Tag: high yield conservation
21st Century Consumer War: Mythical Organic Utopia versus High Yield Conservation
By admin | December 11, 2003
Alex Avery
Presented December 11, 2003
National Agricultural Aviators Association
Reno, Nevada
For two decades, an epic war has engulfed society between those who look backward toward a fictional natural past - an organic utopia - and those who look forward through technology and science envisioning a sustainable future. This war has escalated over the last two decades, with each new agricultural advance and technology. While these visions of the future of farming are radically different, the driving force behind these opposing views is amazingly similar: the desire to safely feed and clothe humanity in a way that is environmentally responsible and sustainable.
The organic farming future advocated by so many environmental activist groups would in fact lead to unprecedented ecological damage due to lower yields, organic fertilizer requirements and subsequent conversion of wildlife habitat to farmland. The huge challenge ahead of feeding and clothing the larger, more affluent, and more democratic world of 2050 will require even greater land and resource productivity if we are to avoid destroying the world’s remaining wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
Only through the continued use of modern crop protection chemicals, inputs, and up-to-date crop varieties can we expect to feed all of humanity well without destroying nature.
However, we have recently begun taking a different approach and one that we are asking all of agriculture to adopt and promote: High Yield Conservation. Moreover, we have become much more vocal and active in countering the claims of the eco-extremists and organic farming promoters, who have misled so much of the urban public. But we need your vital help in these efforts.
We must do two important things in this battle over the hearts and minds of consumers. First, me must communicate the seriousness of the global food/environment challenge humanity faces over the next 50 years. Second, we must expose the con of the “organic utopia” that has captivated so many consumers - at least conceptually - if not at the checkout.
Why the Need for High-Yield Conservation: Food Needs-Population and Affluence
The two factors affecting world food demand are population growth and individual income growth. Both are increasing rapidly at the moment.
As the World Bank’s website puts it: “No social phenomenon has attracted more attention in the past half century than the ‘population explosion’-that surge from about 2.5 billion people in 1950 to more than 6 billion in 1999, making the 20th century one of unprecedented population growth. As the number of people grew, the interval for adding another billion people became shorter and shorter, with the increase from 5 billion to 6 billion occurring in only 12 years.”
The world passed the six billion mark in 1999. The world’s overall population growth rate is currently about 1.23 percent per year-adding an additional 80-85 million consumers each year to the global population. That’s another Mexico added to the world’s consumer pool every year or an additional New York City added every month. According to many environmental activists, these currently fast-growing numbers mean we’re headed for a population train wreck. Sooner or later (with a heavy emphasis on sooner) they claim we’ll run out of resources, humanity will starve, and the environment will be destroyed. Their mantra is that we must stop population growth!
But while an additional 85 million people per year may seem daunting, we are far from heading toward a population disaster.
In fact, recent analysis suggest that the world’s peak population will likely be roughly nine billion, perhaps as low as eight billion or less. That means we’re looking at roughly a 50 percent increase over today’s global population added over the next 45 years or so.
The Slowing Population Train
The World Bank projects that the 7 billion mark will be reached around the year 2014. The Bank and the UN have historically overestimated population growth, so the 7 billion mark may actually be reached later. Whatever the exact date, the current period marks the first time since 1800-when the global population reached one billion-that adding the next billion people took longer than the previous billion. From here on out, world population growth will be slower every year until the human population peaks-expected sometime around the year 2050. Then the global population is expected to begin shrinking.
This is a massive change in population projections compared to the wild-eyed predictions of the 1970s and early 1980s. Back then, the UN and World Bank predicted peak global populations of 15-20 billion people-some analysts warned of potential 25 to 30 billion people. In 1968, Dr. Paul Erhlich wrote The Population Bomb, one of the most successful environmental books of all time. Erhlich predicted massive global famines by 1975 as a result of the dawning population explosion. Lester Brown followed closely behind Erlich with his first book, By Bread Alone, in 1974.
So what happened during the intervening period to make Dr. Erhlich and Brown so radically wrong in their population growth predictions? The answer is unprecedented global economic growth that radically reduced the desired family size. It is somewhat counterintuitive, but rich people have smaller families.
Fertility rates are always low in affluent countries. This is because in a developed economy children are just plain expensive. Disposable diapers, Nikeä sneakers,car insurance, college tuition-I’m sure many of you can attest to exactly how expensive it all is. Women in the workplace mean that things that were previously free, like childcare, become a major household expense.
As a result, women in developed countries now average less than 1.6 children apiece-well below the direct replacement level of 2.1 children per couple (one to replace mom, one to replace dad, and 0.1 to make up for those that die young). Consider Italy and Germany: with a current average of only 1.2 and 1.33 children per couple respectively, they stand to lose half their population over the next 40 years, and nearly 80 percent by 2100. Italy is now paying couples $1,200 to have second and third children-the exact opposite of China’s one-child policy.
In contrast, larger families make economic sense in poor and relatively undeveloped countries. If you are a poor, subsistence farmer, more children mean more cheap helping hands to harvest the crop, gather firewood, haul water, and do the myriad other chores. In the developing world, children are still the equivalent of Social Security, expected to support their parents in their old age. Thus the incentives are toward large families. Another factor: when infant and child death rates are high, as they still unfortunately are in too many areas, the parents must have more children to ensure that one or two of their children will live to provide that social security. Because of all these factors, the average Third World fertility rate in 1960 was 6.5 children per couple.
Today, because of rapid economic growth and rising affluence, fertility rates have plummeted across the globe-most dramatically in formerly poor countries. Compared to less than 1.6 kids per couple in high-income countries, the middle and lower income countries together average only 2.9 births per woman in the period 2000-2005. The global average is now less than 2.7 and falling, meaning that humanity has moved more than 75 percent of the way to a stabilizing fertility rate in only one generation.
Today, the projections for the peak global population are around 9 billion people, reached somewhere about the middle of the century. This is roughly a 50 percent increase above today’s global population. From that point forward, the global population is expected to begin slowly shrinking. Meeting the needs of that peak global population is our challenge, and once that is accomplished, the population monkey will be off our back.
World Food Needs-Affluence
Yet while the population train clearly has its brakes on, the global food demand train is still gaining speed. The reason is, ironically, the same as for the drastic fertility rate decline: economic growth in formerly poor countries. Increased wealth translates into improved dietary quality and higher overall farm product demand.
The GATT, now the World Trade Organization (WTO), has clearly shown itself to be the most successful international institution in human experience. It replaced tariff wars with economic growth. World non-farm trade has increased more than sixteen-fold since 1950, and is still rising.
As a result of the explosion in world trade, nearly 3 billion people in Asia are now living in market-oriented economies that have been increasing their national economic output by nearly 10 percent per year, compounded, since 1980. This economic growth is headlined by Japan, but also includes Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Mauritius, and China. India, Pakistan, and Indonesia havecome a long way as well; although political unrest and regional conflict obviously threaten to stall their economic progress.
As an example of the impacts of economic growth, consider the evolution of the desired consumer goods of the average Chinese citizen. The so-called “precious three” most-coveted and desired household consumer goods in the 1960s and 70s were the bicycle, wristwatch and transistor radio. In the 1980s they became the telephone, television and refrigerator. By the mid-1990s the “precious three” were a cell phone, computer and a car. China is now a member of the World Trade Organization and the prospects for increased economic growth in Asia are so strong that the issue has become a political football for the presidential candidates.
Surging Demand for Better Diets
The first thing that poor people do when they get more income is to bid for better diets. The typical progression is first to buy more rice and wheat-modestly increasing total caloric intake and diversify cereals. Then, they buy more cooking oil-that is, more fried foods. Then, they buy more eggs and diary products.Finally, they purchase more meat, and fresh fruits, and vegetables. These farm products take three to five times as many farming resources to produce as a calorie of cereals - but there is an innate human hunger for them.
The biggest lie from environmental activists is that people in China and other developing countries are only eating more meat because of the advertising of McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken (the largest Western fast food chain in China). That’s silly. It was poverty that kept meat consumption low and meat demand in Asia has been skyrocketing in lockstep with the rise in personal incomes:
Japan was the first of the Asian tigers, and it has become the first of the Asian meat consumers as well. A country that once consumed less than 15 grams per day of animal protein and felt urgent concern about having fish on the plate, is now at 60 grams per day of meat and dairy products. If Japan did not still have such high tariffs on beef imports, the average Japanese might already eat more than 70 grams of animal protein. The Japanese meat consumption pattern is being emulated in Taiwan.
China, of course, is the huge Asian food challenge, with 1.25 billion people raising their incomes at a speed never before seen in a large, low-income country. China has been raising its meat consumption at 10 percent annually for the past decade, more than doubling its national meat consumption in the 1990s alone. Most of the expansion to date has been pork, but the demand for both beef and poultry have more than doubled and are still growing.
And in addition to meat and high-quality animal protein, these Asian consumers are increasing their consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, further increasing domestic farm resource demands.
New Clothes, Beer and Dogs
The other reason why the world must triple farm output is that once we have fed 8 to 9 billion people the way they prefer, we’ll have to satisfy their growing appetites for other farm products. Consumers in these developing countries will want to drink and dress better, too. China’s beer consumption has more than tripled in the last decade. One extra beer per week for 750 million Chinese adults is an extra 3.5 billion gallons of beer consumed in a year! That’s roughly a million tons of grain, folks.
Huge populations of people are moving from societies where everyone owned only two cotton outfits apiece, to a dozen and more-just like any other modern society.
People all over the world are increasingly living in bigger houses, made with additional timber and wood products. Parts of Asia look just like suburban America already, with strip malls and housing subdivisions.
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. China’s one-child policy is causing people to channel their parenting instincts elsewhere and thereby stimulating pet ownership. It is reasonable to project that China in 2050 will have more than 500 million cats and dogs,translating into significantly increased demand for pet food, which includes meat, grain, and protein meal.
Combining the expected 50% increase in global population with the fact that most of these additional people will live in countries that are radically increasing individual incomes and adopting more affluent food consumption patterns, it is easy to see how overall farm resource demand will at least double, and will more likely triple over the next 45 years.
All in all, the next 30-40 years will see the largest and last surge in global food/farm product demand in human history.
Farmland Scarcity and Competition for Land
Already, the world’s farmers utilize an estimated 37 percent of the planet’s total land area. The UN estimates that humanity farms 11 percent of the total land area in crops, and uses another 26 percent for pasture and rangeland. Thus, farming takes nearly half the planet’s total land area not permanently covered in ice.
What this means is that virtually all of the good, productive farmland is already in production. We started farming the best acres first. What is left is mostly relatively poor potential farmland, where yields would be lower, and environmental consequences higher.
Society now demands other uses for those lands — notably wildlife habitat and biodiversity conservation. In fact, much of the remaining non-farmed land that could be feasibly farmed is also some of the most biodiverse areas on the planet. Asia is one of the most densely populated areas on the globe, especially in terms of the amount of farmland per person. China has 20 percent of the global population, but only 7 percent of global arable land. Much of China’s farmland is steep and terraced, although reasonably productive.
As a region, Asia in 2050 will have more than half of the global population but less than a third of global farmland. As far as cropland, Asia will be eight times more densely populated per acre of cropland as North America.
The Myth of the Organic Utopia
There is a loud minority of the First World’s population that rejects high-yield farming. They say the world already has plenty of food, that it’s simply a “distribution problem.” But India in 1959 harvested only about 60 million tons of grain. Today, India harvests more than four times that amount, and still reportedly has some 300 million underfed citizens. How many hungry people would India have today if it still produced only 60 million tons of grain per year?
All over the Developed World, government funding for production-oriented agricultural research is being shifted to low-yield, so-called “sustainable” farming. Meanwhile, regulators respond to public opinion by depriving the world’s high-yield farmers of time-tested pesticides and raising the safety hurdles on the remaining pesticides to unjustifiably high levels. After each new set of regulations comes into force, they move the goal line farther away and the process starts all over again.
In Europe, several governments now have official goals for organic to make up 10-20 percent of farmland by 2010, despite the fact that consumer demand has leveled off. Already, something like 60 percent of UK organic milk is sold as non-organic for lack of demand.
Organic farming is the “save the planet” prescription offered by almost every major so-called environmental group in the world. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, The Sierra Club, Environmental Defense: All of these groups and scores of others tell the urban public that organic farming is the solution to the worlds food and environmental problems. But it is not.
Organic farming cannot possibly meet humanity’s food needs without massive destruction of wildlife habitats - mainly to convert them manure and other organic fertilizer production.
In terms of nitrogen needs alone, and only in terms of today’s food needs let alone the needs of the larger and more affluent society of tomorrow, an organic mandate would require a massive conversion of land into animal pasture or “green manure” crop production. Both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency have concluded that the billion-plus of tons of manure produced annually by U.S. livestock and poultry provide less than one-third of the organic biomass needed to support current farm output, let alone a three-fold increase by 2050.
Globally, the organic fertilizer shortage is worse. The world’s farmers currently use roughly 80 million metric tons of synthetic N fertilizer per year, much of this on cropland, but some on pasture land as well. To replace the 80 million tons of “synthetic” N fertilizer with animal manure would require an additional 6-8 billion cattle.
The entire world cattle population is only about 1.2 billion, so this would be a 600% increase. Where would we “park” that many additional bovines? At the relatively dense stocking rate of only 2 acres per animal -inadequate in most regions - that works out to an additional 18-22 million square miles, or 40-45 percent of the planet’s entire land area!
Of course, manure isn’t the only organic nitrogen source. We could use green-manure crops: Legumes that fix nitrogen via the bacteria in their roots. But the land area needed to grow enough of those would still be huge.
In 1999, a high-level technical committee appointed by the Danish government studied the consequences of a total conversion of Denmark to organic farming. The Bichel Committee was headed by the former president of the Danish Society for the Conservation of Nature and staffed by the best scientists and agronomists using the latest yield data.
The committee found that if Denmark went totally organic with no feed imports and no synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, human food production would fall by 47 percent! Why? Partly because of lower crop yields and partly because many acres of food crops would need to be converted to livestock fodder for manure production.
Organic farming was supposedly developed to avoid “soil poisoning” from inorganic fertilizers. However, long-term studies (more than 100 years at the Rothamsted research plots in England’s temperate climate and 20 years in the International Rice Research Institute’s tropic Philippine climate) show no difference in soil quality between fields fertilized with organic nitrogen and those getting synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Thus, the very basis of organic farming has been proven false. (That’s not to say organic matter content isn’t important, but that there are other ways to increase and maintain soil organic matter than solely the use of “organic” fertilizers.)
Organic Yields Too Low
The organic farming activists claim that they get yields nearly equal to non-organic farmers. But we know that isn’t true, especially when assessed on a “whole-farm” basis (i.e. including the land needed to produce the organic fertilizer).
Direct field-to-field yield comparisons show that organic methods produce between 10-40 percent less than non-organic methods when using identical varieties grown side-by-side. Of the truly peer-reviewed studies I’ve found, organic methods averaged about 15 percent lower in corn yields, 11 percent lower in soybeans yields and 30 percent lower in potato yields. Moreover, even the studies cited by organic supporters seem to indicate yield penalties of at least 20 percent. A recent 21-year Swiss study published in the Journal Science found that organic yields averaged between 10 and 40 percent less, depending on the crop, for a total average of 20 percent lower yields. Their potato yields averaged 40 percent lower over the full 21 year experiment.
Pesticide Use Under All Organic Scenario
Organic activists lie to the public and claim organic farming doesn’t use pesticides. But the first pesticides used by humans were “organic.” Reports of the use of sulfur as a pesticide date back 3,000 years to 1000 B.C., when Homer described how Odysseus “fumigated the hall, house, and court with burning sulfur to control pests.” Nicotine from tobacco was first used as an organic insecticide in 1690 to protect pears from insects. Pyrethrum was first used to kill body lice on people in the early 1800s.
There is a widespread organic myth that the “pesticide era” of agriculture did not begin until after World War II. In reality, the pesticide era began prior to the civil war. Pyrethrum was in regular use as an agricultural pesticide by the 1850s. Farmers were widely using nicotine- and arsenic-based pesticides by the late 1800s. By 1886, the US was importing over 600,000 pounds of pyrethrum annually for farm use.
By 1934, U.S farmers were annually using: 70 million pounds of sulfur, 10 million pounds of pyrethrum, 2 million pounds of nicotine sulfate, and 1.5 million pounds of rotenone. That’s more than 80 million pounds of organic pesticides being used each year. Imports of organic pyrethrum to the United States peaked in 1939 at 13.5 million pounds.
Organic farmers still use pyrethrum. You should know that in 1999 the EPA reclassified organic pyrethrum as a “likely human carcinogen.” This is a label that organic activists have used to argue for permanent bans on scores of synthetic pesticides. But rather than warn their chemo-phobic customers and the public about the EPA’s conclusions, organic activists kept a lid on the scientific findings for two full years. I didn’t find out about the reclassification until asked to comment on it by an obscure Washington news outlet.
Nicotine sulfate use peaked in the 1940s and 50s at about 5 million pounds per year. Cheaper, safer, and more effective synthetic pesticides developed during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s displaced nicotine sulfate. DDT, for example, was very effective against insects, but far less toxic to humans. (Nicotine sulfate is 4000% more accutely toxic to mammals than DDT! )
In fact, if we went 100 percent organic, our overall pesticide use could very well increase, not go down. Why? Because the organic pesticides must be applied at high rates.
Three organically-approved pesticides - oil, sulfur, and copper - accounted for a whopping 62 percent of the total pounds of insecticides and fungicides applied to U.S. crops in 1997.
Replacing all synthetic fungicides with sulfur would require an additional 840 million pounds of sulfur, or more than a 700 percent increase in total U.S. fungicide use!
Replacing synthetic fungicides with copper would require more than 100 million additional pounds of copper, a 50 percent increase in overall fungicide use. The environmental impacts from this increased copper use would be huge. Yet crop losses from fungal diseases would be far higher, as both copper and sulfur are less effective than synthetic fungicides.
Organic Food Safety?
Would this increase safety, consumers ask? The organic activists sure want them to think that. But consider that just last month, the UK’s Food Standards Authority tested 30 cornmeal products from store shelves for residues of a carcinogenic fungal toxin called fumonisin. The European Union has a new safety standard of 500 parts per billion for fumonisin. Of the ten products found to be in violation, 6 were organic. That was every organic corn product tested. The others were from Turkey. But the organic products were hugely contaminated, with two brands having fumonisin levels 1/3 those that have been proven to cause cancer in rodents.
Meanwhile, they’re scaring consumers over pesticide traces that are tiny fractions of doses proven to cause no harm in any animal.
21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable Ever
Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago. They had good reason to worry. Soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human society.
Fortunately, modern farmers have invented conservation tillage, which cuts erosion by up to 90 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria. Organic farmers refuse to use conservation tillage, because it relies on herbicides to control weeds; thus the organic farmers are forced to used bare-earth, erosion-inviting weed control techniques like plowing and hoeing. Plowing also destroys the feeding tubes of the mychorrizal fungi which produce the most important element of soil health: a recently-discovered gooey glycoprotein called glomalin. (Again, organic farmers fail to support their claims of better soil health.)
Thanks to the combination of industrial fertilizer and conservation tillage, a highly erodable farming area in Wisconsin is today suffering only 6 percent as much erosion as it did during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. The author of that study says those who claim high rates of U.S. soil erosion today “owe us the physical evidence.” We are creating topsoil faster than we are losing it on millions of hectares across America, Canada, Europe, Latin America, Australia, and most recently, in Asia.
Two Competing Development Models - Palaces or Mud Huts?
The key question in the Environmental Age is not whether we will save the environment, but how best to save it. Society now puts a higher priority on saving the environment than anything save protecting its children and pets. But two radically different models are being presented for achieving these unprecedented goals of sustainable economic development and environmentally-benign agricultural expansion.
One model for the 21st century - the technological abundance model - would have the global society becoming still more affluent, with a far more sustainable society, creating more high-value jobs on both its farms and in its cities. That model would also have American agriculture provide far more profitable food exports for densely populated Asian countries that would otherwise have to clear species-rich tropical forests to eat well.
The Palace model wants to create new resources through research, clean the air through low-emission cars and power plants, and give every kid on the planet access to a computer and the Internet. It wants to protect wild forests and feed more people from existing farmland through high-yield farming. The Mud Hut model for the 21st century would cut humanity’s farm output in half, and shifted society’s jobs back toward low-tech and low pay.
The Mud Hut strategy is based on getting humans to want less, either through lowering our lifestyles, and/or through having fewer humans on the earth. The “use less” believers think people should eat vegetarian diets, grow their food organically, and ride only busses, trolleys, and bicycles. These opponents of materialism don’t think humans need corporations, shopping malls, or global trade. They want us to have simpler jobs, such as hoeing weeds in organic fields, or hand-sewing leather sandals.
But all of this is wishful thinking. It is a denial of the real wants and needs of poor people and a denial of the current reality: where poor people denied access to technology and capital have ravaged local environments and habitats to satisfy their basic needs.
Defending High-Yield Conservation and Technological Abundance
In April 2002, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the world was offered a practical vision of how we could save the world’s forests and wildlife in the more populous and more affluent world of the 21st century. Two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, and the British author of the Gaia Hypothesis all signed the Center for Global Food Issues’ “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry.”
They pointed out that the world is already farming one-third of its land area, even though we are now feeding high-quality, resource-intensive diets to less than 1 billion people. By 2050, the trends indicate that at least 7 billion people may be able to afford and demand such diets. We’ll need to triple farm output.
The Declaration signers also noted that high-yield farming has saved at least 12 million square miles of forests and wildlands since 1950. That’s how much more land we’d have plowed to get today’s food supply if we still got the low crop yields of the 1950s, before the Green Revolution and the widespread use of modern crop inputs. (For perspective, the world’s total forest area is 16 million square miles.)
This Declaration has now been signed by nearly 1,000 scientists and conservationists from more than 60 countries around the globe. We need to amplify their call and support their cause.
For generations, farmers were considered the community’s most admirable citizens- because they produced food, the most important element of life. That
was back when farmers didn’t have high-yield technology, and food was often scarce.
In the modern world, food is abundant. Since people tend to define unhappiness in terms of what they don’t have, farmers are no longer admired.
The opportunity for North American farmers is growing with the population and affluence of Asia. It’s the last best opportunity and the biggest obstacle to access that opportunity may well be the fears and suspicions of affluent, farm-ignorant, wildlife-loving urban consumers.
But you are part of the greatest conservation effort in human history - at the forefront of conserving wildlife habitat. Therefore, you have the tools to convince those consumers that your industry is critical to habitat and environmental conservation - that they should support your efforts. But only if you speak up, as an industry, but more importantly as individuals.
Start tomorrow, by joining the Nobel Prize winners, founder of Greenpeace, and others in signing the High-Yield Conservation Declaration.
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High-Yield Conservation: The Only Global Sustainability for the 21st Century
By cgfi | March 28, 2000
Humanity faces a daunting task as we enter the 21st century: Feeding a larger, more affluent world a better diet while at the same time conserving wildlife habitat, biodiversity and ecological integrity.
The world is in the midst of the largest surge in global population in human history. Population growth rates peaked in 1996; however, the inherent momentum of population growth will drive the global population to 8-9 billion people before it stabilizes. This represents a 50 percent increase over the current population of 6 billion. Based on recent trends in fertility rate, current predictions call for a peak world population of 8.5 billion reached about the year 2040.[1]
While population growth has been the focus of world attention over the past 30 years, it alone will not be the greatest challenge. Affluence will also increase global demand for farm resources. As living standards rise, a shift occurs from subsistence diets comprised mainly of grains, roots/tubers, and low animal protein consumption, to high-quality diets comprised mainly of varied grains, meats, dairy products, eggs, and consumption of diverse fruits and vegetables. The critical difference between the two is that it takes many more farm resources to produce a single calorie of meat or dairy products compared to cereal grains or tuber crops. Thus, the shift to a more affluent diet, higher in proportionate levels of animal protein, increases the demands on farm resources.
When the expected population growth is combined with the expected shift in dietary preferences, farm product demand will increase at least two-fold, and perhaps as much as three-fold by the year 2050.
There can be little debate about this. I’ve used the most conservative estimates for population growth—mainly because so many past population predictions have been wildly inflated. If population growth is higher, than the food challenge will be even greater. There can be little doubt, as well, about a significant dietary shift in developing countries. China, for example, more than doubled its meat consumption in the 1990s.
Despite this massive increase in national meat consumption, the average Chinese consumer still eats less than a third as much meat per capita as the average Japanese consumer. As economic growth spreads further and deeper in these economies, the dietary shift will increase in both scope and pace.
Nearly half of the world’s population lives in Asia. As Asia continues to grow, both in population and economically, we can look to Japan as a model to see what to expect from the region.
As recently as the late 1950s, Japan was a food aid recipient. Today, Japan is the world’s largest food importer. And the economic growth in Japan brought about a fundamental shift in Japan’s dietary habits. Since 1965, Japanese consumers have reduced their rice calories by 37 percent while they have increased their dairy consumption by 123 percent and their meat calories by 220 percent.
In all, the average Japanese consumer now eats about 55 grams of animal protein per day. And if Japan would reduce its import tariffs, they would probably be eating closer to 65 grams of animal protein per day. For comparison, Americans eat about 75 grams per day. These farm products take three to five times as many farming resources to produce as a calorie of cereals—but there is an innate human hunger for them.
Meat demand in Asia has been skyrocketing alongside the rise in personal incomes:
- Besides the massive increases in Chinese meat consumption, India’s consumers have been adding 1-2 million tons of milk and dairy products to their national diet each year—despite feed shortages, high prices and poor quality.
- Indonesia expanded its broiler flock by 25 percent (and 150 million birds) in 1995 alone!
And despite these recent trends, Asians still consume an average of less than 20 grams of animal protein per day. By 2025, it is likely that the world will have to supply at least Japan’s current 55 grams of animal protein per day for 4 billion Asians. That’s nearly a 400 percent increase in the region’s total meat consumption!
Thus, the world’s biggest food gap is opening in the region least able to meet that demand—the densely populated nations of Asia. That region will have eight or nine times as many people per acre of cropland as North America.
So how will the world meet the 21st century food challenge? There are but three options: intensify food production on existing farmland, increase the amount of farmland, or reduce consumption.
The prospects for reduced consumption are decidedly dim. Vegetarian activists have campaigned for decades on the health and environmental benefits of a vegetarian diet and reduced meat consumption. However, at the same time, the most vegetarian cultures in the world—China and India—have been moving away from a vegetarian diet. More than two-thirds of Indians stated in a recent poll that when they can afford it, they would eat meat (although not beef). McDonald’s now has many outlets in India selling mutton burgers. In the developed world, less than 3 percent of American’s identify themselves as vegetarians, and many of these still eat chicken and fish occasionally. Besides, most vegetarians rely on dairy and egg products as key sources of much needed protein, and both of these products require nearly as many farm resources per calorie as meat itself. Vegetarians who are not vigilant in maintaining a high variety of foods in their diet and back this up with dietary supplements risk such problems as blindness from optic neuropathy, such as the case with a 33-year-old vegetarian man in France reported in latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
What about increasing the amount of farmland? Already, more than one third of the planet’s total land area is devoted to agriculture (11% crops, 26% pasture/rangeland, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1998 Production Yearbook). However, even this number underestimates the amount of useable land devoted to agriculture. When the planet’s permanently-ice-covered land area is taken out of the equation, essentially half the total land area is currently devoted to agriculture.
We submit that if we are to save wildlife habitat, ecosystems and biodiversity in the 21st century, we must meet the food challenge by raising yields on existing farmland. Taking more land from nature is simply not a viable, sustainable option.
I’m proud to say that this assessment, the core message of the Center for Global Food Issues for the past 5 years, has recently been corroborated by a team of ecologists writing in the March 10 issue of the journal Science.[2] The group’s conclusion is that “agricultural efficiency must be improved in any nature conservation scenario in Africa, Asia, and Oceania.”
The group calculated the minimum amount of agricultural productivity growth needed to feed the region’s population in 2050 using only existing farmland in the regions, as well as the amount of agricultural productivity growth needed to feed the 2050 population a high-protein diet using only existing farmland. This gave them a minimum and maximum food productivity growth rate.
Worldwide, agricultural yields need to increase between 0.7 and 1.4 percent annually for the next 50 years to feed the world’s expected population in 2050 a minimal and high-protein diet from existing farmland. Asia needs between 0.6 and 1.5 percent annual productivity growth. However, Sub-Saharan Africa needs between 1.8 and 3 percent annual growth while North Africa and the Middle East need between 1.5 and 1.9 percent annual food productivity growth.
It is finally dawning on ecologists and conservationists that in a world that already takes nearly half of the planet’s non-permanently-ice-covered land area for farming and still faces at least a doubling of food demand, high-yield agriculture is critical to biodiversity conservation. Finally we have come far enough along in the biodiversity debate that the reality of land use and productivity can no longer be ignored. Will the environmental establishment follow these brave ecologists’ lead and take an honest look at the challenges ahead and the options at hand? I don’t think so, but it doesn’t matter, as long as those who are most serious about biodiversity conservation do their jobs and speak out about the critical links between agricultural efficiency and biodiversity conservation.
Along with higher yields, the world must find a way to embrace and integrate global free trade in agricultural products too. A truly sustainable global food system must use the world’s agricultural resources as efficiently as possible—especially in light of the magnitude of the challenge ahead. This means allowing comparative advantage to work to its fullest. There is no industry where comparative advantage is greater than in agriculture. Why should India attempt to produce all of its own dairy products when its dairy herds are plagued by a hot climate, high insect pest populations, and a critical feed shortage? Dairy production is much more resource efficient in the cooler climates of Northern Europe and North America. Conversely, why should the U.S. attempt to be self sufficient in sugar by growing sugar beets in the Northern Midwest? Tropical countries can produce sugar with vastly greater resource use efficiency through sugar cane production.
Desperate Regions: The Food Gaps in Africa and Asia
The world’s traditional patterns of agriculture have always featured small farmers supplying nearby consumers with seasonal fresh foods. Unfortunately, tripling the world’s farm output on this model for the 21st century would likely mean sacrificing at least half of the world’s tropical forests to slash-and-burn farming. Such farming is cheap and effective for low levels of population density. But Africa’s population is projected to grow from 200 million to at least 400 million in the next half century. Asia’s population will rise from 2.75 billion to 4 billion during the same time span. Neither region is yet fully providing its consumers with the high-quality diets they increasingly demand and can afford.
India is getting one-third of the fodder for 400 million dairy animals by literally stealing leaves and branches from its richly biodiverse forests.
Africa has already dangerously shortened its bush fallow periods, from the optimal 15-20 years down to as little as 2-3 years in some regions. It cannot support the expanded population and rising dietary expectations.
None of this is environmentally sustainable. The world must have still-higher yields of crops and livestock, and free trade, or it will lose most of its tropical forests, and perhaps three-fourths of its 30 million wildlife species.
Thanks to biotechnology, the prospects for tripling the world’s crop yields are much better. In fact, biotechnology may be the only compassionate answer to the world food challenge in the 21st century—for poor people, for children, and for the billions of wild creatures on the planet.
Land Area and Competition Between Opposing Needs
The increase in productivity ushered in by the Green Revolution was achieved almost entirely through intensification. Essentially the world’s farmers tripled the yields on the best farm acres through increases in irrigation, better crop varieties, and increased use of fertilizers and pesticides. Environmentalists often claim that these gains are illusory—that we have simply exchanged fossil fuels for food. This is valid only in the sense that the vast majority of the world’s cropland is fertilized with nitrogen fertilizer extracted from the atmosphere using energy-intensive methods, mostly natural gas. However, this accounts for less than 1% of humanity’s overall energy consumption, and the alternatives (fertilizer from legume crops or animal manure) are land intensive and have a higher ecological price.
In fact, research has clearly demonstrated that the current varieties of crops utilize the nutrients and other inputs more efficiently than older varieties.[3] In essence, our agricultural car is getting much better gas mileage for us, allowing us to produce more food with less resources.
Tripling the Crop Yields Again
Ecologists are also telling us the big environmental threat is neither population nor pesticides, but the loss of wildlands with their unique species, food webs and contributions to climate patterns.
Moral concerns aside, famine is not an option for saving the environment. Poor people in the newly-emerging countries are clearly willing to chop down forest and kill wildlife to get adequate calories—or even to get high-quality protein.
Forest requirements will rise even more sharply than food needs. Industrial wood demand is likely to rise ten-fold, unless we shift toward more environmentally-damaging wood substitutes such as steel and concrete.[4]
Land is the Scarcest Natural Resource
The world’s population today is 80 percent bigger than in 1960. The environmental wonder of the 20th Century is that today’s farmers are feeding better diets to almost twice as many people from virtually the same cropland base. We used 1,394 million hectares of land for crops in 1961—and only 1,441 million hectares in 1992 to get twice the grain and oilseeds.[5],[6]
In addition, the average Third World citizen is getting 28 percent more calories, including 59 percent more vegetable oil (twice the resource cost of cereal calories) and 50 percent more animal calories (three times the resource cost of cereals).[7]
Producing today’s world food supply with 1960 crop yields would probably require an additional 10.9 million square miles of land, or more than the total land area of Europe and the U.S. combined! This is no precise estimate—but it underscores the enormous environmental importance of continuing to raise crop and forest yields if we are to have wildlands in the future.
In forestry, Roger Sedjo of Resources for the Future says the world should be able to provide the industrial wood needs for 9 billion people from less than 6 percent of the current wild forest area, planted to high-yield tree plantations.[8] But eco-activists oppose “unnatural” monoculture forests, and we aren’t planting enough tree plantations for the wood we will need when today’s tree seedlings are ready for harvest in 20 years.
The Best Land Has the Fewest Species
For biodiversity, it is even more important to save poor-quality land than prime cropland. Ecologist Michael Huston points out in his book Biological Diversity that the poorest lands harbor the greatest variety of wildlife species, all over the world.[9] Good quality land typically has thriving populations of a few wild species. In rain forests and swamps, the tough conditions force wildlife into narrow niches—producing lots of species.
Huston notes that America cleared about 100,000 square miles of wild forest in Ohio and Indiana during the 19th century, and apparently lost no wildlife species. Neither Ohio nor Indiana today harbor any unique native plant species. In contrast, Florida has 385, Texas 389 and California 1517—because those states have lots of poor-quality land.
The world’s big reservoir of biodiversity is the tropics, where tropical forests harbor 60-80 percent of the world’s various wild species. (Estimates of tropical species keep rising.) This is hugely important for agricultural policy, because the world’s big food gap is in the fast-growing, densely-populated tropic countries.
Sustainability from Technology
Agricultural research is the most important sustainability component under humanity’s direct control—and we are failing to make the appropriate investments. Remember, we don’t have to keep tripling farm output every 50 years into the future. We only have to do it once more.
Can we realistically expect to triple farm productivity again? The accepted expert on the theoretical crop yield limit is C.T. deWit of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He estimated the limit at about 15-22 metric tons per hectare of cropland. The top U.S. corn yields are already over 20 tons per hectare. However the current world average crop yields are far lower—only about 2.6 tons per hectare of wheat, 3.5 tons per hectare of rice, and 3.7 tons per hectare of maize. Crop yields in the Third World have recently been rising by roughly 3 percent annually and in the U.S. by more than 4 percent.
We can expect that biotechnology and other technologies will continue to raise the yield potential of more of the world’s land toward their full potential. Moreover, as more countries become more affluent, we can expect more of the land to be supported with the capital, fertilizer menus and intensive management which have already produced high yields in the U.S., Europe and China.
deWit saw agriculture not as a matter of diminishing returns but as the serial elimination of constraints. When we can plant early in the season, using seeds with high potential, provide the complete roster of nutrients, eliminate weed competition, control insects and diseases, and take fuller advantage of the sunlight and moisture, then a high proportion of the world’s cropland should come far closer to deWit’s maximums.
To show how this plays out in the real world, new U.S. corn hybrids can tolerate being crowded at 50,000 plants per acre, five times as densely as we used to plant. This raises yield potential to 19 tons per hectare (300 bushels per acre). It also helps shade out weeds and reduce soil erosion. The new varieties have shorter stalks that put more of their energy into grain. They also “flex”—in dry years they produce smaller ears instead of barren stalks. At such high yields, researchers are finding they must add more chlorine; the chlorine that normally comes with the phosphate is not enough.[10]
When we can feed the resulting ample supplies of grain and forage to livestock and poultry that have added growth hormone, comfortable surroundings, and protection from diseases, the resulting feed efficiency will have the effect of raising crop yields still further. Bovine growth hormone will safely increase the world’s dairy feed efficiency, making it possible to provide more milk for India without plowing down wildlife. Pork growth hormone will cut feed grain requirements per pound of lean pork by more than 25 percent. This is exactly what a more crowded and affluent planet will need!
Nitrogen Pollution and Environmental NIMBYism
Francis Childs of Manchester, Iowa, became the world’s all-time champion corn grower in 1999, with a record yield of 394 bushels per acre.
However, the afterglow didn’t last long. Mr. Childs picked up a recent copy of his local paper, the Des Moines Register, to find a story headlined “Nitrogen Use Clouds Corn Crown.”
It seems Mr. Childs is now being blasted by the Iowa Environmental Council for using too much fertilizer. He used 400 pounds of nitrogen per acre on his record-setting competition plot. The Iowa average is 127 pounds, and the experts at Iowa State normally recommend only 100 to 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre
Linda Applegate, who heads the Council, said, “I know he isn’t putting this much nitrogen on all his land, but farmers are looking to him for an example. We have serious problems in Iowa with over-application of nitrogen. Our water suffers, and so does the water of our downstream neighbors.” (Mr. Childs uses about 200 pounds per acre on the rest of his corn acres.)
But high levels of nitrogen fertilizer don’t risk public health and don’t automatically mean downstream damage to our streams—but they do mean saving huge amounts of forests and other wildlife habitat.
Bob Aukes, a farm management consultant in Des Moines, says, “Mr. Childs is using only one acre to produce 394 bushels of corn, while his Iowa neighbors require 2.27 acres. If all Iowa corn growers mimicked Mr. Childs’ championship performance, more than 63 percent of Iowa’s 12 million corn acres could be set aside for wildflowers and pheasants…while holding total corn production constant. Or consider what more nitrogen fertilizer and other yield-enhancing inputs (including biotechnology) could do in terms of Iowa exports saving rainforests overseas!
Bob then challenges the Iowa Environmental Council to answer three questions:
- Regarding nitrogen runoff, where do we get more runoff, from one acre of Mr. Childs’ cornfield, or from 2.7 acres of average Iowa cornfields?
- Regarding soil erosion, where do we get more soil erosion, from one acre of Mr. Childs’ cornfield, or 2.7 acres of average Iowa cornfields?
- What is Iowa State’s recommended rate of nitrogen application for producing 394 bushels of corn per acre?
I’m not in favor of wasting fertilizer by letting it run off into the streams. Nor do I favor creating algae blooms and eutrophying lakes and reservoirs with excess N. But the current eco-frenzy about nitrogen is wildly overplayed.
First, doctors in 1945 made a mistake when they blamed nitrogen in drinking water for causing the famous Blue Baby Syndrome. Today’s medical evidence says Blue Baby is caused by severe gastroenteritis not nitrates. High levels of nitrate may aggravate Blue Baby, but won’t cause it. (See Alex Avery, Infantile Methemoglobinemia: Re-examining the Role of Drinking Water Nitrates, Environmental Health Perspectives, July 1999).
Second, nitrogen is absolutely vital to growing food. It takes 25 kg of N to produce a ton of wheat. You can put 400 kg of N on one hectare of land and grow 18 tons of wheat. Or you can spread out the fertilizer at 25 kg per hectare, and get the same wheat from 18 hectares of land. The major difference is that with low yield production you take 17 times as much land away from Nature.
Third, nitrogen in the water is not a soil erosion issue. The nitrogen mostly comes down drainage tile. A recent study of the hilly Coon Creek watershed in Wisconsin found that its farmers are suffering only 6 percent as much soil erosion as they lost in the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. And the Coon Creek farmers don’t even use much conservation tillage. Iowa farmers have probably improved their soil conservation even more than Coon Creek.
How does the Iowa Environmental Council suggest we feed a peak population in 2050 that will be 50 percent larger than today’s? With organic farms that yield 80 bushels of corn per acre? Where will that leave our wildlife?
Can Biotechnology Permit More Compassion in the 21st Century?
Much of the productive power of nitrogen and hybrid seeds has already been applied to get today’s farm output. Tripling yields again will require us to apply more knowledge, more effectively.
Biotechnology seems to be the most promising way to ease the land conflict between people and wildlife in the 21st century. Biotechnology is the big new knowledge breakthrough that is just beginning to be applied to agriculture. It apparently has more conservation potential than any agricultural technology in human history.
To mention just a few of the exciting new developments in agricultural biotechnology:
§ Swiss researchers, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, have announced the development of a high iron, vitamin A rich rice variety. Vitamin A deficiencies affect 400 million people worldwide and contribute to blindness in an estimated 14 million, mostly in rice cultures. Because rice contains phytate which inhibits iron uptake, 4 billion people in these cultures are also anemic. This new rice variety, which should be available in 2-3 years, would combat both of these deficiencies simultaneously.
(Sadly, the activists are already demonizing the golden rice as a mere ploy of agribusiness corporations to monopolize the global food economy. Vandana Shiva insists that the world doesn’t need golden rice. She recommends that chronically malnourished Asians just eat more chicken, dairy products, liver, and green leafy vegetables. This is the 21st century equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s purported “let them eat cake.” Ms. Shiva/Antoinette even has the audacity to suggest that golden rice could poison people with excess Vitamin A, never mind that the golden rice provides only Beta-carotene, not vitamin A. Never mind that a person would have to eat huge amounts of golden rice per day for months to the point their skin turned orange well before any vitamin A toxicity set in. Their opposition reveals their true anti-biotech colors.)
§ Canadian researchers have discovered that they can confer tolerance to salt in plants simply by engineering the over-expression of a single natural gene. Because the work was conducted in Arabidopsis thaliana, the plant equivalent of the laboratory mouse, the work will be easily repeated in virtually all of the major crop plants in use today. The degree of salt tolerance is remarkable, with the engineered plants able to cope with salt water 40% the salinity of sea water. The implications for better utilizing salt-contaminated areas or reclimating areas previously damaged by poor irrigation practices are clear, however, this technology must await viable strategies to ensure that the plants do not become opportunistic weeds, crowding out native flora of saline environments.
§ Two researchers in Mexico have found a way to unlock the productivity of billions of hectares of acid-soil lands in the tropics. The acidity liberates toxic aluminum ions which cut crop yields by up to 80 percent, on 30 to 40 percent of the world’s arable land, most of it in the tropics. Huge tracts of otherwise-good land in Brazil and Zaire have simply been left unused, growing only stunted brush and poor-quality grasses. But a gene from a soil microbe has given crop plants (tobacco, papaya and now rice) the ability to secrete citric acid from their roots. (This is a success strategy used by some of the wild plants growing on the acid soils.) Apparently, the new biotechnological intervention will overcome much of the “tropical disadvantage” which has kept regions like central Africa and South Asia so poor for so long. Moreover, they higher yields should help preserve tropical habitats.
§ Genes from wild relatives of our crop plants appear to be one of the most promising avenues for achieving safe, sustainable yield gains for the 21st century. Scientists have gathered hundreds of thousands of such wild relatives for the world’s gene banks. However, these wild relations are too different from the crop plants to cross-breed. The wild-relative genes can only be used through biotechnology. But what promise they contain! Researchers from Cornell University have recently used wild-relative genes to get a 50 percent increase in yields of tomatoes! (Tomato yields in standards cross-breeding programs have recently been rising by only about 1 percent per year.) The implications for phytopathology are obvious and enormous.
§ The same Cornell research team inserted two promising wild-relative genes into the top-yielding Chinese rice hybrids. Each of the new genes produced a 17-percent yield gain. Together, they offer the world’s rice breeders a sudden 20 to 40 percent increase in rice yields. It is no accident that China recently announced a new rice variety that yields 13.5 tons in test plots—more than double that nation’s 6-ton national average yield.
These are all examples of “high-yield conservation.” Since 1950, the rising yields of the Green Revolution have permitted farmers all over the world to triple their yields (and more) on the world’s best farmland. That is permitting the world to feed better diets to twice as many people, without taking any more land for farming (except in Africa).
The challenges ahead, both in humanitarian and environmental terms, are enormous. We must find a way to supply higher quality diets to a 50 percent larger population; preferably without destroying more of the world’s wildlife habitat. Our immediate challenge is convincing the public that this challenge warrants significant public investment. Agricultural researchers have justified their work in humanitarian terms. However, the stakes are much higher. The public seems to place as much if not more importance these days on environmental conservation. Agricultural research in productivity and disease resistance have at least as much conservation value as humanitarian and it’s our job to communicate this to the public.
Because if we don’t, the costs in lost biodiversity and wildlife habitat will be the legacy of our inaction.
###
Alex Avery is Director of Research and Education at the Center for Global Food Issues of the Hudson Institute, a think-tank headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry from Old Dominion University. From May of 1992 to December of 1994 he was a McKnight research fellow in plant physiology at Purdue University working on a project to develop drought-resistant sorghum varieties for the Sudan of Africa.
He represented the Center at the 1996 United Nations World Food Summit in Rome and was co-author of Farming to Sustain the Environment, a Hudson Institute briefing paper which addresses issues of agricultural sustainability from a practical and global perspective. This paper is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format at the Center’s web site under “Key Publications” or by contacting the Center for Global Food Issues at (540) 337-6354.
[1] United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization statistic, UN FAO Production yearbook: 1996. And World Bank, World Development Report 1997.
[2] C. J. M. Musters, H. J. de Graaf, and W. J. ter Keurs. Can Protected Areas Be Expanded in Africa? Science Mar 10 2000: 1759-1760.
[3] How Efficient are Modern Cereal Cultivars, CGIAR News Vol. 4, number 2, pgs. 2-3, April 1997. Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, Washington, DC.
[4] Dr. W.R.J. Sutton, Tasman Forestry Ltd., “The Need for Planted Forests and the Example of Radiata Pine,” paper presented at the symposium “Planted Forests — Contributions to Sustainable Societies,” Portland, Oregon, June 28th, 1995.
[5] FAO Production Yearbook, 1976, Table 1, “Land Use.”
[6] FAO Production Yearbook, Vol. 47, 1993, Table 1, “Land Use.” Note: most of the expansion was on productive and sustainable land in places like Canada, Australia, Paraguay, eastern Bolivia and Brazil. Most of the Brazilian expansion was not in the rain forest but in southern and central savanna regions. This is not to excuse the expansion of cropland in some rain forests (Ecuador, Indonesia, Brazil) or other fragile environments which should not have been needed.
[7] FAO Production Yearbook, Vol. 46, 1992, Table 3, “Population;” Table 106, “Calories;” Table 108, “Fat.”
[8] Roger Sedjo, personal interviews, 1992 and 1996.
[9] Dr. Michael Huston, Biological Diversity, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
[10] Gogerty, “More Plants, More Corn,” The Furrow, Deere & Co., Moline, IL, Jan. 1996, pp. 7-8.
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The War We Can’t Win Against Our Own Food System
By cgfi | October 25, 1999
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:
- Radically-declining birth rates virtually all over the world;
Enormous advances being made in the scientific knowledge of how to boost food production; - Vastly more affluence than any generation before has had, and thus more capital to invest in the roads, storage facilities, ships and research labs that encourage food production, distribution and preservation;
- An array of technologies-contraceptives, biotechnology, computers, satellite communications, cryogenics and a host of other technical advances-that can help to achieve a constructive balance between human needs and the ecology.
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 its farm output in the next 40 years.
Land — the Scarcest Natural Resource
But this intense increase in food demand 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 18-20 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 the 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 New Global Campaign Against Plant Nutrients
The latest eco-campaign is against plant nutrients. The U.S. supposedly has a crisis in water quality. The public is being told that vital plant nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus are environmental threats.
· Blue Baby Syndrome. Some environmental groups are demanding that the nitrogen limit in drinking water be lowered to from 10 parts per million to 5 ppm, apparently just to make it more difficult for modern agriculture to function. Never mind that the incidence of blue baby syndrome fell drastically during the very period when the use of chemical fertilizers and confinement feeding of livestock and poultry flourished. Never mind that the latest research indicates it is gastrointestinal inflammation and irritation which causes blue baby syndrome — not nitrates.
· Hypoxia. A White House task force has been appointed to resolve the hypoxia problem in the Gulf of Mexico. The hypoxic, or low-oxygen, zone in the Gulf doubled after 1990, from 3,500 square miles to 7,000 square miles. Agriculture, again, is being blamed. The presumed solution is to make Midwest farmers radically cut their use of fertilizer, and to “crack down” on big livestock and poultry farms. Never mind that hypoxic zones are characteristic of rivers that drain fertile lands all over the world. Never mind that the nutrients support rich fisheries. Never mind that cutting fertilizer use on the world’s good farmland would mean significantly lowering yields — and clearing forest for low-yield crops somewhere else in the world.
§ Manure as Toxic Waste. For 50 years, the critics of modern farming have held up organic crops fertilized with animal manure as the global ideal. Now the same critics are saying that “organic fertilizer” is “toxic waste”-if the animals or birds are being raised in a big confinement facility. Never mind that the big confinement feedlots and poultry houses protect the environment by collecting their wastes, and using them constructively to more sustainably raise the yields of feed crops.
· Volatilized nitrogen. Recently, the activist magazines — and even Science –have carried articles about the dangers of “too much fixed nitrogen.” (The Science article was authored by Peter Vitousek, a former graduate assistant of Paul Ehrlich, the ill-famed population scaremonger) They’re claiming that too many crops are being fertilized, and too many meat and milk animals are producing too much manure. They claim that too much fixed nitrogen might even change the global climate and our ecosystems. The U.S. National Research Council has already studied this possibility and dismissed it. The best recent study finds “surprsingly little change in the deposition of nitrogen.” The biggest negative impact is likely to be a slight disadvantage for wild legume plants.
· Complaints about Wonder Wheat. Recently the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center announced a major re-breeding of the wheat plant — done without biotechnology. CIMMYT says the new wheats have yielded up to 18 tons of grain per hectare, 50 percent more than any other wheats! The initial reaction cited in Science was distress that this would encourage high levels of fertilizer use. Never mind that it takes about 25 kilograms of fertilizer to grow a ton of wheat. We can grow 18 tons of wheat on one hectare with 400 kg of fertilizer, or we can clear another 17 hectares of wildlife habitat to grow one ton of wheat on each of 18 hectares.
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.
Fighting Human Malnutrition With Genetically-Modified Rice
The Rockefeller Foundation recently announced the success of its project to overcome two of the world’s largest sources of malnutrition with genetically-modified rice. Around the world, some 400 million people currently suffer a chronic severe shortage of Vitamin A. About 14 million of these people go blind every year, including about 8 million children. Rockefeller’s new “golden rice” contains beta carotene, which the human body readily turns into Vitamin A. (The beta-carotene literally turns the rice golden.) The new rice also has three new genes which overcome the chronic iron deficiency among people in rice cultures; 4 billion people suffer this iron deficiency, and the women are at increased risk of birth complications. (The phytate in rice tied up the iron in their bodies no matter how much iron they consumed; the new rice has phytase to free the iron. ) “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.
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 eight times as 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 fact is that 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:
- Organic farming for the world would mean clearing at least 5 million square miles of wildlife for clover and other green manure crops.
- Free-range chickens for the U.S. would take wildlands equal to all of the farmland in Pennsylvania.
- Reducing fertilizer usage in the Corn Belt would mean clearing many additional acres of poorer-quality land in some distant country to make up for the lost yield.
- Blocking free trade in farm products and farm inputs will probably mean clearing tropical forest for food self-sufficiency in Asia.
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.
- Brinkley notes that farmers are still the most indispensable people.
- He shows a cute little girl in Taiwan, and points out that her mother wants her to have meat and milk in her diet so she will grow strong and vigorous. Who could oppose that?
- The ads show families of deer and wild birds, and note that “the higher yields achieved by modern farmers are providing food — and in some cases even shelter –for families around the world.”
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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