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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—The sun is currently producing fewer sunspots than it has in more than a century. Florida State researchers tell us this may predict bad U.S. hurricane seasons. They say that when the sunspot numbers peak, within the (roughly) 11-year sunspot cycle, the U.S. has less than a 25 percent chance of being hit with a hurricane. The odds of a hurricane rise to 64 percent in the lowest-sunspot years. Even more important, the probability of three or more hurricanes hitting the U.S. in a season increases dramatically during low-sunspot periods.

Years with few sunspots and relatively high ocean temperatures are less stable, and thus trigger more hurricanes, reports James Elsner, a geography professor at Florida State. He says “With fewer sunspots, there’s less energy at the top of the atmosphere.” Thus the temperature above the hurricane are cooler, he told Florida Today. The differential creates more instability and stronger storms. Our atmosphere responds dramatically to changes in the sun’s UV light, because the ozone layer readily absorbs the UV heat.

Humans have known for 400 years—since Galileo—that sunspots correlate with climate changes on earth. A startling lack of sunspots predicted both of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer Minimum that began in 1460, and the Maunder Minimum, which began in 1645. More recently the Dalton Minimum predicted severe cold in the early 1800s.

We’ve also known since 1984 that sunspots correlate strongly with abrupt-but-moderate Dansgaard-Oescher cycles in the earth’s temperature regime—a 2-4 degree C shift about every 700 years. These changes have produced the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Warming, the Dark Ages, the Roman Warming and a whole series of moderate climate cycles going back at least 1 million years. The sunspot index has a 79 percent correlation with the earth’s temperatures since 1860, while CO₂ has only a 22 percent correlation. The sunspot index has been predicting global cooling since 2000.

Changes in sunspots have also predicted the failure of many human societies over the past 5000 years—including the collapse of the Mayan civilization and the death of the Roman Empire. The Mayans suffered “a century of drought” after 800 AD. The Roman Empire collapsed about 540AD after the end of the Roman Warming, which had given good crop-growing weather to both Europe and North Africa for more than 700 years.  The shift into the Dark Ages turned the cropping seasons cloudy, cool and unstable, with violent storms and untimely frosts. That meant no more free bread for Roman citizens, no grain to feed its legions, and no food to bribe barbarian tribes.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change continues to predict strong warming for the earth over coming centuries, due to rising levels of atmospheric CO₂. However, CO₂ makes up only about .03 percent of the atmosphere, and humans contribute only about 3 percent of the .03 percent.

Roy Spencer, of the University of Alabama Huntsville, collates the temperature data from the satellites. He says it’s likely that the IPCC has got it backwards. Instead of higher CO₂-induced temperatures creating fewer clouds; fewer clouds may let more solar heat come to earth, and vice versa. That would account for the predictive failures of the global climate models. The models did not foresee the recent cooling of the oceans since 2003, for example.

The sunspots, in fact, now predict a 30-year cooling, to be delivered by the Pacific Ocean’s shift into its cool phase. That, too, will undoubtedly be a product of the sun’s internal chemistry and further evidence of the sun’s massive importance to Planet Earth.

Resources:

J.H. Elsner et al., 2010, “Daily tropical cyclone intensity response to solar ultraviolet radiation,” Geophysical Research letters, Vol. 37.

Roy Spencer, Testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, July 22, 2008.

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—India is setting up its own climate research unit because it no longer trusts the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I’ve been predicting such a move for years—partly due to the IPCC’s biased science, but more because India simply cannot afford to curtail its desperately needed and energy-powered economic growth. India’s government’s stability depends on expanding prosperity for the all of its people. That means more energy, and over half of India’s electricity comes from coal.  

 

Carried to its extreme, the global warming scare would pressure India to give up the nitrogen fertilizer that feeds nearly half its population—and even slaughter its 200 million sacred cows, which daily produce huge amounts of the greenhouse gas methane. Either would cause widespread rioting.

 

The warming alarmists have predicted awful things for India unless fossil fuels are curbed, including submergence of its coastal lands, lack of water for irrigation, increased cyclone activity, and forced shifts in rice production that would threaten hunger for millions.

 

I predict the new Indian research unit will find that the IPCC’s data and conclusions have been deliberately and massively misleading and the scares wildly overstated, while actual temperature changes have been small and non-threatening. We recently finished the third sharp increase in global temperature since 1850, including one from 1860–1880, and another from 1910–1914. All ended in coolings, not runaway warmings.

 

Other emerging countries have been willing to let the Western societies sacrifice themselves to the IPCC’s man-made warming dogma—and even hoped for some of those big “carbon guilt payments” the West has talked about. But it’s clear now that the West won’t be making big carbon payments to the Third World.

 

The breaking point for India came when the IPCC’s 2007 report announced that India’s Himalayan glaciers were melting faster than the world’s other glaciers, and might be completely gone by 2035—or sooner. Worse, the report claimed that the billions of people who depend on Himalayan snowmelt would no longer get adequate drinking and irrigation water from the Indus and Ganges Rivers. That could have triggered a major refugee problem for neighboring countries, or beyond.

 

India didn’t believe it, and assigned their top glaciologist, V.K. Raina, to assemble a new assessment from satellite data and laborious on-site measurements. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh announced a few weeks ago that Raina and his teams had found the IPCC was wrong. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers,” which Ramesh pointed out are at much higher altitudes than most of the world’s other glaciers. He added that though some glaciers are receding, they were doing so at a rate “not historically alarming.” He further noted that India’s rivers actually depend primarily on the monsoons. .

 

In a remarkable finding, the Raina report claims the Ganotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges, actually receded faster before 1978, and is today “practically at a standstill.” Newspapers warned that the Siachin glacier in Kashmir had shrunk as much as 50 percent—but Raina reports that those claims are simply wrong, that the big glacier has “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.” 

 

The IPCC Chairman, India-born Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed the Indian response as “voodoo science,” But the flimsy basis for the IPCC claim has now been revealed, and the IPCC has had to issue an apology. Since then, additional IPCC claims have been found to lack scientific support.

 

My prediction:  The Indian science panel will hasten the end for the IPCC’s once-dominant view of man-made climate change.

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Resources: 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

By:  Dennis T. Avery

Nuclear power and genetically engineered rice are set to help rescue the world from global warming. This isn’t really what anti-tech activists had in mind when they launched the campaign against fossil fuels, hoping to restrict our current lifestyles.

The British government has just announced that it will encourage a new generation of nuclear power plants to “supply unlimited amounts of electricity to the national grid,” to offset its declining energy harvests from North Sea oil and gas.

Meanwhile, a California genetic research firm is collaborating with a Chinese province to create UN-approved “carbon offsets,” by encouraging Chinese farmers to plant a new genetically engineered rice variety. The biotech rice needs only half the normal amount of nitrogen fertilizer to produce the same yield, and thus emits far less nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times as potent as CO₂. 

Britain’s sudden move to expand nuclear power represents a major shift from the Labor government’s 2003 stance that nuclear power was “an unattractive option” for its energy future. Since then, oil prices have hit record highs and Middle East Islamic turmoil has further increased the importance of “energy independence.”  Nor has any more attractive energy option than nuclear come forward.

Britain thus joins France (80 percent of its electricity nuclear), Finland (building a new nuclear plant), Germany (Chancellor Merkel says she will not decommission her nuclear plants after all), and Eastern Europe (building several nuclear facilities) as pro-nuclear powers. China and India are planning and building dozens of nuclear facilities.

NRG Energy of Texas has filed for two new U.S. nuclear plants to come on line in 2014, reportedly the first of a new wave of American nuclear expansion.

The biotech rice might be as important to our Greenhouse future as the nuclear power. The International Rice Research Institute estimates that rice production around the world adds 100 million tons of CO₂ equivalents per year because only about half of the nitrogen fertilizer applied to rice is absorbed by the plants. Much of the rest passes into the air as nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse agent.

Arcadia Bioscience’s new rice plants would cut nitrogen fertilizer use by 50–60 percent without reducing rice yields. The new technology would also sharply reduce the amounts of natural gas needed by fertilizer makers to capture natural nitrogen from the air.

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions through American lifestyle changes, in contrast, would probably require at least a two-thirds cut in U.S. energy use. The Marshall Institute suggests that a couple could achieve their share of such a greenhouse cut if they 1) gave up driving any car;  2) moved to a smaller home heated with natural gas (in increasingly short supply) rather than coal or oil; 3) set their thermostat 10 degrees lower in winter and 10 degrees higher in summer;  4) replaced their windows with energy-efficient types; 5) refused to fly; and 6) reduced their electric bills to half the current U.S. family average. Driving, flying, reading after dark and home freezers would put their emissions footprint far beyond any greenhouse limits. Obviously, a few Americans could or would comply.

Any massive shift to such lean lifestyles, however unlikely, would doom the suburbs, and require us to recreate the “tenements” that crowded our cities 100 years ago. Even then, most industrial production would have to be banned because of greenhouse emissions. Even imported manufactures would have to pay “energy taxes” on the CO₂ used in their production. 

On the other hand, the earth’s net warming since 1940 is 0.2 degrees C, and there is a 95 percent correlation between our temperatures and sunspots, not with CO₂.

Presentation to the National Turkey Federation: The Moral Challenge of the 21st Century
Dennis Avery

. . . farms obliterate empty places, ploughed fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts. . . and there are such great cities where formerly hardly a hut . . . everywhere there is a dwelling, everywhere a multitude. . . . We are burdensome to the world. The resources are scarcely adequate to us . . . already nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.

Quintus Septimus Florence Tertillianus, Roman citizen, bout 200 A.D., with a world population about 200 million

“. . . the Western World today is on the verge of the greatest ecological renewal that humankind has known; perhaps the greatest that the Earth has known. Environmentalists deserve the credit for this remarkable turn of events. Yet our political and cultural institutions continue to read from a script of instant doomsday. Environmentalists, who are surely on the right side of history, are increasingly on the wrong side of the present, risking
their credibility by proclaiming emergencies that do not exist.”

Greg Easterbrook, A Moment on Earth, 1995, p. xvi, with the world population 30 times as large and still increasing

“Here’s something for the Greens of the world to ponder: ‘genetic engineering may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries,’ Jonathan Rauch writes in The Atlantic Monthly. . . Noting that ‘world food output will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades,’ the author argues that ‘the great challenge’ is ‘not to feed an additional three billion people (and their pets) but to do so without converting much of the world’s prime [wildlife] habitat into second- or third-rate farmland.’”

New York Times, “Frankenfoods to the Rescue of Mother Earth,” Week in Review, Sept 21, 2003

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 have been deemed more important than people, because humanity had become so carelessly powerful that it threatened the whole environment. A million Africans (mostly children) have been, and still are, allowed to die each year of malaria rather than allow the use of DDT-indoors where it could be no threat to birds.

This orgy of anti-humanity was driven, almost certainly, not by Rachel Carson and her erroneous 1962 book Silent Spring, but by people-phobic Paul Ehrlich and his equally wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.

I think people certainly cared about the environment before, and will continue to do so. However, it seems clear now that the real motivating factor in much of our eco-fervor has been an irrational fear that our ways of living would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion poor brown and yellow people who don’t share Western culture or values. (And who might grab all the resources away from us.)

But the same moral codes that say humans are responsible for protecting Nature also say we’re also responsible for helping our fellow men. It doesn’t say we can become Druids, worship trees, and practice human sacrifice.

It would certainly be easier to leave room for wildlife if we eliminated all the humans. But that would be the conservation equivalent of “cheap grace.” Killing off our fellow men or enforcing billions of forced abortions are not moral solutions when we have the intelligence and societal skills to save both people and wildlife.

Fortunately, there’s good news for all in the 21st century. The population surge is nearing its end, and our resource base is increasing, not disappearing. Technological abundance is making it possible for the peak human population that we expect in 2050 (less than 9 billion) to live better than people do today, while doing less and less damage to the environment.

How can I say this?

Richer Means Fewer Wildlife Extinctions

The UN Environmental Program reports that the world lost only half as many species to extinction during the last third of the 20th century (20 among birds, fish, and mammals) as it did during the comparable period of the 19th century. Moreover, the UNEP says our rate of wild species extinctions is now as low as it was 500 years ago, when the world population was less than one-tenth what it is today (about 450 million).

The biggest reasons for the low rate of wildlife extinctions today are high-yield farming 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 bad, 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. Even the “peaceful” Anasazi Indians of the Southwest were eventually driven by long-term drought (associated with global cooling) from their scattered farmhouses into fortified cliff dwellings.

Only in the last 100 years, thanks to nitrogen fertilizer taken from the air, 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.” (In 1932, Japan invaded Manchuria for oil and soybean fields.)

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 either give these people high-yield farming or off-farm jobs if we hope to prevent massive wildlife extinctions in the next 50 years.

Yet the eco-movement holds up hunters and gatherers as the environmental models for the future.

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 eco-movement is holding up primitive people and peasant farmers as the models for conserving Nature in the 21st century.

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 (a supposed aphrodisiac) and “bushmeat” from endangered gorillas and rare civet cats-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; every few years, 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?

But there is hope for humanity and nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. A World Bank staff team has documented a bell-shaped curve in environmental protection. In the early years of industrialization, forests die and pollution surges. Rising populations and higher incomes demand more farmland and better diets. But when per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) a different set of factors take over. People are already well-fed and birth rates fall rapidly. With better inputs and management, crop yields rise, so less land per capita is needed for food. Diesel fuel, taken from under the land or sea, substitutes for firewood even as forests are replanted. Affluent people want cleaner air and are willing and able to pay for it. They begin to demand clean rivers, for both health and aesthetics.

The World Bank staff finds no hordes of high-pollution industries fleeing to unregulated Third World countries, nor any significant list of governments reducing their environmental regulations.

Richer Means a Cleaner Environment

Pollution trends are declining in virtually every affluent country. In England, air pollution has been declining since the 1920s, long before the “clean air” legislation was passed. In America, public sanitation has been improving since we began phasing out horses (along with horse manure and horse carcasses) in favor of trains and automobiles.

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 broilers, 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 at the processing plant.

As you know better than anyone else, these poultry waste products are then recycled into livestock feeds, and many other products, far more effectively than they could be handled without the centralized processing and waste management.

The rendering industry is one of the largest 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 be a horrible waste if the products from the rendering industry were consigned to a landfill. It would take millions of additional acres of farmland to replace the nutrients salvaged and put to use through rendering.

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 high crop yields give only an illusion of a sustainable food supply because the 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.” (Or the depleted soils combined with drought to give us a “Dust Bowl.”) Today’s farmers use soil testing and industrially supplied nutrients to keep their soils rich and productive.

In addition, modern farmers invented conservation tillage. Sometimes called “no till,” this farming system eliminates plowing by using herbicides to control weeds, planting through the unplowed soil. It cuts erosion by up to 95 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria. Organic farmers refuse to use conservation tillage because they don’t allow themselves to use herbicides. Organic farmers are still forced to use bare-earth, erosion-inviting weed control techniques like plowing and hoeing.

Industrial fertilizers and conservation tillage are two of the major reasons why the Soil and Water Conservation Society of the U.S. calls modern high-yield farming “the most sustainable in history.”

Richer Means Upgraded Diets – But Less Population Pressure

The absolute best news for the planet is that the world’s recent population surge is nearly over. Since I started my career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1959, the average births per woman in the poor countries of the Third World has dropped from 6.2 to 2.7, and is still declining rapidly. (The rich countries are at 1.7 births and declining too.)

This is apparently the first major change in global birth rates in all history. (The population surge was not caused by higher birth rates, but by lower death rates due to modern medicine.) Paul Ehrlich did not know in 1968 that the world would become so much richer and more urban. Poor farmers always have large families, while affluent urban couples always have small ones. As a result, the current world population of six billion will probably rise to a peak of between eight and nine billion about the year 2035, and then begin a long, very slow decline-as more and more people become rich and urban and have 1.7 children per woman.

The end of the population surge will ease the pressure on agriculture to some degree-but the continued rise of incomes (which has been strong and steady for more than 40 years now) will mean billions of additional high-income consumers. Most of the Third World will emulate Japan, South Korea, and China in the coming decades, industrializing their populations and generating more income and more attractive lifestyle choices. Instead of feeding high-quality diets to only one billion people as we do today, we’ll have to offer high-quality diets to about seven billion people in the future.

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 have no shortage of people with parenting instincts. We expect China to have 500 million companion cats and dogs in 2050, and woe unto the politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.

In Southern Africa, last winter, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. They convinced African government leaders not to distribute U.S. corn donated as food aid. America co-mingles corn that is genetically altered with conventional corn, since both are equally nutritious and approved as safe by three U.S. government agencies. However, 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 food approved for safety by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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, the suffering it causes, and the disability it inflicts. There is no evidence that DDT harms humans, and only shaky 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. Fortunately, the World Health Organization has so far blocked the final ban, but just barely.

Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior? Does nature-worship always push society over that thin line?

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-that founded 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 know now that he was wrong. We know now that poor rural people always have large families and high death rates-while affluent urban couples have small families because they recognize the low death rates. (And the high cost of raising kids in the city.)

For 30 years, the First World has been terrified of an upward population spiral that never happened. For 30 years, the environmental movement took advantage of overpopulation fears to advance an anti-human agenda. Agriculture was condemned for “producing too much food.” Modern agriculture could get no credit, either for saving billions of people or millions of square miles of wildlife habitat. Now, with the end of the population surge, the activist campaign against biotechnology has brought the issue of high-yield farming to a head- and modern agriculture is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.

We at the Hudson Institute take some of the credit for the turnaround. In May of 2001, we 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 other Nobel Peace laureate was former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, directly representing the Third World.

The Declaration didn’t endorse any agricultural technology or system. It simply stated 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 David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October 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.

The October 17th issue of the journal Science carries 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.”

To understand the importance of this statement, the recently appointed Dr. Kennedy was introduced to the journal’s readers?on its own pages?by his old Stanford colleague, Dr. Paul Ehrlich!

Kennedy is now urgently endorsing the very agricultural research that Dr. Ehrlich has so long blamed for overpopulating his planet.

Canada’s Globe and Mail on Oct. 20 editorialized:

“GM food could be an especial boon to the Third World, where traditional farmers are eating up vast swaths of rain forest and other rich habitats. Just as the Green Revolution of the 1960s, 70s and 80s all but ended famine in the Third World by introducing high-yield crops, GM agriculture could help save what is left of these precious environments. It is odd, then, that the environmental movement has become so fixated on the threat it sees in GM foods. Yes, we need to be careful how and where we introduce them. . . . But we also need to remember the power of good they can do.”

These statements were true 10 years ago, and 30 years ago. But they are only now being made. I think the First World has become more serious about Third World hunger and poverty in the awful aftermath of the World Trade Center’s destruction. I also think the eco-activists damaged themselves severely by carrying their fear campaign against biotech foods to Southern Africa last winter. But the African hunger didn’t attract much media coverage.

I think the underlying factor that has seemingly created a sudden turnaround in the American attitude toward high-yield farming is the visible end of the human population surge.

That means modern farmers and their supporting industries have a better opportunity to tell their positive stories than they’ve had in 30 years. It probably means that animal rights activists and eco-terrorists will face more public approbation and less public tolerance. It should mean that the efforts to strangle high-yield farming and modern meat production with over-regulation can be eased by effective industry presentations to the public.

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.

Given the still-rising population, we expect that if per capita meat demand simply held steady, meat consumption in 2025 would be 25 percent higher. However, my Hudson colleague Tom Elam (formerly of USDA and Elanco Animal Health) notes that meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. He projects that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, Dr. Elam says this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025. (He expects a 31 percent increase in beef consumption, a 61 percent increase in pork consumption, and a 73 percent rise in poultry consumption.)

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. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, thanks to the fact that birds and animals can nourish themselves on things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat is just about what it would cost in resources to get the same number of non-meat protein and calorie.

Dr. Elam realizes that 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. He says these will only be possible if we continue to invest in research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted. The current regulatory war against farmers, renderers, fertilizer makers and virtually anyone else involved in high-yield farming must stop.

Tom notes than the current “organic agriculture” cannot possible feed high-quality diets to the 21st century. Its yields are at least 20 percent lower, and often 40 percent below those of conventional farmers.

Worse, there’s a global shortage of organic nitrogen. The Danish government in the mid-1990s appointed a high-level technical committee to examine the impact of an all-organic farming mandate. The committee concluded that would cut Danish food production by 47 percent, because most Danish farmland would have to be planted to forage crops, for green-chop delivery to feedlot cattle, so the manure could be slathered thickly over the Danish landscape.

Dr. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba says America would need the manure from another 1 billion cattle to go all-organic. (We have 200 million now.) Since there are only 2.1 billion acres in the lower 48 states, the United States would have room for its cities, and manure production-but no room for food, forests, or Yellowstone National Park.

It’s hard to see that clearing the earth’s forests for enough forage for another 8 billion cattle is good for the environment-let alone water quality.

If it’s free range chickens and pigs you prefer, understand that their feed conversion is 15-20 percent lower, so they take lots more land for feed crops. And putting the world’s chickens outdoors would take 20 million acres of land just for their playgrounds (at 1200 broilers per acre). Putting the hogs outdoors, even at a crowded 4 hogs per acre, would take 250 million acres. Is that a constructive trade-off for nearly 300 million acres of the world’s wildlife habitat?

More Globalization, Not Less

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 can be expected to shift from price supports and import barriers to a more trade-friendly farm policy of direct income payments to small farmers.

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. Obviously, the next farm bill will look radically different from the last one.

Meanwhile, China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and 7 percent of its arable land, and its only spare land is thousands of miles from its cities (and beyond the Gobi Desert) in its far-western provinces. 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. India is urgently short of water and will be short of livestock feed. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Egypt are other major population centers which are likely to bid happily for farm imports in the decades ahead.

How Agricultural Biotechnology Could Help the Planet

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 large amounts of wildlife to the expansion of low-yield crops. Fortunately, agricultural biotech is already showing what it can do:

The first blight-proof potato will ensure that neither China nor Bangladesh (increasingly dependent on potatoes because of their high food output per acre) will suffer a modern replay of the Irish potato famine.

Biotech is taking the natural allergens out of such naturally dangerous foods as soybeans and peanuts, so allergenic consumers will no longer have to fear potentially-fatal anaphylactic shock.

Crops that can grow in highly-salty water will ensure that our irrigated land can continue to produce high yields of food into the foreseeable future, instead of lying useless due to high soil salt levels.

Did Farming Destroy the Salmon in the Pacific Northwest?

If you are still reluctant to speak up for modern farming and processing in the face of eco-opposition, please note that last year, the Columbia River had its biggest salmon run in its modern history. It hasn’t been logging, farming or hydroelectric dams that had reduced salmon numbers, but Nature herself responding to a 25-year cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. 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. I’ve seen fishing records that go back a century and the pattern of co-variance is dramatic and clear. The Columbian salmon began to decline in 1977. Now they’re returning, right on schedule.

Did the Sierra Club not know about the 25-year cycle? Or did they know and not tell us?

Is Global Warming A Rich-Country Betrayal of the Planet?

The eco-activists say that the rich countries are about to burn up the planet with fossil fuels, but the ‘man-made warming’ evidence has always been weak. Virtually all of the warming in the past 120 years occurred before 1940, before much greenhouse gas was emitted by human industries and autos. After 1940, the climate stubbornly refused to warm for 40 years, despite huge greenhouse emissions.

The world’s known temperature history includes a Medieval Warming of perhaps 3 degrees Fahrenheit (950 to1300 AD), followed by the much-colder Little Ice Age, from 1300 to 1850 AD. History also tells us about a Roman Warming, from 200 BC to 400 AD, followed by an Ice Age from 400 to 950 AD. The world has been moderately warming and cooling for as far back in history as we have records.

Recently, an elegant and careful analysis of iceberg debris from the floor of the North Atlantic showed that the world has had nine moderate global warmings and nine global coolings in the last 12,000 years-coinciding exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. By this analysis, we are about 150 years into a mild, natural, global warming that will last another 600 years. The cycle will return us to what history calls the Medieval Climate Optimum-the finest weather humanity can remember.

Why would environmentally concerned activists seize on the global warming issue?

“[Global] warming . . . is capable of realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population’s eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”
Dr. Aaron Wildavsky, Professor of Political Science, University of California/Berkeley

“No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment, as quoted by the Calgary Herald, 1998

Why would European governments aid and abet a global warming scare not supported by science? First, many European governments are run by coalitions including Green parties, and its politicians are anxious to give Green concessions that won’t cost money before the next election. Second, the barrel of Saudi crude that nets the Saudis $25 nets the British government about $150 in taxes-all of it now conveniently justified by the global warming theory.

Make Your Case to the Public

Nothing else humanity does for conservation in the 21st century will be nearly as important to the planet’s wildlands and ecosystems as high-yield farms and high-efficiency meat production. Nothing else will affect so much land.

However, too many in the environmental movement demand we achieve sustainability by massive numbers of forced abortions or by minimizing human consumption. Neither is a valid way to achieve conservation. Neither is likely to occur. What can occur is a technological abundance that will maximize the world’s ability to have people and wildlife thriving economies and thriving ecologies, all at the same time.

You have been and are a vital component in this technological abundance, and co-sponsors of the conservation that has occurred through it.

Now is the time to state this loudly and confidently to the urban public. It is not easy to talk to the public about farming, but the last 30 years had demonstrated that it’s too dangerous to let urbanites get all of their information about farming from its opponents. Greenpeace and the other eco-groups will continue trying to demonize agriculture, and the farming industry we have today of necessity looks little like the traditional red barns and Percheron horses in the Christmas Budweiser commercials.

We must help the whole world finally understand that saving both planet and people are possible, and that our moral challenge in the 21st century is to achieve nothing less.

Presented at the Hyologisk 25th Anniversary Conference Braedstrup, Denmark
Alex Avery

February 4, 2004

A dozen years ago, I retired from the U.S. State Department-and began a mission to convince First World farmers they had more to gain from free farm trade than they did from continued heavy government subsidies.

The Bullish Demand Forecast for Farm Products and Pork

My key point was that the world was rapidly increasing its demand for better diets, driven not only by population growth but even more by rising incomes. I predicted that world farm demand would nearly triple by 2050. I expected the demand for high-quality foods-meat, milk, eggs, fruits, and vegetables-to increase even more than three-fold.

I also pointed out that virtually all of the demand growth would be occurring outside the First World countries with heavy the farm subsidies, in the densely populated countries of the Third World.

Twelve years ago, I predicted that Asia, with its rapid economic growth, would be the key market for export farmers. However, I warned that without liberalized farm trade, First World farmers would see relatively little farm import growth in the Asian Tiger countries.

Was I right?

The Fading Specter of World Overpopulation

Back in the 1970s, I can understand why people were afraid of population growth. Agricultural research had just created the Green Revolution, which was tripling crop yields on good land over most of the world, except Africa. Famine was becoming outmoded. In addition, DDT and other synthetic chemicals and vaccines were radically cutting death rates. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, wrote eloquently of human population rising above 20 billion.

Since then, we have learned that while poor farmers mostly have large families, affluent, urban people have small families. The world is moving rapidly toward urban affluence, and its birth rates are plummeting. Europe is now down to a fertility rate of about 1.7 births per woman, with Germany, Italy and Spain at 1.2. Italy is now offering a $1200 subsidy for 2nd Italian children, to ensure the country is not totally abandoned to Albanian and North African immigrants.

In the Third World, birth rates have fallen 80 percent of the way to stability, from about 6.2 births per woman in 1960 to about 3.1 births today with birth rates continuing to decline rapidly. Stability is 2.1. The UN Population Division has just lowered its peak projection for human numbers-again-to between 8 and 9 billion people. That still means a substantial increase in people, but not enough of a population increase to ensure prosperity for European farmers.

That leaves income gains in countries not yet well fed as the farmers’ best friend, and such gains are continuing.

China, with its massive population of 1.3 billion people, had been increasing its GNP by roughly 8 to 9 percent per year, with virtually no population growth. That meant very rapid increases in consumer incomes. (The Chinese economy grew about 8 percent in 2003.) The “precious three” most-sought-after household consumer items in China progressed from a bicycle, a digital wristwatch, and a transistor radio in the 1970s to a telephone, a TV, and a refrigerator in the 1980s-and today, China’s “precious three” are a cell phone, a computer, and a car. (Yes, they will have cars, lots of them.) China has about 20 percent of the world’s population and about 7 percent of its arable land.

India has been expanding its GDP by nearly 6 percent annually since Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister in 1990 while its rate of population growth has declined from 3.2 percent to 2.9 percent. (India’s economy grew nearly as fast as China’s in 2003, at about 7 percent.) That means India’s per capita incomes are also rising rapidly. India has 17 percent of the world’s population and about 2.4 percent of its arable land.

Indonesia, with 225 million people, has not recently achieved the 7 percent annual GDP growth it registered from 1990 to 1997. However, the economy has lately been expanding by 3 to 3.5 percent annually, and household consumption has been rising by 6 percent per year. Indonesia has 3 percent of the world population and only 0.2 percent of the world’s arable land.

To date, my long-term demand growth forecast has been largely on target. Chinese pork consumption increased nearly 70 percent in the decade of the 1990s, and is currently expanding by more than one million tons per year. Unfortunately for the EU, China is supplying virtually all of that pork domestically, fostered by import barriers, high consumer prices and investments in its own animals and facilities. Chinese pork imports this year will about match the EU’s pork imports at a pittance of 70,000 tons. China has become a member of the World Trade Organization, but the WTO farm trade rules are so inadequate that it is hard to see much expansion in Chinese pork imports in the foreseeable future.

India’s milk consumption increased by 14 million tons in the decade to 2001, and its poultry consumption rose by 80 percent. (Even India’s pork consumption has risen 43 percent in the last decade, though from a small base.) Again, the expansion in demand has been met through domestic price supports protected by import barriers, and much consumer demand has been constrained by high prices. India is a member of the WTO, but the WTO rules do not favor trade expansion. Moreover, India has always pleaded balance-of-payments problems to excuse its policy of not importing farm products. (India imports significant amounts of pulses and palm oil, but virtually no other farm products.)

Indonesian poultry consumption increased from 512,000 tons to 864,000 tons during the 1991 to 2001 period, despite the ravages of the “Asian Collapse” of 1997. However, Indonesia is a Moslem country and eats virtually no pork. (It does produce some pork on its northern islands to supply Singapore.)

Total world demand for farm products has been increasing, as we knew it would. World grain consumption has been increasing by about 18 million tons per year, world oilseed demand by about 7 million tons per year, and world meat demand by more than 5.5 million tons per year. As in the past, most of the demand has been met domestically, behind trade barriers.

The strongest growth in pork imports has been in Mexico, where the U.S and Canada now get duty-free access through the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico’s pork imports have risen by 155,000 tons per year in the past five years, to a projected 345,000 tons in 2004.

The strongest growth among pork exporting nations in the past five years has been in Brazil, where low land costs and the construction of new pork processing facilities have enabled Brazil to reach more export markets with processed products. (Transport costs from the interior for fresh pork are still prohibitive.)

The Forecast for Farm Subsidies

The stifling of world farm trade by subsidies is a well-known story, and farm trade was stifled anew during 2003 by the collapse of the WTO farm trade talks in Cancun, Mexico.

First World countries with good farmland have a strong history of favoring their own farmers with import barriers, price supports, quotas and phony “health” requirements. Western Europe and the U.S. both have ugly histories of subsidizing their farmers in these ways.

On the other side of the equation, Third World countries still have lots of farmers who resent farm imports as an intrusion on “their” markets. To prevent unrest among their large numbers of small farmers, such important would-be importers as China and India have state policies of importing farm products only when that could not be avoided. This means their consumers are taxed at the grocery stores for import exclusion. Food prices are often much higher in countries that refuse to import farm products and their industrial labor costs are thus raised artificially.

Unfortunately, farm subsidies have only one guaranteed result: they raise farm land prices in the subsidizing country. Essentially, that means the subsidizing countries are raising their farmers’ costs, and gradually pricing them out of their markets.

Cropland prices in the U.S. Corn Belt today average about $6,000 per hectare, up nearly 10 percent since the 2002 farm bill was passed, but still far below typical cropland prices in Western Europe.

I recently saw a cost comparison for soybeans grown in the Corn Belt versus those grown in the Matto Grosso region of Brazil. The imputed land cost for Iowa soybeans was $140 per acre, while the land cost for Brazil was $23. (That implies an Iowa land value of $1,000 per hectare.) The Iowa farmers’ non-land costs were lower, especially transportation. But the high land costs put Iowa farmers at a disadvantage in export markets.

That’s why the U.S. in 1996 passed a different sort of farm bill that was supposed to phase its commodity subsidies down and then out. The farmers’ “golden parachute” payments were essentially to buy down U.S. land values.

In 2002, political events overtook the new farm policy. During 2001, the U.S. election split the country 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. The House and Senate were divided almost 50-50 as well. Control of the whole U.S. government seemed to turn on a few farmer votes in the Midwest. To make matters worse, the federal budget seemed to be in surplus at the time, so there was no political constraint against buying the farmers’ votes. A lavish new farm bill was passed by the Congress, and President Bush did not dare to oppose it.

Unfortunately for farmers, the 2002 election also proved that American voters were ready to hear about reforming our massive Social Security system, which has some $25 trillion in unfunded obligations. It’s basically a pyramid scheme, and we will soon have less than three workers to support each of the 77 million “baby-boom” retirees-an impossible burden for our younger generation. Reforming Social Security and our old-age medical care programs to put them on a sustainable basis would require an 81 percent increase in our individual income taxes. We’d like to keep putting off the reform, but Social Security receipts will fall below payments about 2011, and the huge baby boom generation is starting to retire. A few years ago, any politician who mentioned Social Security reform lost. In the last election, those who talked of pension reform won – by big margins.

The reform of entitlements for the elderly and the costs of the “war on terror” pretty much ensure that when the U.S. farm bill comes up for renewal, probably in 2007, there will be cut-throat competition for federal dollars. The farmers will probably be in a much weakened position-to the point that some of our farm groups have actually proposed give-backs on the current program to help stave off cuts in the next farm bill. I predict that American farmers will lose a lot of their farm subsidy dollars in the years ahead.

You know the farm subsidy situation in Western Europe better than I. The EU is taking in 10 new countries, including Poland (4.2 million farmers and 14 million hectares of land); Hungary (490,000 farmers and 4.8 million hectares of land); Bulgaria (270,000 farmers and 5 million hectares of land, much of it disadvantaged); and Romania (1.5 million farmers and 10 million hectares of land, much of it fine quality in the Danube Valley.)
The two-tier farm subsidy structure now envisioned for the expanded EU is likely to last less than a year after the new member countries reach voting status. The new member countries will not be content with lower subsidies for their farmers. Germany, the traditional source of most EU farm payments, is now cash-strapped and unwilling to expand its farm subsidy obligations. The French feel they have an inherited right to their current subsidy levels. Something will have to give.

Meanwhile, the farmers in Poland, Hungary and Romania will soon catch up to their colleagues in the current EU 15, in both technology and yields. Poland and Romania, in particular, will be capable of major production increases, including pork production. There is nowhere in Europe to sell their additional output.

Nor does Western Europe’s capacity to finance farm subsidies look very promising. EU economic growth is currently less than 2 percent per year, and Germany has lately been achieving about half of that. Europe has not been creating many additional off-farm non-government jobs in recent decades, and there is no indication of a new flow of off-farm income that could be “painlessly” shared with EU farmers.

My prediction is that EU expansion will at least dilute the subsidy payments of current EU farmers. It may even trigger a more fundamental Common Agricultural Reform keyed not to commercial production but to direct income payments that will favor small farmers.

All of this was apparently well-known to the participants at the Cancun meeting of the World Trade Organization last fall. The U.S. offered what it regarded as radical surgery on its farm subsidies-cutting them by nearly half as part of a deal for Third World countries to permit more farm imports. The EU was less forthcoming, but its proposal went beyond what it had earlier said it could do, especially in reducing export subsidies.

Both the U.S. and the EU thought they might have to give more as the WTO negotiations went forward, but hoped the concessions would not have to be too politically costly back home.

They reckoned wrong. India, speaking for a group of 25 developing countries, announced that the U.S. and EU must begin the negotiations by promising to eliminate all of their farm subsidies-without any promise of improved market access in the Third World. In other words, the Third World said the First World must drop all farm protectionism, while the Third World countries would be allowed to continue theirs.

It was breathtakingly naive.

Unfortunately, when the First World rejected the demand, the Third World packed up and went home. It refused to negotiate at all. A farm trade negotiation that had been scheduled since 1994 was terminated overnight with not a word of agreement on anything, or even a discussion. WTO and First World officials are trying to restart the Doha Round, but there is not yet any agreement to do so.

With the WTO round dead, First World companies will not be able to gain any additional Third World access in such area as services and government procurement. No doubt they find this disappointing. But, the average tariff on nonfarm manufactured goods has already been cut from about 40 percent in 1946 to 4 percent today. Much of the world’s nonfarm trade is already liberalized.

First World farmers are in much worse shape. The U.S. Special Trade Representative says the current average tariff on farm products is 65 percent. I don’t know how he can tell, since so much of the potential farm trade is barred completely by governmental non-import policies like those of China and India. Whatever the real farm tariff average, it is dauntingly high. The odds of bringing it down are hauntingly low.

After the new U.S. farm bill was passed in 2002, I hoped that American farmers would have the best of both worlds: They would have high government subsidies until a WTO liberalization allowed them to phase into a freer global farm market where increased exports would take up the slack when Washington could no longer afford the lavish subsidies.

Now, I see crash landings for both American and European farmers.

First World farmers waited one trade round too long to offer up reform. We thought the Third World would try to negotiate half a loaf. Instead, the Third World took us at our word, and decided they’d rather buy political peace at home by subsidizing their own farmers.

There will not be much farm trade growth in the next decade as a result.

Who Will Be the Winners in the Export Markets of the Next Decade?

The winners in the export markets of the next decade will be few, and they will not win very much. Mostly, they will be the farmers who do not currently get very much subsidy, and thus have been forced to keep their production costs low. The biggest of these winners are likely to be the South American giants, Argentina and Brazil. Of these, the biggest is likely to be Brazil.

The other winners in farming for the next decade will be the farmers in China, India, and other Third World countries where economic growth is raising incomes for formerly poor consumers. Their governments are likely to continue to resist farm imports, both within and beyond the rules of the World Trade Organization. (China recently refused to accept biotech soybeans from the U.S. while continuing to grow biotech cotton and corn, and developing Chinese biotech soybean varieties.)

Brazil will almost certainly be the first claimant of any farm demand that is not domestically supplied. For some years now, the Brazilians have been expanding their production from the interior, essentially converting acid-soil scrubland into cropland through the addition of lime to the soils, planting acid-tolerant crop varieties bred in Brazil, and using no-till farming systems to prevent soil erosion on the rolling, volcanic soils.

Until recently, I believed that the Brazilian land available for cropland expansion was fairly limited-about 60 million hectares of acid savannah on its central-western frontier, far from markets and without railroads. Recently, however, the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service re-examined Brazilian potential. They note that America’s pasturelands cannot be converted to cropland; they are too arid or too steep. But Brazil’s pastureland has no such limitations. FAS believes that 70 to 90 million hectares of Brazilian pasture could be converted to cropland in the future, if international commodity prices are high enough to finance even paved roads, let alone railroads, into the interior. That would represent a very significant increase in the world’s cropping resources.

Turkey, too, is capable of major increases in crop production, partly through the development of its new irrigated projects in the Upper Euphrates Valley, but also by extending conservation tillage across its large tracts of semi-arid rainfed land. Conservation tillage radically reduces soil erosion, and retains much more of the rainfall in the root zone of the soils.

Biotechnology: Wave of the Future?

Europe is still blocking the advent of genetically modified crops and most biotech foods (though not the cheeses and wine made with biotech enzymes). Most of the world is taking quite a different approach, welcoming the improved productivity of genetically modified organisms.

I continue to believe that “golden rice” will be a major long-term benefit for the children and women of poor rice-eating countries, and I commend the EU for developing it.

I am impressed that Bt corn test plots in the Philippines outyielded farmers corn fields by 80 percent, and that biotech has given us our first victories over plant viruses (in bananas, papayas and sweet potatoes).

I note that, far from unleashing new allergens on the consuming public, biotech researchers have learned how to take natural allergens out of some of nature’s most allergenic foods: peanuts and soybeans.

I think I am most impressed-to date-by the new blight-proof potatoes bred in both the U.S. and Europe. The blight-resistance gene had been discovered in a wild potato some 50 years ago, but it had defied efforts to cross-breed it into modern potatoes that taste good and yield well. Now, biotech will prevent a recurrence of the Irish Potato Famine in modern Asia.

The biggest factor in spreading the acceptance of biotech crops around the world, however, has been Bt cotton. It’s not a food crop, and no amount of fearmongering has served to frighten farmers or consumers about the cotton it produces. Instead, farmers and governments have been enormously impressed by the ability of biotech cotton to resist the voracious pests that had always made cotton the most intensively pesticide-sprayed crop in agriculture.

China, India, and South Africa now feel heavily dependent on biotech cotton to preserve not only their cotton farmers’ livelihoods but also the millions of industrial jobs that depend on their cotton production.

Famine has been another winning issue for biotech. The activist efforts to bar American food aid corn from the famine stricken regions of southern Africa last winter seem to have backfired. When the president of Zambia said he would not distribute U.S. food aid corn to starving people who’d already been reduced to boiling poisonous roots, the world shuddered. The reality that no harm has been linked to biotech crops was extended to many more people. The inhumanity of the eco-activists was exposed in a new way.

This year, Brazil has decided to permit the planting of biotech soybeans. According to that country’s major soybean growers, this is likely to stimulate another expansion of soy production there, because it will sharply reduce growers’ costs.

In the future, if Europe wants to continue importing non-biotech soybeans, it may actually have to pay a premium to get them. Will Europe do this? If so, that will put EU hog producers at a further disadvantage in world competition.

Will the WTO uphold the EU constraints of biotech development and trade? That will be highly interesting as well.

In almost any case, it seems likely that the rest of the world will proceed with genetically modified crops, and eventually even biotech animal developments.

The Organic Path?

Many non-farmers have praised organic farming as the appropriate path for Europe’s agriculture. We can understand why they believe it. Non-farmers see modern agriculture as employing too few farmers and producing too much food. They think organic farming will solve both problems at once.

The reality is that few people want to be organic farmers, doing the hand weeding, the composting, being too often at the mercy of insects and crop diseases, and needing far more land (or imported manure) to get the same food production.

In America, organic has been increasingly taken over by agribusiness. A large proportion of our organically grown vegetables are now produced by four California farms. Horizon Dairy, the international conglomerate, provides 70 percent of America’s organic milk. Such major corporations as General Foods and ADM now have organic divisions.

Meanwhile, the organic premiums have often weakened in the face of increased production and a limited number of consumers willing to pay them. A significant percentage of the organic milk produced in Europe is sold as non-organic for lack of demand.

From a public policy standpoint, moreover, the major problem with organic farming becomes more pressing the more it expands: the large and global shortage of organic nitrogen. Buried in the 1999 report of the Bichel Committee, Denmark’s high-level technical assessment of organic strategies, is the reality that a true organic mandate would cut Denmark’s human food production by 47 percent. Its pork and poultry industries would be slashed 70 percent for lack of feed. Much of the countryside would have to be planted to green-chop forage, to be hauled to feedlot cattle, so their manure could be slathered over the countryside. All of this to replace the natural N from the air (which is 78 percent N) captured today by the Haber-Bosch industrial process invented in 1908.

If Europe went all-organic, it would probably not be able to export any farm products at all, even with the best efforts of newly energized farmers in Poland and Romania.

Dr. Vaclav Smil, author of Enriching the Earth, a fine book on thje history of nitrogen in agriculture, says the world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of N we currently take from the air industrially. America would need the manure from another 900 million to one billion cattle, at three to 30 acres of forage per beast. The U.S. has only 2.1 billion acres in its lower 48 states, so we’d have room for our cities and manure production, but no room for food, forests or national parks.

Dr. Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, says that organic farming could support only four billion people on the planet, even if we convert all the forests to fields.

The Environmental Movement

A great deal of the urgency behind the environmental movement has come from the fear of overpopulation. In the 1970s, the Green Revolution had just showed how to triple the yields on much of the world’s cropland-eliminating the famine constraint on human numbers. Then DDT came along, eliminating millions of deaths from typhus and malaria. Can we blame people for fearing that human population would soar to 20 or 50 billion?

Unfortunately, the fear of being overrun by third world babies also meant a fear that high-yield modern farming would foster overpopulation. This hasn’t been the case; the population growth overwhelmingly resulted because of a reduction in death rates. It is highly unlikely that the world would have quietly accepted massive famines if the Green Revolution had not occurred. But the environmental movement remains implacably opposed to virtually every aspect of modern food production, including pesticides, antibiotics for livestock, fertilizers, feed additives, and on down a long list.

In the U.S., the state of North Carolina has had a moratorium on confinement hog expansion for seven years, supposedly because confinement hogs were reducing the water quality in the state’s streams. Recently, under threat of legal action, our Center got the State water quality data for the “hog rivers” that drain America’s most intensive hog producing region. Thanks to “zero-discharge” hog management, an expansion from 2 million hogs to 9 billion has occurred with no reduction at all in the state’s stream water quality. The Black River, the major hog river, is still rated an outstanding resource with fine water quality. But the hog moratorium remains in place, because the urban voters of North Carolina do not like the idea of hogs in their state, even if they’re beyond the horizon and beyond smelling distance.

By the end of the next decade, Europeans will probably be far less sensitive to the population issue, and may be more flexible on environmental questions as well. But not yet.

European farmers can also expect that their eco-regulation will continue to become more and more invasive, and their costs in meeting these eco-restrictions will continue to rise.

Animal Rights Constraints

Animal rights constraints will continue to plague livestock producers in both Europe and America. People who eat meat but have not grown up on farms will never be fully comfortable in confronting the reality of livestock slaughter. As they treat their own pets more and more like children, they will be less and less comfortable with having your livestock not treated almost as well.

I note that in Germany, it is no longer legal to kill an ant colony if it invades your home. Instead, you must call a government ant warden who will come, trap the colony, and move it to some other location. The U.S. state of Florida recently amended its constitution to forbid farrowing crates for sows.

Never mind that the policies of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are a fraud. They would result in no domestic animals living at all, and would even deny people and their kids the right to have pets. The public will never allow its pets to be taken away, of course, just as they will never allow themselves to be driven to vegan diets. However, the more strident activists have no compunctions about imposing more and more and more regulations on how you raise your livestock, and the urban public will applaud.

Pig farmers in China and Brazil do not face these constraints. Their customers and neighbors are not yet nearly as sensitive as those in Europe and America.

The Next Decade for European Farmers

I cannot be optimistic about the next decade for commercial farmers in either the United States. or Europe. Their governments are faced with farm subsidy programs they will not be able to support. They remain sealed off from the world’s increasing food demand by trade barriers which will not be overcome during the decade. Their competitors have lower-cost land, and unused land on which to expand, and are beginning to use biotech seeds to further lower their costs. The farm cost structures in both the U.S. and Europe seem out of line with reality, and there is no visible way to rescue them.

I wish I could be more optimistic than this.

In the past, I believed that farm trade liberalization offered a new lease on commercial viability for the farmers in both the U.S. and Europe. It still might, but not during the upcoming decade.

It will take years to craft any meaningful change in the world’s farm trade barriers. The first problem is that the U.S. and EU have not yet “hit the wall” of unsupportable farm subsidy costs. The second problem is that China and India have not yet hit that wall. In the long run, all of these countries will want farm trade reform, especially under cover of an international mandate, but not yet. Even when they do, it will take more years to craft and phase in an agreement.

The “collapse at Cancun” was a disaster for First World farmers.

The answer to the question: Who will take the yellow jersey in global pig production is now simple-China. Second place will go to Brazil. Europe and the U.S. will suffer.

I wish you all good fortune, but I do not expect you will get it until the world has liberalized farm trade.

Alex A. Avery

You have heard today of the tremendous opportunity emerging in Asia due to the combination of population growth and rising living standards. Despite the recent Asian economic crisis, the unprecedented economic growth in Asia over the last decade represents the largest increase in per capita income for the largest population in human history. There are strong indications that Asia is already started its recovery and is preparing to move on. Thus, the trends in dietary changes and increased animal protein consumption we have seen over the last decade will continue into the next.

Worldwide poultry consumption has been growing at about ½ a percent per year. This growth rate should actually increase during the next five to ten years as more Asian populations reach the critical development stages where meat consumption increases most rapidly.

So the question is not whether or not there will be growth in the demand for poultry products. The question is will North American poultry producers have free access to those growing export markets and how fast will they get that access. The next round of World Trade Organization talks, starting this November in Seattle, will hopefully settle many of these issues. However, they will likely take several years and there is still time for public opinion to influence the outcome and direction of the negotiations. That is why environmental and anti-trade activists will be out in unprecedented force in Seattle. They smell blood. They have even been holding week-long activists commando training camps all summer long, teaching how to scale buildings and barbed wire fences to fly Greenpeace banners. The battle over agricultural free trade and fair access to open markets has just begun.

This brings us to the other large question: what regulatory constraints will be placed on the poultry industry and what impact will they have on the competitiveness of our poultry products in the global market. Public opinion has a great impact here, as well.

Currently, there is a new push to tighten regulation of agricultural nutrients as part of the renewal of the Clean Water Act. The EPA is focusing a significant share of its early efforts on livestock operations, including poultry. While hog farming has taken the brunt of environmental criticism over the last two years, poultry has not been left unscathed. Rightly or wrongly, the poultry industry has been assigned the blame for Pfiesteria in the Chesapeake Bay and other eastern shore waters. That debate has been settled and we lost. We’ve lost so bad that poultry farming gets blamed for fish kills which the experts all agree were due to natural anoxic conditions in the Bay, not Pfiesteria.

As a result of this public relations loss, the Virginia Poultry Federation has agreed, at least on some level, to a phosphorus standard for applying poultry litter to pastures and fields-limits on phosphorus application which are arbitrary and poorly justified at this time. The bitter irony is that there is little evidence that phosphorus is a significant problem in our watersheds, including the Chesapeake Bay. This example perfectly illustrates the power of public opinion over facts or science.

In fact, the public is turning against production agriculture in general. Fueled by nostalgia for an agricultural past most have only read about and a more direct connection to earth, the public (at least as portrayed by the media) has convinced itself that it doesn’t want production agriculture. Of course, the public has always sided with small, family farms over large agribusiness when asked in polls, but the difference is that today the anti-agribusiness sentiment runs much deeper. It’s not just who is farming and how big they are, but what they produce and how they produce it. There is no better example of this than biotechnology.

Agricultural biotechnology is being rejected by consumers around the globe. Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea all have labeling requirements for genetically-modified foods. This even applies, in many cases, to livestock fed genetically-modified feeds. Far from adding value to the farmer, premiums are instead being paid for commodities free of genetically-modified crops. This is Monsanto’s and the rest of the biotech industry’s worst nightmare.

A recent report by a biotech stock research firm was understandably grim. According to their analysis, “rebuilding consumer, regulatory, and political confidence in the economic and social value of agricultural biotechnology, will not only take time, but will require a different message than “the science is safe,” as well as the need to…reach out to all stakeholders.” The question for this firm is “not whether, but to what degree farmers retrench from their use of biotech seed technologies.”

In preparing for this panel discussion I was directed to the recent report by the Council on Agricultural Science and Technology which concluded that animal agriculture was essential to ensuring an adequate global food supply. While we like to see that others have made the same conclusions as us as far as the role for production animal agriculture, it would be a mistake of the highest order to assume then that the public will see the light and finally appreciate the poultry and livestock industry. Biotechnology is only the most visible example of the recent backlash against agricultural technology. This is true with livestock production technologies. There is a fundamental reason for this backlash: lack of understanding. One of the most important and neglected areas in agriculture today is communicating with the public. Only two percent of the public farms, with many of those farming only for the tax break. The vast majority of the food produced in this country is produced by a tiny minority. The public doesn’t care anymore about protecting the farmer’s way of life-in fact they want to reshape it. Environmental organizations have convinced the public that farming is controlled by corporate moneymen who will rape the environment for profit. The enemy has become production agriculture in much of the public’s mind.

Therefore, it is time that agriculture engage the public directly. We cannot afford to continue hoping that the media will get the story right. The biotechnology industry is learning the hard way that unless the public is shown the benefits of new technologies, they will happily reject them. But there are examples of success from which we can learn. While considered a long shot, the plastics industry was faced with a potential ban on many plastics on environmental and health grounds. But they considered the threat realistic enough to launch a PR campaign aimed directly at consumers. The campaign is surely one of the most successful in recent memory. Greenpeace has had to abandon their Ban Plastics campaign and the failure in plastics may be what led to the anti-biotech campaign.

The lesson is that the public will listen and react reasonably when given the full story about new technologies or industries. Poultry farming is in the situation today where few understand what they do, how they do it, or how it benefits them. They see only what the media tells them: that poultry farmers destroy the Chesapeake Bay and pollute the water.

The poultry industry cannot afford to lay low any longer. Public opinion is far too important in today’s business world to leave it to hope. If the industry fails to communicate its message to the public, they risk losing the support of government leaders needed to open foreign markets and continue operating profitable operations in the 21st century.