CHURCHVILLE, VA—The newly published President’s Cancer Report puts this quote in bold type:

“I believe it is time for a new human experiment. The old experiment is that we have sprayed pesticides which are inherent poisons . . . throughout our shared environment. They’re in our amniotic fluid . . . They’re in our mothers’ milk. What is the burden of cancer that we can attribute to these poisons in our agricultural system? We won’t really know the answer until we do the other experiment, which is to take the poisons out of our food chain, embrace a different kind of agriculture, and see what happens.”

Sandra Steingraber, biologist and author of the book Living Downstream:  An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Steingraber’s ignorance of biochemistry and agriculture is breathtaking. We’ve actually been running a long-term experiment on chemical-free farming for about 5,000 years:  It’s called Africa. Africans don’t produce much food, and the little food they produce comes at a fearful price in human stoop labor, horrifying soil erosion, and increasing displacement of wildlife by low-yield crops.

Africans get cancer at an alarming rate even so—though many die too young for the old age cancers. In Kenya, where Mr. Obama’s father lived, the life expectancy is 20 years shorter than America’s 78 years. Cancer has recently made the “Top Ten Killers” list, but Kenyans worry more about the epidemics of malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis.

Don’t look for any new science in this new President’s Report. There isn’t any. The report includes much talk of the precautionary principle, and how we might begin to find these “hidden” cancer sources. It’s just the same old fears and alarms that have circulated since Rachel Carson. Indeed, Dr. Steingraber has been called “the new Rachel Carson.”  That’s no compliment; Rachel’s rant against DDT has cost more than 50 million needless malaria deaths.

Dr. Graham Colditz, a cancer epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, urgently disagrees with the new cancer report. He told Reuters, “Maybe 4 percent of cancer in the western world is caused by contaminants and pollution.” He wants more done to combat much larger known cancer risks, such as smoking and obesity

The new report recommends eating organic food. However, National Science Medal winner Bruce Ames reports that 99.99 percent of the carcinogens we swallow grow naturally in our fruits and vegetables—put there by Mother Nature to fend off the insects, bacteria and fungi. Eating organic food makes one ten-thousandth of a percent difference.

This chemo-phobia is another left-wing Obama import from Europe, like the coming government health monopoly. Europe is banning some 85 percent of its pesticide active ingredients—based on “theoretical risks” rather than “proven risks.”  Obama wants similar laws for the U.S., even though our rat tests overstate our real pesticide risks—deliberately—by about 1000 percent.

Besides smoking and old age cancers there has been no increase in cancer rates; but huge numbers of Americans will live long enough to get (and hopefully survive) cancer. Dr. Steingraber is herself a cancer survivor

Following Obama’s farming advice, however, would make it impossible for us to feed humanity right now. Nothing in the plant world grows without nitrogen, and we have less than half enough manure—so we take nitrogen fertilizer from the air. Lack of nitrogen and too much pest damage (especially weeds) cut organic crop yields by about 40 percent compared to conventional.

The African forced scenario is that mom and the kids spend their days out in the fields, pulling weeds by hand—and skin cancer is among the most prevalent African cancers.

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—The earthquake in Haiti has caused more than 100,000 deaths and destroyed the homes of 1.5 million people. It’s a devastating blow to Haiti—but we don’t know how to prevent earthquakes. All we can do is help Haiti rebuild.

 

On the other hand, we do know how to prevent 500,000 kids from going blind every year—and even dying—due to severe Vitamin A deficiency (VAD). But we’re not preventing the blindness or the deaths. Instead, we’re accepting the tragedy of millions of blind kids, plus the deaths of hundreds of thousands of pregnant women who die from needless birth complications, also due to VAD. The Vitamin A problem is far bigger than the Haitian earthquake, and it keeps on going, year after year.  

 

We started trying to cure Vitamin A deficiency 20 years ago, after a Swiss government researcher bioengineered “golden rice.” The new rice contained a gene from the daffodil that codes for beta-carotene.  The human body can then make Vitamin A out of the beta carotene. Kids in rich countries get most of their Vitamin A from meat, milk and eggs, but poor-country kids live mainly on such plant foods as rice, cassava and sweet potatoes.  None provide much bio-available Vitamin A.

 

But Greenpeace and its eco-allies claimed—without evidence—that such genetic engineering is a “danger to the planet.” 

 

Even after Syngenta developed a corn-based “golden rice II” with vastly more beta carotene—and offered it free to the Third World—Greenpeace still said no.

 

Only now, after 20 years of blockade and delay, are we finally seeing the dramatic benefits of growing Vitamin A crops in the local fields. In the Mukono District of Uganda, they’re growing bio-fortified sweet potatoes. Here, about 25 percent of the children used to be wan and sickly, prone to severe diarrhea, pneumonia, eye inflammations and blindness. Most of the kids are now healthy and vigorous. Pregnant women are thriving, along with their babies.

 

The difference? Orange-colored sweet potatoes, supplied by Uganda’s national agricultural research organization. They’re rich in beta-carotene, and they produce high yields because they resist local crop diseases. The germ plasm for the new sweet potatoes originated at HarvestPlus—Norman Borlaug’s international farm research organization that saved a billion people from starving in the Green Revolution of the 1960s.  

 

“A danger to the planet,” of course is what Greenpeace has called virtually every recent advance in global food production. At the same time, they claim the earth cannot sustainably feed the people already here. The European Union, to its shame, has backed up Greenpeace with threats to boycott the farm exports of any country which allows biotech plantings. In India, rice farmers protested plantings of the new rice, for fear the EU’s ban on biotech foods would block their exports of high-value basmati rice.

 

HarvestPlus finally decided to breed around the Greenpeace blockade. It took more than a decade of laborious test plots and back-crossing, but now cross-bred beta-carotene is being planted in farmers’ fields—and the Mukono mothers say their kids have become remarkably healthier. All it cost was 20 more years, 10 million more blindings, and millions of maternal deaths.  

 

HarvestPlus notes that much of the Third World’s population is caught in a health-poverty trap. Blind and ill family members and orphans need extra care from the able-bodied family members or from societies resources. They never get ahead. Instead, struggling people and their large families keep slashing-and-burning more subsistence crops and hunting endangered animals with cheap AK-47s.

 

Not even Greenpeace should want a poverty-stricken world full of blind children.

 

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 Green Movement has been called “the new religion.” It surely isn’t that. Religion is a belief in a higher power than humanity. The Green movement believes nothing is more powerful than a press release from the Sierra Club or a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace.

 

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine recently reviewed 162 scientific papers published over 50 yeas—and found that “there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically grown foods over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority.” This is no surprise.

 

The first researcher to announce the health futility of organic foods was Lady Eve Balfour, one of the sainted organic pioneers. She turned her English estate into an experimental farm, to “prove” organic food was better. She finally admitted in 1977 that 30 years of testing had produced no evidence of nutritional or health differences for organic.

 

This will make no difference to the sales of organic food because organic food buyers are irrational. They think buying the most expensive foods buys longer, happier lives. No such luck. If organic were healthier, African subsistence farmers would have been outliving American housewives and stockbrokers for the past 90 years.  

 

Instead, Americans eating industrially fertilized and genetically modified crops have been outliving Somalis and Nigerians by about 30 years. We not only have ample high-yield food, but our lives are also protected by vaccines, antibiotics and sterile operating rooms.

 

There is only one known way to extend your life through eating, and that’s to eat more fruits and vegetables. The quarter of the population that eats the most fruits and vegetables has about half the cancer risk of the quarter that eats the least. The produce doesn’t have to be organic, local—or even fresh. Canned, frozen, and imported produce will serve just about as well.

 

But such knowledge isn’t nearly as powerful as superstitions like “eating organic” to avoid “depleting the topsoil.” No-till farming, with herbicides, saves far more topsoil than organic farming, but again that’s only knowledge.    

 

Greens keep telling me that humans are even powerful enough to “change the earth’s climate” Forget the sun!  During the Little Ice Age, the sun was weak and crops failed repeatedly. More than a thousand “witches” were burned to wrest control of the climate back from Satan—just in Bern, Switzerland. Wiesenstag, Germany, burned 63 women as witches in one year, 1563. Now that is superstition at work!

 

Of course, most of the “witches” were elderly widows whose husbands were no longer growing food for them. Many were mentally ill. So, maybe it was also self-serving behavior. It certainly predicted the idea of abortions as a “solution” to global warming. Even if that doesn’t stop the warming, the old planet will be a little less “crowded.” 

 

Religion in recent centuries has mostly prodded us toward treating our fellow men more humanely. The Green movement has no such lofty pretentions. If the world went all-organic, half the humans would die of starvation. Most of the remaining wildlife habitat would be plowed down to make room for more low-yield crops. That’s an even uglier outcome than we can expect from President Obama’s commitment to cut U.S. fossil fuel emissions by 80 percent. And just about as useful.

 

Excuse me now, I have to find a black cat.

 

 

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