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Will the World Throw Away High Yield Agriculture?

By cgfi | March 17, 2000

Alex A. Avery

Speech to the National Potato Promotion Board, Denver, Colorado

The Rev. Thomas Malthus’ famous question about whether humanity can continue to feed all the people was posed exactly 200 years ago.

It has taken us nearly all of that 200 years to be sure of an affirmative answer. Only recently have we been certain that the opening of the 21st century should see a new and fully-sustainable balance between food, population and the environment because of:

Compare this situation with any year before 1960. Before that year, massive famines seemed certain for much of the world; poverty was the global norm; the Green Revolution had not yet demonstrated its power.

By comparison, the world today has a virtual certainty of food production success. If humanity is to starve or displace wildlife in the 21st century, with today’s technology and a declining population growth rate, it could only be because we lack the political will.

However, that may be the case.

Today, the real question is not whether the world can produce enough food for a peak population of 8.0-8.5 billion people. It can. We could already produce enough to satisfy minimal caloric requirements for that many people if known technologies were fully extended, and production was divided equally among all consumers.

The world’s recent famines have been due to “mistakes of government,” such as civil wars and Mao Tse-tung’s ill-considered communal farms. Little hunger has been due to the lack of available food.

Forty percent of the world’s current crop output, in fact, goes to livestock and poultry feed so that affluent people can eat high-quality diets full of meat, milk, and eggs. In a hunger emergency, we can eat both the feedstuffs and the livestock, and later worry about rebuilding the flocks and herds.

The Food Challenge is Affluence

The food challenge of the 21st century, in fact, is not the challenge of population growth, but the challenge of affluence. Virtually all the people of the 21st century will be affluent by today’s standards and able to afford education, nice clothes and TV sets. Such people are unwilling to accept minimal diets.

The same modern couples who are willing to practice family planning, with two children instead of 15, demand that their two children get rich diets high in meat protein for growth, and milk calcium for strong bones. Affluent people insist on fresh fruits and vegetables all year round. Such diets take far more resources than boiled rice or corn-flour tortillas.

There is no vegetarian trend in the world; instead we are seeing the strongest surge of demand for resource-costly foods in all history. Currently, only about 4 percent of the First World’s population are even vegetarian, and most of these vegetarians consume lots of resource-costly eggs and dairy products.

There will even be a pet food challenge. The U.S. has 113 million pet cats and dogs for 270 million people. All over the world, ownership of companion animals and pet food sales rise with incomes. Already, China’s one-child policy is stimulating pet ownership. It is reasonable to project that China in 2050 will have more than 500 million cats and dogs. And, woe unto the public official who stands between a pet owner and Fluffy’s favorite food.

The debate in development economics is whether the challenge of affluence requires a 250 percent increase in the world’s food output, or a 300 percent increase. The universal human hunger for high-quality protein, combined with the pet factor, convinces us that the world must be able to triple, certainly more than double, its farm output in the next 40 years.

What About Potatoes?

As you all are likely well aware, the market of the future for North American potato growers is Asia, as Asia is the future market for almost all North American farmers. Whereas in Ireland, potatoes were the food of the poor, in Asia, potatoes are percieved as a luxury food—sold almost entirely as french fries in Western-style fast food outlets, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonalds. However, as Asia’s economy grows, fast food is loosing its label as a “luxury” food and is entering the mainstream of Asian society.

So we can look to the fast food sectors as an indicator of where the market for potatoes is likely to go in the next several decades.

The Fast Food Industry is skyrocketing in Asia. One Hong Kong-based market analysis firm, Asian Market Intelligence, estimates China’s fast food sector have nearly $5 billion US dollars in sales in 1997, 20% from Western fast food outlets. Even better, the fast food sector has grown at an average rate of 50 percent annually in recent years. But this hardly does justice to the phenomenal growth in the frozen french fry market in recent years.

The US agricultural attache in China reports that China’s direct purchases of frozen french fries have increased ten-fold in the past three years, and re-exports through Hong Kong have tripled. McDonalds and KFC account for two thirds of the market share in french fries, demonstrating the close connection between french fry consumption and fast food chains.

Even more promising, from a long-term perspective, China’s supermarkets are beginning to stock frozen french fries for home consumption. This trend is especially marked in the north, where deep frying at home is common.

These trends indicate that french fries and potato products are making significant cultural inroads in Asia. A wave of young Chinese consumers raised on “treats” of McDonalds and other fast food is transforming the Chinese market. These trends will only increase in both scope and depth. More restaurants beyond simply fast food will start serving french fried potatoes, just as salsa and nachos have extended their base beyond Mexican restaurants. Already, french fries have moved out of simply Western-style fast food restaurants, and into Chinese fast food outlets.

Currently, China is estimated to import as much as 20,000 tons of french fries in 1997, with greater than 95 percent of this coming from the United States. China recently decided to lower import duties on french fries and the sector is making improvements in infrastructure to ensure the maintainence of high quality. China, although it produces potatoes, has yet to produce a quality potato with the proper characteristics for french fries.

Even in Japan, where Western foods have been popular for several decades, french fry consumption has been increasing recently. Because of the rising popularity of hamburger joints, french fry imports have been rising at 7-10 percent annually. This is a 250,000 to 300,000 ton potato import market, with almost 90 percent of these coming from the United States.

If China consumed half of the Japanese French fry consumption, it would be a 2 million ton potato import market. Is that possible? You bet, but it will take time for the Chinese to reach that level of individual income and for Chinese tastes to be Westernized to the level of the Japanese. However, it is not just the Chinese who will be our ultimate consumers. Asia includes three of the four largest nations: China, India, and Indonesia. And let’s not forget Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan, and Pakistan. The opportunity for export growth is simply astonishing.

Legislating Scarcity?

But at the same time that this enormous opportunity is emerging overseas, there are significant uncertainties arising here at home. Many thought just a couple of years ago that the only thing we had to worry about was opening up the trade barriers. Once we got that, we’d be OK. After all, we’d just solved that darned old “Delaney Clause” mess with the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) and the Freedom to Farm bill was going to get the government off our backs. Well, as Dennis and I were saying then, “hold on a minute.”

Everyone realized fairly quickly that the FQPA was going to cause some problems. Beyond the basic problems I have with methedology in assessing exposure of pesticides and the aggregate/cumulative risk cup analysis done by the EPA, the process is happening quite fast and growers are going to have to watch the process like a hawk from this point onward.

When Tim asked me to speak here today, he wanted me to cover the current FQPA situation and where it is going. The simple answer is that it’s going fast and loose.

The EPA is basing their pesticide review decisions on old data in some cases. As a result, the agency is not fully accounting for how important some of these compounds really are to potato growers. Methamidophos or Monitor is one example.

The fungicide TPTH was saved because potato growers demonstrated that it was a key chemical to many growers. But the EPA’s estimates were inaccurate and if the industry hadn’t been watching closely, it would have been lost. It’s that simple. Does that mean that you will be able to save every chemical currently allowed? Don’t bet on it.

At this point, Carol Browner has only a short time left. With Al Gore in the Presidential race, things could change rapidly. That is exactly how the FQPA was enacted in the first place. My advice and the advice of many I’ve spoken to is to watch the agency like a hawk. More importantly, if there are data gaps on the use of specific chemicals undergoing review that are important to the potato industry, GET THE DATA!! With FQPA already the law, the only significant defense you guys have is solid data. The more data the better because in the absence of data, the EPA will make “default” assumptions about pesticide exposure.

I must add, that potato growers have a few things in their favor over growers of some other crops. While the market for pesticides is larger in corn or soybeans, your market is no small potatoes. You are an important market for fungicides and insecticides, a market that the chemical companies want to keep. That means, under FQPA’s unified risk cup, where chemicals with similar modes of action and from other crops are combined when calculating consumer exposure and risk. As the risk cup gets full, manufacturers will have to dump pesticide uses in order to keep the risk cup from overflowing. Potatoes, while not the biggest, will likely be behind many other commodities when it comes time to ditching uses.

To make things doubly uncertain, on top of FQPA, biotechnology is now controversial. We went from getting rid of Delaney and going after trade access, to overly stringent pesticide laws and a consumer confusion crisis in three years. The Chinese curse of “May you live in Interesting times” is definitely upon us.

For those of you who think that pesticide issues are completely separate from biotechnology issues, let me clarify things for you: it is all part of one, much larger conflict.

Robert Shapiro, head of Monsanto, actually believed when they started developing biotech crops that the activists would see the virtue in biotech crops and would eventually support the technology. After the biotech fiasco broke in Europe, Shapiro was so niave that Monsanto’s advertising campaign gave out the web site addresses of the opposition!

The promise of biotechnology is immeasurable. We couldn’t begin to forecast what developments will be coming in twenty years if biotech is allowed to move forward and there is even modest consumer acceptance. Already we have the New Leaf and New Leaf Plus potatoes. I’m told that the New Leaf Plus is good, but not perfect. There may be some yield drag. But the trial results I’ve seen so far look pretty good. A drastic reduction in the average amount of insecticide sprays and excellent virus protection. One set of photos even showed pheasant tracks in a NLP potato field, and the researcher mentioned that it was the first time in here over ten year career that she’d seen such tracks.

In the pipeline are a whole range of biotech potato improvements, ranging from greater virus and fungus resistant varieties to bruise resistant potatoes.

The reality is, however, that if we fail to communicate the benefits and need for biotechnology, we risk loosing it to over regulation and consumer fear. It was no surprise that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were vehemently against the new agricultural technology. It was a surprise, however, that many in agriculture were caught off guard by the environmentalist opposition. Where have such people been during the last 20 years. There hasn’t been a single new agricultural advancement in this century that hasn’t been opposed by some group, mostly environmentalists.

In the early part of this century, some, despite the high risk of milk-borne tuberculosis, vehemently opposed milk pasteurization. Then it was hybrid corn. The it was insecticides, especially DDT. Then it was herbicides. Now it’s biotechnology.

As proof that the opposition is to modern agriculture, not social or human health concerns, I call your attention to the comments of two prominent critics of biotechnology in response to the announcement of the development of the Golden Rice by scientists funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Golden rice is rice engineered to contain Beta carotene, the precursor to Vitamin A, and inactivates a protein in rice, phytase, that inhibits iron availability. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the research to develop golden rice because Vitamin A deficiency and iron deficiency plague many rice-based cultures. It is estimated that 4 million children go blind each year because of vitamin A deficiency. An estimated 2 billion women suffer birth complications as a result of iron deficiency. Golden rice was developed as a humanitarian effort to relieve these simple dietary deficiencies. The International Rice Research Institute is now developing regional varieties of rice which incorporate golden rice’s traits and will then give the germplasm to national governments for free.

But just look at the response from environmentalists and activists. Margaret Mellon is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, in Washington, D.C. She claims that golden rice is simply a ploy by the agribusiness community to put a humanitarian face on a dangerous technology. She says “there are ten simple things we can do to solve these problems without biotechnology, from building roads and distributing iron tablets to encouraging people to grow gourds.”

Let me get this straight, instead of allowing people access to a rice seeds they could grow themselves which would alleviate all of these problems, we’re supposed to just build an entire network of roads and infrastructure so that we can distribute pills and pumpkin seeds? News flash, Ms. Mellon, if they had such diverse backyard gardens and infrastructure, they likely wouldn’t be nutritionally deficient to begin with.

Vandana Shiva, an Indian “community activist,” is even more silly. She states that all we have to do is get poor Asians to eat more meat, milk, eggs, dairy products, and green leafy vegetables. Even sillier, she suggests that golden rice is dangerous because it could poison people with too much vitamin A! These are people suffering from chronic vitamin A deficiency. Besides, Ms. Shiva is extremely ignorant of the physiological realities. The golden rice contains only Beta carotene, not vitamin A. Beta carotene is a precursor to vitamin A, which means it is extremely difficult to overdose on Beta carotene. One nutritionist I spoke to said that a person would have to eat 10 times the normal amount of rice each day for months before any problems would show, and even then, they would have ample warning that something is wrong because their skin would begin to turn orange well before toxic levels of vitamin A occurred.

The activists opposition to golden rice exposes their real colors. They aren’t against bad biotechnology, the activists are against all biotechnology. How else to explain their opposition to golden rice. It can’t be because they fear it will be used as a tool of multinational corporations to monopolize agriculture—it was funded by a philanthropic charitable foundation and will be given away to farmers free. It can’t be because they fear environmental or ecological consequences—the golden rice contains no new plant genes, only existing genes from wild plants. The only explanation is that these people are luddite elitists pandering to their own paranoia.

“Golden rice” will offer improved health to billions of women and children in rice-eating countries who could not have been helped through factory-food additives—at a tiny cost to society and no cost to them.

We must stop hoping and waiting for people to realize how important these technologies are for us and the planet and begin communicating on a level that consumers understand.

Land—the Scarcest Natural Resource

We in agriculture have a duty to help people understand that the intense increase in food demand I spoke of earlier will force even greater competition between farming and wildlife for land.

· Agriculture already uses about 37 percent of the earth’s land surface, and any land not already in a city or a farm is wildlife habitat.

· If the world has 30 million wildlife species (a reasonable biologist’s “guesstimate”) then 25-27 million of them are probably in the tropical rain forests, with most of the remainder in such critical habitats as wetlands, coral reefs and mountain microclimates. These are places we have not farmed, and should not farm.

Through pesticide use, fertilizers, confinement meat production and modern food processing, modern high-yield farming has already saved millions of square miles of wildlife habitat.

Our peer-reviewed estimate is that the modern food system is currently saving something on the order of 15-20 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield food production. That makes it the greatest conservation triumph in modern history.

Thus the key to conserving the natural world in the 21st century will be what the Hudson Institute calls “high-yield conservation.” Meeting both the food and forestry challenges, while leaving room for nature, will depend on our ability to continue increasing the yields per acre from plants, animals and trees on our best land, and transporting to where the people are demanding it. Our success will also depend heavily on how urgently we explore such high-tech methods as biotechnology in food and forestry.

Hamstringing High-Yield Conservation

Yet the world’s most advanced societies are attempting to legislate low-yield agriculture. All over the First World, government funding for agricultural research is being cut back, or shifted to low-yield “sustainable” farming. Governments in affluent countries subsidize low-yield organic farming, while regulators respond to public opinion by depriving the world’s high-yield farmers of time-tested pesticides and raising the safety hurdles to unjustifiably high levels.

In Africa, which has not yet had its Green Revolution, aid donors are demanding that farmers increase food production without modern pest protection or plant nutrients.

Large numbers of well-fed, affluent, influential people are opposing biotechnology, the most important unexploited advance in humanity’s knowledge of how to increase food production rapidly. There is serious question whether the power of biotechnology will be marshaled in agriculture soon enough to make its undoubtedly huge contribution to simultaneously saving people and wildlife.

Are modern societies attempting to surrender the planet back to hunger, malnutrition and massive losses in wildlife habitat? And if so, why?

The Environmentalist Campaign Against Modern Farming

The opponents of modern, high-yield agriculture and biotechnology are, ironically, gathered under the banner of environmentalism.

§ With the help of Rachel Carson’s brilliantly-flawed book, Silent Spring, eco-activists long maintained that modern farmers are poisoning children with cancer-causing chemicals. After 50 years of widespread pesticide use and billions of research dollars, science is still looking for the first case of cancer caused by pesticide residues. The U.S. National Research Council, the Canadian Cancer Institute and other medical authorities are trying to tell the public that the cancer fears are unfounded.

§ For fifty years, wildlife groups have universally claimed that modern farm chemicals were poisoning wildlife on a massive scale. However, the wildlife losses to today’s narrowly-targeted and rapidly-degrading chemicals are trivial — especially when compared with the millions of square miles of wildlife habitat saved by farmers’ high yields.

§ Eco-activists claim that more food means more people. But we are clearly in the first era of human history when more food has not meant more population. Births per woman in the Third World are down from 6.5 in 1960 to 3.0 today, and the birth rates have fallen fastest in the countries where the crop yields have risen most rapidly.

§ Environmentalists claim that modern farming is destroying the soil with rampant erosion. But farmers have used herbicides and tractors to invent conservation tillage, which cuts soil erosion per acre by 65 to 95 percent. A recent soil erosion study in Wisconsin finds that the farmers there are suffering only 5 percent as much erosion as they did during the “Dust Bowl” days of the 1930s.

§ Environmentalists oppose liberalized farm trade, though this is the only hope for much of Asia’s wildlife.

We must now realize that modern agriculture is being targeted, not because it is bad for the environment, but because modern farming 1) represents the greatest success of technological abundance; and 2) because farming controls much of the world’s land and water. The environmental movement seems to want managed scarcity for a few people. It seems to want more bison and prairie dogs—and fewer corn plants—on American land even if that sacrifices wildlands and biodiversity elsewhere.

The Future with Biotechnology

The world is in the early phases of exploring biotechnology’s potential—the “biplane stage,” to draw the analogy with airplanes. But already we see enough to know that biotechnology will be enormously important to conservation.

Saving Wild Species with Aluminum-tolerant Crops

Two researchers from Mexico discovered a way to overcome the aluminum toxicity that cuts crops yields by up to 80 percent on the acid soils characteristic of the tropics. Noting that some of the few plants that succeed on the world’s acid savannas secrete citric acid from their roots, they took a gene for citric acid secretion from a bacterium and put it into tobacco and papaya plants. Presto, they had acid-tolerant plants. The acid ties up the aluminum ions, and allows the plants to grow virtually unhindered. The Mexican researchers have since gotten the citric acid gene to work in rice plants, and hope that it can be used widely in crop species for the tropics.

Acid-soil crops have enormous potential for wildlife conservation. Acid soils make up 30 to 40 percent of the world’s arable land, and about 43 percent of the arable land in the tropics. Thus far, they have been one of the major barriers to providing adequate food in the very regions that are critical to wildlands conservation, the Third World tropics. These are the very areas where the populations are growing most rapidly, where incomes are rising most rapidly, where the food gaps are expanding most rapidly — and where most of the world’s biodiversity is located.

Raising Yields with Wild-Relative Genes

Two researchers from Cornell University reasoned that more than a century of inbreeding the world’s crop plants had significantly narrowed the genetic base of our crops. They also reasoned that the world’s gene banks contained a large number of genes from wild relatives of our crop plants. They selected a number of genes from wild relatives of the tomato family, a crop where yields have been rising by about 1 percent per year. The wild-relative genes produced a 50 percent gain in yields and a 23 percent gain in solids. The same researchers selected two promising genes from wild relatives of the rice plant — a crop where no yield gains had been achieved since the Chinese pioneered hybrids some 15 years ago. Each of the two genes produced a 17 percent gain in the highest-yielding Chinese hybrids; the genes are thought to be complementary, and capable of raising rice yield potential by 20 to 40 percent.

Improved Meat Animals with Biotech

Heretofore, methods for introducing new genes into livestock had a low efficiency — less than 10 percent. However, in the 24 November issue of The Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report a new method for producing transgenic animals that approaches 100 percent efficiency. Researchers put the foreign gene into the animal’s egg before it was fertilizer rather than shortly after. Obviously, this is another important step in creating animals with greater tolerance for pests and diseases, better feed conversion ratios and other practical advantages.

Saving Forests with Biotech Trees

The world could increase its forest harvest ten-fold if we planted just 5 percent of today’s wild forests in high-yield tree plantations. Such plantations are good-but-not-great wildlife habitat because they are not “fully natural,” but they could apparently take all of the logging pressures off 95 percent of the natural forests.

Trees have always been difficult to improve through crossbreeding because the time frames are so long. Biotechnology is already helping to provide the higher-yielding trees through cloning and tissue culture — which permit us to rapidly copy the fastest-growing, most pest-resistant trees in a species. When we master the tools of biotechnology more fully, we should be able to increase forest growth rates, drought tolerance, pest resistance and other important traits more directly, and even more effectively.

A Global Trend Toward More Activists

It is the nature of activists to push for something different.

In Peru, activists demanded an end to the chlorination of drinking water because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found chlorine, at high levels, could cause cancer in laboratory rats. Peruvian officials took the chlorine out of the water, and the cities promptly suffered a cholera epidemic that killed 7,000 people.

I don’t blame the activists. I blame the people who trusted the activists, and the people who should have represented the other side of the question. I also blame the press, which should have sought out the broader reality.

Like it or not, the world is on a trend to have more activists, in more countries. Democracy and affluence encourage activists and the free, open debate of public questions. The internet and instant global communication will also spur the creation of more activists. If modern agriculture is to succeed, it must learn to succeed in an activist-rich environment.

It’s not just agriculture, of course. Global warming activists have created global summits, an international treaty, and captured the political soul of a major U.S. presidential candidate—with less evidence than they’ve had of harm from modern agriculture.

But the activists have come so far, won so much power and prestige around the world that they can’t stop.

The Achilles Heel of High-Yield Agriculture—Regulation

It is true that the Green Movement has rarely won an election, anywhere in the world. But the desire to preserve Nature is so urgent in First World cities that the Greens haven’t needed to win elections. Environmental concern is so widespread that politicians race each other to embrace key points of environmental strategy. In America, Wirthlin polling a few years ago indicated that 75 percent of the public agrees with the statement, “We cannot set our environmental standards too high—regardless of cost.”

Because of the high public approval for the environment, we have an Environmental Protection Agency with virtually no Congressional oversight. The bureaucrats who work for EPA read newspapers and polling results. They assume that they can regulate “environmentally offending” industries, such as agriculture, in virtually any way they choose.

Modern farming’s reputation with the urban public is now so bad that it can no longer persuade the Congress to block unfavorable legislation, or force Federal agencies to modify unfavorable regulations and rulings. Not even farm-state politicians will commit political suicide on behalf of farming.

Betrayed by Modern Journalism?

Unfortunately, today’s mainstream media are not living up to their professional obligations for objectivity and resarch. Somewhere during the Vietnam era, journalists got the idea that refereeing the game of life was not as satisfying as playing on the winning team. Among the causes they have adopted as their own in recent decades is the environment.

Recently, our Center put out a press release noting that the water quality in North Carolina’s Black River has improved over the last 15 years, even though the hog population in its watershed had quintupled to one of the highest densities in the U.S. Of the 300+ media outlets we sent the press release to, one lone skeptical reporter called to inquire further. She asked whether the hog industry had sponsored the study. No, we told her, the data was from the State environmental agency. “But that’s not what my readers want to hear,” she lamented, then hung up.

That’s how far behind the public affairs curve modern agriculture currently finds itself. This is not a problem that can be dealt with by writing press releases, or by hosting community tours of farms and milk processing plants.

Can We Educate the Public on High-Yield Conservation—in Time?

Someone must tell the urban public about the environmental benefits of high-yield modern farming. I submit that it will have to be agriculture.

Agriculture and agricultural researchers must talk about saving wildlands and wild species with better seeds. We must talk about conquering soil erosion with high yields (so there’s less farmland to erode) and conservation tillage (which radically reduces erosion per acre of farmland). We must talk about preventing forest losses to slash-and-burn farming (the cause of destruction for two-thirds of the tropical forest we’ve lost). We must point out that where high-yield farming is practiced, the amount of forest is expanding. We must point out that the losses in wildlife habitat overwhelmingly occur where the farmers get low yields.

Agriculture and its researchers also need to point up the high risks of organic food. The Centers for Disease Control has been afraid to publicize it, but their own data seem to show that people who eat organic and “natural” foods are significantly more likely to be attacked by the virulent bacteria, E. coli O157:H7. Consumer Reports wrote that free-range chickens carried three times as much salmonella contamination.

The facts are clear: organic food is fertilized with animal manure—a major reservoir of bacterial contamination—and composting is neither careful enough nor hot enough to kill all of the dangerous organisms.

We must analyze every eco-activist proposal in terms of its land requirements:

It should not be solely up to agriculture to prevent such a needless disaster. Agriculture has no history of public affairs campaigns or any real experience in conducting them. However, I see no other entity with the knowledge, the financial requirements and the direct interest to do it.

I doubt that the National Academy of Sciences or the National Research Council can turn public opinion around. The NRC’s recent report, Carcinogens and Anti-carcinogens in the Human Diet, is a landmark. It essentially says pesticide residues are no threat to public health. But the public is not reading the document, and the media are not reporting it. Moreover, a significant number of NAS members are encouraging the attacks on high-yield farming.

How can we present the environmental case for high-yield agriculture if the journalists will not write it and politicians fail to support it?

Modern agriculture must take its case directly to the people, through advertising.

My model is the American Plastics Council, which spends about $20 million per year to keep plastics virtually out of the environmental discussions in America. The Weyerhaeuser Company is another good example of positive imaging; Weyerhaeuser has been telling me for decades that it’s the tree-growing company. Not the tree-cutting company, not the tree-using company, but the tree-growing company.

David Brinkley, the most respected journalist in America today, has also shown us the way. ADM, the big corn and soybean processor, sponsors the Brinkley ads and they are doing a fabulous job.

Many of the firms with billions of dollars invested in modern agriculture are already talking to urban America. DuPont and Dow have whole rosters of consumer products and millions of dollars worth of consumer advertising. Cooperatives like Land-o-Lakes and Countrymark have consumer ad budgets too. Wildlands conservation would be a winning message with both their customers and their farmer members.

So far, agriculture has failed to accept the challenge, and the momentum for high-yield conservation is waning. We are not increasing public investments in high-yield research. We are not creating support for the farm community. The regulators are continuing to strangle farm productivity.

In the long run, of course, farmers and farm researchers will be vindicated even without a public affairs campaign. But that vindication could come too late for the wildlands and the wild species—and too late for most of today’s high-tech farmers and agribusinesses.

At this point, it looks as though we will fail to meet the food challenge of the 21st century—not for lack of time, but for lack of realism in our public life. Our forefathers would have been ashamed for us.

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Alex Avery is Director of Research and Education at the Center for Global Food Issues. He received his bachelors degree in biology and chemistry from Old Dominion University. Previous to joining the Center, Alex was a McKnight research fellow at Purdue University conducting basic plant research. Alex represented the Center at the United Nations World Food Summit in Rome in 1996. He is co-author of the Hudson Institute briefing paper Farming to Sustain the Environment, which addresses issues of agricultural sustainability from a practical and global perspective.

Alex has written on agricultural, food safety, regulatory and global population issues for major newspapers, including The Washington Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Des Moines Register. He has also been published in USA Today magazine, Regulation magazine, Feed Management, and scientific publications such as Environmental Health Perspectives and the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. His article on international food regulations will appear in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Food Science & Technology, second edition.

In addition to his publications, Alex has spoken to a wide range of groups, including the Australian Weed Science Society, American Veterinary Medical Association, American Phytopathological Society, as well as numerous industry and university audiences.

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