands of animals, and that things will get back to “normal.” That’s unlikely.
We’re hoping against all odds that Japan and the other beef-importing countries that have suspended U.S. beef imports will not keep their bans in place for years to come, in order to favor their own farmers. That’s equally unlikely.
We’re hoping here today that the activists are not sitting in their offices plotting new attacks on the modern food system, designed to undermine our faith in our food. Which, of course, is an impossible dream.
We’re hoping that McDonald’s and the other big retailers that market U.S. meat, eggs and milk are not going to demand some additional changes in the production system to protect their investments and their reputations from this latest activist foray, or the next one. Bigger cages, no antibiotics, no cages at all, pasture-only feeding? We have no idea what they’ll demand next - because of pressure from the public dictated by the activists and their symbiotic journalists.
Agriculture looks at Mad Cow as an aberration that was impossible to foresee. An unknown disease, caused by a misfolded protein that no one knew existed, may have crossed from sheep to cattle to humans, through a rendering system that had previously been safe and environmentally constructive.
That rendering system itself was invented for environmental and health reasons: nobody wanted billions of pounds of rotting slaughter scraps lying around the countryside, or even buried in pits where dogs or wild animals could dig them up. How much better to turn the slaughter by-products into meat and bone meal, to make use of that protein, so we didn’t have to clear still more forest for more livestock feed.
The meat industry was holding true to the reality that land is the scarcest resource. Humans are already farming half the land on the planet that isn’t under deserts or glaciers. The world’s population is still growing, though more slowly, and getting richer. They’ll demand three times as much farm output by 2050. and perhaps five times the livestock products we produce today. Fortunately, we’ve doubled the meat output per acre in the First World over the past 30 years. Part of that is higher crop yields. Part of it is better breeding and better feed rations. But it’s a conservation miracle.
And unless we triple the yields of crops and livestock again, over the next 45 years, we risk losing the world’s wildlife after all. That’s why biotechnology is important. That’s why the eco-activist model of organic farming doesn’t win.
But our opponents don’t see Mad Cow and Industrial Agriculture the way we do. They really don’t. They claim there’s already enough food produced on the planet for everybody - especially since humans don’t need meat. They say that producing more food will just produce more people who will need more food, and on and on. They say that factory farming is eroding all the soil, using up all the water, and polluting all the streams. Nitrogen from the farms is causing “dead zones” downstream and killing all the fish. Antibiotics from livestock are making it less and less effective to treat human illnesses with antibiotics. And now, industrial farming has created Mad Cow disease.
We’ll get to the realities later, but these are things they tell each other and tell the public.
What does agriculture tell the public? Nothing. We don’t need to tell the public anything. We produce lots of safe food at low cost. That’s all they need to know, and they already know it. This crisis will blow away just like the others.
After all, the public wouldn’t do anything truly stupid to farmers and jeopardize their food supply, would they? Just out of ignorance?
Yes, this crisis will blow away, after costing agriculture billions of dollars, and making the public even more willing to believe the next “crisis” about modern agriculture.
Urban Myths Working Against Agriculture
1. High-Yield Farming Threatens the Frogs
In 1995, a group of Minnesota school children visited a local pond, and found deformed frogs-too many legs or too few. They reported it on the Internet, and over the next three years reports of deformed frogs flooded in from across the country. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency quickly decided it must be pesticides in the water, and spent millions of dollars trying to prove it. Now, we’ve learned that the frogs are deformed because of a natural parasite, the trematode, which burrows into the developing leg joints of the tadpoles. Frogs don’t become deformed in ponds that don’t have trematodes. Pesticides have not been implicated by any science, though the Minnesota officials still refuse to admit this.
In the mountains of California, red-legged and yellow-legged frogs are often absent from the lakes. Several researchers are trying to prove that pesticide-laden dust from the San Joaquin Valley is being blown up into the lakes and killing the frogs.
Indeed, traces of various pesticides were found in the mountain lake waters!
However, the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California/Berkeley have now proved the cause of the frog decline: hungry trout. In the high lakes stocked with trout, there are no frogs. The aggressive fish eat the frog’s eggs and tadpoles. In the wilderness areas, where the lakes are no longer stocked with trout, the frogs thrive. When researchers netted all the fish out of a lake without frogs, the frog population “exploded,” even though there were still traces of pesticides in the water.
2. Farming and Logging Caused the Salmon Decline in the Pacific Northwest
The salmon numbers in the Columbia River of Oregon and Washington began to decline in 1977. Environmentalists were quick to blame overfishing, logging, pollution and the water demands of irrigated farming. State and federal governments began spending billions of dollars on logging restrictions, fish ladders, reserving water for off-season flow, and barging young fish down to the sea. Nothing helped. But in the fall of 2002, the salmon came back. Columbia River had a record salmon run, and the salmon numbers have recovered to their former abundance. I had predicted this, three years earlier, in a Knight-Ridder newspaper column.
How? The salmon catch data for the past 100 years of the Columbia River and Gulf of Alaska fisheries clearly reveal a 25-year cycle. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents take the salmon food to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon/Washington salmon fishery shrinks. Then, for the next 25 years, the Oregon/Washington salmon fishermen flourish, while the Gulf of Alaska shrinks. Studies now show that this cycle is Pacific-wide, exhibited most dramatically by a 250- year shift in sardine and anchovy populations.
Did the Sierra Club not know about the cycle? If not, we can’t trust their advice on fish management. Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us-in which case we can’t trust their advice on fish management.
But the public hasn’t yet heard about the salmon cycle. The Portland Oregonian just said it was “changed sea conditions.” A fish researcher from the University of Washington -who has published in peer-reviewed journals on the 25-year cycle - is on TV saying it was the $1 billion per year in Federal fish management subsidies. He’d rather be funded than right.
3. Fertilizer from the Midwest Threatens the Gulf of Mexico
During the Clinton Administration, a White House Task Force recommended a 30 percent cut in Midwest fertilizer use because of a so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, the task force admitted in its report that it could find no evidence of either ecological or economic harm to the Gulf from the summer algae bloom that causes the “dead zone.” The first reports of such algae blooms in the Gulf go back into the 19th century. Fisheries experts say that most of the nutrients for the Gulf’s vast, rich fishery come down the Mississippi River, and when fresh, nutrient-laden water hits salt water, the laws of biology and physics guarantee period algae blooms. It’s a common feature at the mouths of 40 major rivers around the world.
Know also that Midwest fertilizer use has not risen since 1980, while the yields from the corn that gets most of the N fertilizer have risen 25 percent. Obviously, more of the farm fertilizer is being harvested as corn. More of the Midwest’s poultry and livestock have been moved indoors, where their wastes are carefully collected and spread on growing crops. If the “dead zone” is expanding, which is in serious doubt, where is the additional N coming from? The sewage treatment plants of St. Louis and Kansas City?
Don’t forget either, that before farmers settled the Great Plains, there were 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds and grasshoppers, all eating the grass and defecating. The N may have taken longer to reach the Gulf, but it’s likely that Cortez could have found an algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico when he invaded Mexico in 1520.
4.Modern Farming Causes Soil Erosion
In a piece of elegant ’soil archeology,” Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA went back to the highly-erosive Coon Creek watershed in southern Wisconsin, and redid the 1938 Soil Conservation Service surveys, in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. What he found is that the Coon Creek watershed is currently losing only 6 percent as much topsoil as it lost during the Dust Bowl era.
Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and especially to conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history.
Dr. Trimble says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. The fact is that they lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.
5. Farmers Cause Overpopulation by Producing Too Much Food
Ted Turner claims modern farming is the root cause of global overpopulation. The reality, however, is that the food security produced by high-yield farming helped bring about the first major decline in human birth rates the world has ever seen. In 1960, the average woman in the Third World had 6.2 children. Today, she has 2.7, and since population stability is 2.1 births, the poor countries have come 75 percent of the way to stability in 34 years. No one in 1960 would have dared predict such a radical drop in birth rates. After 2050, the world’s human population will begin a slow decline.
6. Organic Farming Would Be Kinder to the Environment
Recently, the UN Environmental Program published a new edition of The Atlas of Biodiversity. In it, they mention that the current rate of species loss-20 birds, fish, and mammals in the last third of the 20th century-is half the rate of wildlife extinctions in the last third of the 19th century. In fact, the rate of species extinctions today is as low as it’s been in 500 years.
Why? Primarily because high-yield farming eliminated the need to clear more land for food production.
Today’s farmers are feeding 6.3 billion people on the same cropland that used to be inadequate to feed 2.3 billion in 1940. With the crop and livestock yields of 1950, the world would already have had to plow all 16 million square miles of its remaining forestland to get today’s food supply. If we extend high-yield farming to Africa and the world’s currently-marginal farmlands, we shouldn’t have to clear any more land for farming ever again.
Organic farming is an environmental fraud. The first and foremost rule of organic farming is that “thou shalt not use industrial fertilizer.” This means organic farming needs more land to make up for its lower yields (typically 10 to 40 percent lower) and it needs more land for green manure crops or more cattle to produce more manure.
In Denmark, a high-level technical committee reported in 1999 that an all-organic mandate would cut Danish food production by 47 percent. Most of Denmark’s farmland would have to be planted to forage crops and fed to feedlot cattle so their manure could then be spread thickly over the whole Danish landscape.
Dr. Vaclav Smil, an award-winning science author from the University of Manitoba, says all-organic farming for America would take the manure from another 900 million to 1 billion cattle, at 3 to 30 acres of forage per beast. There are only 1.2 billion acres in the whole lower 48 States. We’d have to eliminate half our citizens, or plant all the forests to pasture grass. The world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of nitrogen we take from the air each year. (The air is 78 percent N.)
7. Modern Farming Aggravates Global Warming
Eco-activists hate the fact that American farmers burn diesel fuel and put nitrogen fertilizer on their crops and they’ve gotten the whole world excited about global warming.
But the physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate - the ice cores, the tree rings, the cave stalagmites and the fossilized pollen grains — are telling us something quite different. They’re telling us that the Earth is ruled by an irregular solar cycle that lasts about 1500 years. That cycle is moderate (about 2 degrees C up or down), goes back a million years, and all of the Earth’s creatures and plants are adapted to it. It’s not something to be feared, it’s just something to be accommodated - until the next Ice Age brings a really bad climate.
Global Warming and the 1,500 Cycle of the Sun
History tells us of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1400 AD to 1850. Before that, there was a Medieval Warming, which lasted from about 950 AD to 1400. The temperatures during the Medieval Warming were about 2 degrees C. warmer than today in Northern Europe, and during the Little Ice Age they were about 2 degrees colder. Before the Medieval Warming, the Romans enjoyed a moderate warming period from 200 BC to 400 AD, and the Roman Empire began to disintegrate when the Dark Ages cold period began (600 to 950 BC).
The North American Pollen Database testifies that there’s been a major reorganization of this continent’s vegetation nine times in the past 14,000 years. That’s an average of once every 1650 years. The seabed sediments say these long-term cycles have been occurring for at least a million years.
We first learned of the cycles from a Greenland ice core about 1980. By that time, lots of people were already committed to the idea of man-made global warming. Al Gore had already held his first congressional hearing on the problem. Greenpeace had already announced that mankind must give up fossil fuels (and send in money).
But most of the warming of the last 150 years took place before 1940, and thus before the big increase in CO2 emissions. We’ve had very little global warming since 1940.
More important, the Greenhouse Theory says the additional CO2 will collect heat in the lower atmosphere - up to 30,000 feet. Then the heat of the atmosphere will radiate down to heat the Earth’s surface itself. But the lower atmosphere is hardly warming at all. The highly-accurate satellite reading show virtually no warming trend since 1979. The Earth’s surface is warming faster than the atmosphere that is supposed to warm it! This can’t be Greenhouse warming.
There’s more. The ice cores in Antarctica clearly show CO2 and global temperature tracking closely together through 250,000 years and three Ice Ages-but the changes in CO2 lag behind the changes in temperature by 200 to 800 years! CO2 is a lagging indicator of temperature change, not the forcing agent on global climate.
The physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate says we’re 150 years into a moderate, cyclical warming being caused by the sun. We used to think the sun was a constant. But now that we can send satellite measuring devices out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of the Earth, we find that it varies by fractions of a percent.
And we have the linkage. We’ve known for 400 years that when the number of sunspots is low, the Earth’s climate will be cold. When the number of sunspots is high, the Earth will be warmer. And the number of sunspots is higher now than it has been in 1200 years.
We also have beryllium. An isotope called Beryllium 10 is created when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. When the sun is weak, we get hit by lots of cosmic rays, and lots of beryllium 10 is created. (When the sun is active, solar winds protect us from cosmic rays.) In the last 50 years, researchers tracking ice cores find there’s less beryllium in our atmosphere than for the past 1150 years.
Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly millions of years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species by 2050. But over the past 100 years, we’ve already had that much warming-and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result.
Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.
Will there be more and worse droughts? We don’t know, but there are always droughts. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. In either case, conservation tillage and water management will become even more important.
Will malaria sweep over Virginia? History says malaria was rampant in Virginia until after World War II, when window screens and DDT helped us eradicate it. If the temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, we’ll still have window screens and pesticides.
The Harsh Costs of Kyoto
Unfortunately, the Kyoto Treaty would bring about a bigger collapse in human standards of living than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Solar and wind power couldn’t possibly provide all the power a modern society needs, nor could nuclear power plants. (We don’t have enough uranium ore.) The Ecologist magazine in Britain says we should give up 80 percent of the fossil fuels and 75 percent of the wood we use - now, next year, in a crash program. How would it affect your life if your electricity supply was cut 80 percent and you could only drive your car two days a month?
Worse, we’d have to give up the nitrogen fertilizer that supplies more than half our food.
I want to see very strong proof of a CO2-warming linkage before I accept Kyoto.
The Strange Anti-Human World of the Late 20th Century
For the past 40 years, human society has been in a unique anti-human mode. “Saving the planet” has been the watchword. For the first time in human history, kangaroo rats and flowerhead weevils are deemed more important than people.
This orgy of anti-humanity was almost certainly driven, not by Rachel Carson and her erroneous 1962 book Silent Spring, but by people-hating Paul Ehrlich and his equally wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.
I think people cared about the environment before Rachel Carson, and will continue to do so in the future. However, much of our eco-fervor has been due to an irrational fear that our affluence would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion additional poor brown and yellow people who might grab all the resources away from us.
In Southern Africa, in 2003, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. The president of Zambia said the activists told him the U.S. corn was poison. People who were boiling poisonous roots because they had nothing else to eat were denied access to an abundance of their favorite food staple. And remember, this is the same corn that everyone in this room eats as corn flakes, tacos, and chips.
The environmental movement has been broadly involved for many years in an even more deadly effort-to ban the use of DDT on the planet. The campaign against DDT has cost at least a million malaria deaths per year in the Third World-and tens of millions of lives ruined by the disease. There is no evidence that DDT harms humans, and no solid evidence that it harms birds. Nevertheless, the eco-movement has tried to ban even the indoor use of DDT in malarial regions, which could not possibly harm wildlife. On the inside walls of homes, it’s by far the most cost-effective mosquito killer, and also the longest-lasting and most effective mosquito repellent.
Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior?
The same moral codes that say humans are responsible for protecting Nature also say we’re also responsible for helping our fellow men. They don’t say we can become Druids, worshiping trees and practicing human sacrifice.
It would certainly be easier to leave room for wildlife if we eliminated all the humans. But killing off our fellow men or forcing billions of forced abortions are not moral solutions when we have the intelligence and societal skills to save both people and wildlife.
Rich Countries Are Better for the Environment
Paul Ehrlich said the affluent people of the First World were: (1) the worst polluters in the history of the world; (2) would destroy half the world’s wildlife species in the next few decades; and, (3) would bring about the ruin of the whole planet.
The reality, however, is that most of the Third World is already in the most polluting phase of industrialization-burning huge amounts of coal to smelt massive amounts of iron, cooking food with wood from trees that aren’t replanted and caring too little about water pollution.
Meanwhile, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling rhinoceros horn and “bushmeat” from endangered primates - harvested with AK-47s.
Mexico is losing three million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farming. More than half of the forestland cleared in Honduras in recent decades has been “steepland,” with a slope of more than 30 degrees. At least once a decade, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.
How can the eco-movement present these hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future?
There is hope for humanity and nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. When per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) crop yields rise and birth rates fall rapidly. Less land per capita is needed for food. Diesel fuel from under the land or sea substitutes for firewood and forests are replanted. Affluent people want and pay for cleaner air and water.
High Yield Mean Fewer Wildlife Extinctions
The biggest reasons for the low rate of wildlife extinctions today are high-yield crops and high-efficiency meat production. High-yield farming has tripled the yields of crops on the world’s best farmland in recent decades. High-efficiency meat production has doubled the pounds of meat produced per acre of pasture and cropland in the past 30 years. While some activists rail against confinement feeding, moving the birds and animals indoors has made them more comfortable and increased their feed efficiency by 15-20 percent. It has also prevented the clearing of millions of acres of wildlife habitat for hog and chicken playgrounds.
We tend to forget that man has been using and abusing wildlife for eons. Stone Age man used to hunt birds and animals to extinction. North America lost more than 40 species of huntable birds and animals within a few years after the human hunters arrived from Asia some 14,000 years ago-including North America’s horses, camels, and elephants.
Equally dangerous, we’ve forgotten how vicious people were to other people when food was scarce. Paleontologists tell us that up to 25 percent of the males (and perhaps 15 percent of the females) in primitive communities showed signs of violent death. They were essentially fighting over food: good hunting grounds and good farmland.
Only in the last 100 years, (thanks to nitrogen fertilizer, plant breeding, and integrated pest management) has man been able to support high populations of both people and wildlife in the same region. Only after World War II, when the Green Revolution extended high-yield farming over most of the world, did human society free itself from “food wars.” (Just before WWII, crowded Japan invaded Manchuria, in part for its soybean fields; Nazi Germany invaded Poland for “living room.”)
The World Conservation Union today warns that more than one billion poor people are living in the world’s biodiversity hotspots (particularly tropical and mountain rain forests)-and trying to feed their children by hunting bushmeat and doing slash-and burn farming. We must give these people higher-yield farming if we hope to prevent massive wildlife extinctions in the next 50 years.
Richer Means a Cleaner Environment
Remarkably, the waste volume from American homes today is one-third less than the waste volume from Mexican homes! This is due in sizeable part to the centralized processing of our food supply. Our broiler chickens, for example, arrive at the store wrapped in sanitary, lightweight plastic-wrapped trays-with the feathers, heads, feet and many of the unwanted internal organs already separated out for recycling at the processing plant.
These poultry waste products are then turned into livestock feeds and many other products, far more effectively than they could be handled without the centralized waste management.
The U.S. rendering industry is one of the world’s most successful and most critically needed recyclers, treating 50 billion pounds per year of waste that urgently needs to be treated, even if it were only going into a landfill. However, it would take millions of additional acres of farmland to replace the nutrients salvaged and put to use through rendering.
The rest of America’s vaunted recycling effort has pretty much collapsed. Most of our carefully-sorted urban trash is all dumped together in the local landfill, because it takes more resources to produce useful things with recycled stuff than it takes to start from scratch.
21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable in History
Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago, with good reason: soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human society.
Environmental activists today rely on our long-held and valid fear of soil erosion to undermine our confidence in the sustainability of modern high-yield farming. They tell us that today’s farmers are “mining the soil.” That’s not the truth.
Thanks to chemical fertilizer, modern farmers no longer need to “wear out” their soils. In the traditional farming of the 19th century, growing crops often took more nutrients out of the soil than farmers could replace with manure. As yields and soil organic matter declined, the farm would be abandoned as “worn out.” (On a broader scale, the depleted soils combined with drought to give us “Dust Bowls.”) Today’s farmers use soil testing and industrially supplied nutrients to keep their soils rich and productive.
In addition, modern farmers invented conservation tillage and no-till. These farming systems cut erosion by up to 95 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria. Organic farmers can’t use conservation tillage because they don’t allow themselves to use herbicides. Thus, organic farmers are still forced to use bare-earth, erosion-inviting plows and rotary hoes.
Industrial fertilizers and conservation tillage are two of the major reasons why the Soil and Water Conservation Society of North America calls modern high-yield farming “the most sustainable in history.”
The End of the Population Surge
The absolute best news for the planet is that the world’s recent population surge is nearly over. Farmers won’t have to feed many more people, but instead of having one billion affluent people eating meat and cheese, we’ll have at least 7 billion affluent consumers. Most of them will demand hamburgers, fish, salad bars and fresh fruit year round.
There’ll even be a pet challenge. America has 112 million companion cats and dogs today. A rich, urbanized China in 2050 may still have the one-child policy, but it will also have perhaps 500 million companion cats and dogs; and, woe unto the politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.
The New Surge of Support for High-Yield Technologies
After the success of the Green Revolution became clear in the 1970s, a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation-founder of the key agricultural research stations in Mexico and the Philippines-spoke of his profound regret. He said that agricultural research had turned humanity into a cancer on the earth. We now know he was wrong.
Now, with the end of the population surge, high-yield farming is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.
In May of 2001, our Hudson Institute presented (at the National Press Club in Washington) two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the then-latest winner of the World Food Prize, and the British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, as signers of our “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry.”
This remarkably broad coalition was led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, Chairman Emeritus of our Center, and the 1970 winner of the Peace Prize for his work on high-yield crops for the Green Revolution.
The Declaration doesn’t endorse any agricultural technology or system. It simply states that the world urgently needs higher yields based on sustainable advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology-to save room for wildlife.
At the time of the Press Club event, we feared it had been a failure. The biggest media outlet to feature the event was the American Farm Bureau News. But in the months since that event, the concept of high-yield conservation has been praised by columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October, 2003, issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly carried an article lavishly praising both high-yield farming and biotech. More startling by far, the editorial page of the New York Times recommended the Atlantic Monthly article to its readers-in a newspaper which has been editorially praising organic food and condemning high-yield farming for decades.
In October of last year, the journal Science carried an editorial by Dr. Donald Kennedy, the magazine’s editor. Kennedy states that world hunger is now the overarching issue for world health-and concludes:
“Unless agricultural production is increased on the good lands, population pressures will cause farmers to move upslope and deforest the hillsides. That’s a double whammy: a loss for those families, and a loss for the environment. And on already marginal lands, GM technology may offer the best hope for producing crops that can withstand drought, impoverished soils and disease. For both these reasons, we’d better resolve the GM controversy.”
Half Again As Much Meat Demand in 2025
All of that comes in the nick of time because the worlds’ demand for meat and livestock produce will continue to soar. The Third World is raising its meat demand three times as fast as the First World. No vegetarian societies are emerging anywhere. (India has always consumed lots of milk, and now they’re eating chicken and yearning for mutton.)
Meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. We project that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025.
This meat increase will be good for children, since it provides them with high-quality protein and key micronutrients. Without livestock products, children do not reach their full genetic stature, and may lag in cognitive learning. It will also be good for adults, who need calcium and protein. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, since birds and animals can nourish themselves on grass and other things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat and milk is just about the same as for the same amount of non-meat proteins and calories.
Such a major meat production increase will require higher grain yields (perhaps 30 percent higher), higher oilseed yields (25 percent higher?) and still-better feed conversion ratios. These will only be possible if we continue to invest in high-yield farming research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted.
It looks now as though agricultural biotechnology is winning its place in the 21st century. I’m thankful, since I do not know how we would triple the world’s crop yields again in the next 50 years without it. And unless we triple the crop yields again, we risk losing most of the world’s wildlands.
More Globalization, Not Less
The world also urgently needs farm trade liberalization. Obviously, most of the increase in global meat consumption will occur outside of North America. It is also true that much of the meat consumption gain will occur in densely populated countries that will be critically short of land and water to produce their own livestock products cost-effectively.
Liberalization of farm trade remains a strong imperative, despite the recent collapse of the World Trade Organization talks at Cancun. I say this because the world’s big agricultural players will all need farm trade reform in the coming decades.
The EU is now admitting it will have to change its Common Agricultural Policy as it takes in millions of additional farmers and farming acres in 10 new member countries that include Poland and Romania. The EU should be exporting more livestock products to Asia.
The United States recently passed a lavish farm bill-but did it during a period of supposed budget surplus. Now the budget surplus has disappeared (economic slump and war on terror). Worse, we are rapidly approaching the time when the federal government must begin to pony up the money for Social Security reform. The Congressional Budget Office says the costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the baby boomers’ retirement will force a 36 percent increase in all federal taxes-or a 91 percent increase in the payroll tax and 81 percent increase in the individual income tax. The next farm bill will have to cost far less than the current one.
Meanwhile, China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and 7 percent of its arable land. Three-fourths of India’s Hindus say they will eat meat when they can afford it, and their GNP is now rising twice as fast as their population. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Egypt are other major population centers which are likely to bid strongly for farm imports in the decades ahead.
The world urgently needs both high-yield farming and the liberalization of global farm trade to meet the population and conservation challenges of the 21st century. I think the time is now ripe for American farmers to present their credential more forcefully, and more successfully than when the First World was fleeing in terror from “overpopulation.”
You might start by joining the thousands who have signed the High Yield Declaration, at www.highyieldconservation.org
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