A new natural food additive, discovered in a laboratory accident, is now ready to slash by half the number of hospitalizations and deaths from food-borne bacterial poisoning across the Western World.

In July, salmonella traced to ground turkey hospitalized 78 people in 26 states and was blamed for one death. Nationwide, such deadly food-borne bacteria as E. coli O157:H7, salmonella, campylobacter and listeria claim an estimated 48 million victims per year, with 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths. The bacteria attack even more viciously in countries with cruder defenses.

Now, hundreds of thousands of anguished parents, relatives and friends will not find themselves standing by hospital beds because a victim innocently ate something that should have been safe—thanks to the new food additive.

That’s today’s good news. The bad news is that the other half of our food-borne bacteria victims are still at risk. We still refuse to use safe, cheap “electronic pasteurizing” to kill the deadly bacteria on our fresh produce—such as the E. coli-infested bean sprouts that recently sickened 3900 people and killed 39 in Europe.

Food Scientist Dan O’Sullivan at the University of Minnesota found the new natural food additive because he was looking at food bacteria microscopically and knew what he had when he found it. The new food additive is a “lantibiotic,” a peptide produced naturally. It kills gram-negative bacteria—including most of the harmful ones.

The new lantibiotic can be added safely to hamburger and other ground meats, egg and dairy products, seafood, salad dressing, canned foods and many other products. It’s nontoxic, easy to digest and doesn’t induce allergies. It’s also hard for bacteria to develop resistance to it. It has been patented by the University of Minnesota and will now be licensed for industry-wide use. Watch for it.

This kind of food safety advance was supposed to come from the government’s new Food Safety Act, which is hiring lots of new food inspectors to chase food-borne bacteria after they’ve already sickened or killed their victims. That’s a fool’s game because the bacteria are so pervasive, and often appear only fleetingly in the food chain. The food inspectors will spend millions of hours without preventing much danger. In 2006, contaminated California spinach killed 3 and hospitalized 276. The source may have been found—weeks later—in a nearby cattle pasture, with a fence that had been penetrated by feral hogs. But that doesn’t tell us how to prevent future E. coli O157 outbreaks since the E. coli O157 has been found in every cattle herd ever tested for it.

Unfortunately, our “food scare industry” loves the new law, because, not being at all preventative, it leaves them free to proclaim profitable “answers” such as organic food and “nature’s own” products that are not demonstrably safer.

Electronic pasteurization has been on the shelf for decades, safety-tested, approved by medical authorities worldwide and cheap. It even makes the produce taste better and fresher because it kills the spoilage bacteria too.  The world got pasteurized milk because of a tuberculosis epidemic in the dairy cows, which were spreading it through their milk. What will it take to reassure our consumers that technology is better than thousands of hospitalized children per year?

The best news for me, besides the thousands of people who don’t become ill, is that the food scare industry will now have only half as many food-borne illnesses to crow about in the press. Unfortunately, you will still be playing a needless game of Russian roulette with your family’s health when you buy fresh fruits and vegetables—even organic ones. Good luck.

This week’s headlines: Another huge, awful outbreak of food-borne bacteria. This time the worst, so far, in modern history; perhaps 2000 sickened, and about 20 dead. At least 500 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome.. That means liver damage—and potential death from kidney failure. More than 1000 cases of severe diarrhea. Usually it is the very young and the elderly who are most at risk of serious consequences, but this outbreak targeted young adults, mostly women.

All the known cases involved people who recently ate food in northern Germany—but scientists can’t find the source of the infections. They seldom can. The deadly bacteria appear without warning, and usually disappear before they can be traced.

At least this time we are being spared the sanctimony of the organic believers, since organic cucumbers imported from Spain were early reported as the most likely source of the infections.

People all over Europe are being warned away from eating health-protecting fruits and vegetables. Europe’s farmers are being devastated by the public’s renewed fear of eating produce at the beginning of Europe’s fresh season—and they’re demanding indemnities. The Spanish government is demanding apologies and payments for the losses suffered because Spanish farmers were accused—without undeniable proof—of sickening thousands.

In America, our response to food safety is predictable: we have a hugely expensive new Food Safety Act. We are hiring thousands more inspectors, who won’t be able to find the deadly bacteria in our food before they strike. After the people have gotten sick and/or died, many additional scientists will spend huge sums of public money failing to find the sources of the infections.

Soon, the food scare industry will be on the front pages telling us that this is the ultimate breakdown of Modern Farming, and demanding that we go back to Old McDonald’s farming methods. As they write they will know full well that the E.Coli bacteria is spread mostly through contact with infected feces. And, what do modern day Old McDonalds use for fertilizer? All food growing systems can and do harbor the bacteria, but using manure makes organic food slightly more dangerous.

All of this could have been prevented, but we refuse to use a fabulous technology that’s been known since 1904. Alarmists say it would make our foods “more dangerous.” More dangerous than liver failure? More dangerous than dead?

I’m talking—again, as I have for over 20 years—about electronic pasteurization. About streams of high-energy electronic particles basically sterilizing our ground meat and fresh produce, much as we defanged tuberculosis by pasteurizing our milk. No radioactivity. The necessary doses are so small that the food will even taste fresher—because the spoilage bacteria have been killed.

It has been approved by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Society and the medical authorities of virtually every country with a food science laboratory. But that’s not good enough for a country that resisted pasteurized milk for 40 years. It took a huge epidemic of tuberculosis to get our milk pasteurized, and an ardent group of know-nothings is still demanding the right to sicken themselves with raw, bacteria-laden dairy products

How many more must die before we protect ourselves effectively from the food-borne bacteria that have always contaminated food and always will. Preventive action is the only solution.

This is one time that being right brings me no joy.

Forty thousand researchers and clinicians have just written to the journal Science —through their professional societies—asking for broader and quicker testing of “new chemicals in our environment.” Eight societies, including the geneticists,

endocrinologists, developmental biologists and others say that 12,000 new substances are being registered with the America Chemical Society every day. They admit that not many of these “new substances” will ever make it into the environment.

Still, the societies are asking the federal government to broaden testing beyond toxicology, into such unproven dangers as trace levels of bodily toxins and potential endocrine disruption. This would, of course, employ far more of the learned societies’ members.

Do these professional societies think they have learned a lesson from the climate modelers? To whit: if you want more of your members profitably employed, get the Feds to give them lots of nice, salaried government jobs with hefty retirements—to solve some newly concocted media-driven scare The public is always looking for another scare to tickle their fear genes and the congress will happily fund such projects, with your money.

Climatologists are now the third-best-paid profession in the world, with many billions of dollars flowing into their research projects—since they elevated a net global warming of 0.2 degrees C over the last 70 years into an international emergency.

I recently got invited to a lecture on detoxifying my body, presented by a genuine “former professional tennis player.” I managed to resist the invitation, but I did go on the Web to look at the detox alternatives out there

Some of them were outright shilling for organic farming:

* “Most of the animals we eat are raised on factory farms. Seek a butcher shop where organically farmed meat is sold. It will be more expensive, perhaps that will help curb your consumption.”
* “Our crops of fruits and eatables are mass farmed . . . have led to less nutrient rich food products. . . . Organically farmed food will really boost your nutrient intake.”
* “Our water supply is also filled with impurities such as lead, rust and chlorine . . . purchase a Brand X water filter. . . . It is critical to your health”. . .

Then there are the product-pushers: Toxin detox capsules; Detox blood purifier capsules with Goldenseal, a potent, cleansing herbal combination; Liver Renew Capsules; and the Hot Seaweed Bath 3-packs (save 15 percent).

My favorite is the website of the ayurvedic healing system from India. “You need this ‘renewal’ periodically if you feel ‘a general lack of zest for life’, feel ‘spaced out’; if you have ‘a general sense of malaise’.” Naturally, they recommend cleansing your system under the care of an ayurvedic physician. Some of the advice they give is actually pretty sound: Stick to lighter, easier-to-digest foods, and eat lots of cleansing fruits and vegetables. However, their “detoxifying tea” is probably just tea.

I prefer to heed the wisdom of Dr Graham Colditz, a cancer epidemiologist from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, on the occasion of another cancer scare report being delivered to President Obama last May

“We already know what causes most cases of cancer, and it’s not pollution or chemicals lurking in our water bottles. It’s tobacco use and other unhealthy behaviors. . . . Maybe up to 4 percent of cancer in the western world is caused by contaminants and pollution and yet we are chasing new, unknown causes. . . . The damage is it distracts us, as a society, from actually acting on the things that are already in our grasp.” He mentioned giving up smoking, eating a pound of fruits and vegetables per person per day (cutting cancer risk by 25 percent), drinking less alcohol, and eating less red meat.

Thanks to our secure and safe food and water supply and world-class access to modern medicine, we are living long enough to get the diseases associated with old age. As baby boomers see 65 in the rear view mirror, they may treasure the remaining years enough to take Dr. Colditz’s advice.

Sources:

1. “Cancer Report energizes activists, not policy”; Maggie Fox, Reuters, May 10 2010.

2. Patricia Hunt, “Physicians Call for ‘Swifter and Sounder’ Testing of Chemicals” Washington State University, March 3, 2011

DENNIS T AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 2442; email to cgfi@hughes.net.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—On the10^th birthday of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, officials are lamenting that the world has made little progress in meeting them. No one should be surprised.

Goal # 1 is to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent. The UN says this clearly within reach if there’s the “political will.” “Economic death-wish” would be a better term. The UN wants us to give up 85 percent of our energy system, and use expensive, erratic solar and wind that would do little to reduce greenhouse emissions.

More importantly, we haven’t gotten the massive warming so long predicted by the computer models. If James Hansen had been correct in his 1988 predictions to congress, the planet would already some 2 degrees warmer today than it is. Nor did the computer models predict the Pacific Ocean’s 2008 shift into a massive cool phase, which now looks likely to cool the planet for the next 30 years. Let’s wait for the current La Nina to fade and see what sort of actual warming cycle we are facing.

UN Goal #2:  Convert at least 40 percent of agricultural lands to ecologically sustainable production, with minimized use of agro-chemicals, and expanded use of techniques that reduce soil erosion and run-off and that maintain high levels of biodiversity.

Holy contradictions, Batman!

The most deadly risk from pesticides is that Indian farmers will use them to commit suicide when they can’t pay their debts. Such suicides account for the vast majority of the 100,000 pesticide deaths per year. Accidental ingestion is the other biggie.

Meanwhile, the weeds, bedbugs, mosquitoes and viral crop diseases continue to mutate and proliferate. The chemical companies only make money if their pesticides can safely be approved for use—and suppress pests.

A 2007 University of Michigan study claimed organic farming could produce all the food the world will need, by getting nitrogen from green manure crops. Unfortunately the study overestimated the nitrogen such green manure crops could contribute to food production by at least three-fold. Across the developing world, the crop plants remain starved for nitrogen, and Africa is headed for a truly massive Dust Bowl with accompanying famine.

The UN says it wants “expanded use of techniques that reduce soil erosion and run-off.”  No-till farming is now being used on millions of hectares of vulnerable lands around the world, cutting soil erosion by up to 95 percent, and virtually eliminating runoff. But the system can’t work without herbicides—which the UN wants to ban.

Finally, claims of impending biodiversity losses are now becoming fashionable again as the global warming scare wanes. A decade ago, I estimated high-yield farming had saved about 7 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for more low-yield crops, about the land area of South America. Stanford University recently concluded high-yield farming has saved 6.6 million square miles of wildlife, about the land area of Russia. By far the biggest thing we can do to save biodiversity is to double the yields on the existing cropland—using inputs the UN wants to ban.

The only goal offered in the UN Millennium goals that might work is #4:  Reduce average animal protein intake among rich people by 20 percent. I’m not sure eating somewhat less meat would hurt us rich people, but the UN needs to revisit its math. Livestock eat huge amounts of stuff humans can’t digest—grass, cottonseed hulls, citrus rinds, rice straw. Along with whatever high-yield corn escapes becoming ethanol. The ecological gains from Meatless Fridays are likely to be as ephemeral as the environmental gains we’re supposedly getting from corn ethanol and Jimmy Carter’s solar panels on the White House roof.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Churchville, VA—I lost a debate on organic food last week—to the city of New York.

Intelligence Squared, a philanthropic foundation, which brings Oxford-style debating to American issues, invited me to be part of a debate on whether the organic food movement is a scam. The invitation was a big deal, with the audio carried nationwide by National Public Radio and the TV shown repeatedly on Bloomberg TV.

Each of us six debaters got seven minutes to present our best arguments.

Lord Krebs was formerly head of Britain’s Food Standards Authority.. He quietly pointed out that the UK bars its organic farmers from making any claims of greater food safety or better nutrition—because in 80 years they’ve never documented any such benefits.

The elite New York audience yawned.

Blake Hurst, a farmer from Missouri, noted that most of America’s organic food is produced on giant farms in California, where they avoid using pesticides by having Mexican immigrants pull the weeds by hand. With the subtraction from organic of every “unnatural” additive, the fungi, molds and bugs increase, Hurst said. His biggest environmental sin had been letting too much nitrogen run off his fields and down the Mississippi River—until he adopted no-till, the soil-safest farming system ever. With no-till, there is virtually no runoff from the fields.  Organic farmers still commit “bare earth farming,” he warned, because they refuse to use herbicides. Their plowing and mechanical cultivation encourage erosion.

The New Yorkers didn’t care.

I pointed out that high-yield farming has saved millions of acres of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield organic crops.  We’re farming 37 percent of the land area now, and we’ll need twice as much food when human populations peak about 2050.  To prevent mass starvation and wildlands destruction we’ll need to double yields again—with nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and biotechnology.

The New Yorkers barely restrained themselves from booing.

On the other side were Jeff Steingarten,  the Vogue food critic; a cheerful frequent traveler on the organic talk circuit  named Chuck Benbrook; and Urvashi Rangan of Consumer Reports.

Benbrook professed to be puzzled why nobody cares about the tiny and intermittent differences in nutrient levels between organic and conventional foods.

Ms. Rangan starred, drawing cheers and applause as she complained about “pools of pig poo the size of the Great Lakes” and “chickens that didn’t have room to turn around in their cages.” Apparently animal welfare arguments are resonating louder than pesticide scares in New York this season.

On our side, Hust remembered when the mother pig rolled over and crushed his 4-H piglets; gestation crates prevent that. His neighbor’s free-range turkeys often got their throats slit by weasels.

I said the best argument for confinement livestock was human disease risks. I quoted physiologist Jared Diamond, best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, that most of humanity’s epidemic diseases came from microbes shuttling between humans and their domestic critters. They mutated into cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox, among other deadly risks. Today, Asian flu mutates every year in Asia’s outdoor village poultry flocks, and wild birds spread it worldwide.

Urvashi said she’d never heard of such a thing. But then, she didn’t really want to concede another valid, scientifically documented reality.

When the debate opened, 21 percent of the audience had agreed organic was “marketing hype,” 45 percent said no, with 34 percent undecided. At the end, our side still had 21 percent for “marketing hype”—but all the “un-decideds” had swung against us.

New York may be hopeless. Will the rest of the country continue to back organic food if it takes 80 percent of the earth’s land area to produce our basic food supplies organically?

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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Vegetable growers in the Philippines are finding that no-till farming not only saves their topsoil but may even lessen the danger of landslides!

Four years of experiments in the Cordillera—the “salad bowl” of the Philippine highlands—show a 50–70 percent reduction in soil erosion because the farmers neither plow nor hand-weed. The region specializes in vegetables because its 6,000-foot elevation keeps the soil cooler and less humid than at sea level hear Manila. However, the steep slopes also mean high risks for both soil erosion and landslides.

Gil Magsino, of the University of the Philippines at Los Banos, says that even hand-weeding breaks up and loosens the soil structure. Then heavy tropic rains come to wash away the soil, its nutrients, and any fertilizer the farmers have been able to afford.

During 2009, in fact, Typhoon Pepeng caused landslides that killed some 200 people in the Cordillera region and U.S. military helicopters were sent in to help rush rescued landslide victims from the cut-off city of Baguio to regional hospitals.

A similar mudslide phenomenon hit southern Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2007, after a 12-inch rain. Four people were killed, small towns had to be evacuated, and soil sloughed off any unprotected hillsides. As it happens, that sand-hill region holds the second-largest concentration of organic farms in the U.S.—and organic farmers don’t allow no-till because it needs herbicides.

Sediment expert Stanley Trimble of UCLA had long studied the region’s Coon Creek watershed, and returned after the 2007 storm to view the impacts. “It was amazing,” Trimble reported. “I saw a narrow valley with no-till corn on one shoulder, no-till soybeans on the other shoulder, and in the valley was a sediment basin that had collected no sediment at all. The no-till had done a fabulous job.”

While U.S. no-tillers rely heavily on Roundup, Gil Magsino has been recommending that Filipino farmers spray between their crop rows with a mild solution of the herbicide paraquat. He says using strong herbicide solutions would kill the weeds and also their roots. The mild herbicide solution suppresses the weeds long enough to give the crops a head start—while keeping the weed roots intact below-ground. That helps hold the soil and its nutrients so the crops can benefit from them.

The farmers also gain from no-till’s low input costs. The herbicide costs far less than the diesel fuel otherwise needed to plow the fields. American farmers invented no-till during the first OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s for exactly the same initial reason—to cut fuel costs. Green manure crops, planted to cover the soil surface when no crops are growing, cut down on the need for commercial fertilizer. Then the herbicides kill the cover crops when the grain or vegetables are planted; otherwise the cover crops become weeds themselves.

No-till is currently being used on more than 100 million acres of crops world-wide. Among the biggest users are the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Indonesia. In Canada, no-till has replaced the old clean-fallow system on the semi-arid prairies. The fallow system left the soils open to wind and water erosion most of the time. With no-till, yields are higher and soil losses have been radically reduced.

Soil erosion is man’s most ancient and implacable enemy; no-till practically eliminates it.  No-till often doubles soil moisture in the fields; water sinks in rather than running off, and the crop residue on the surface keeps soil temperatures cooler. And no-till achieves all this while keeping crop yields high.  It is the most sustainable farming system that will sustain both the people and the wildlife in the 21^st century.

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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—“Environmentalists are standing in the way of feeding humanity through their opposition to biotechnology, farm chemicals and nitrogen fertilizer”—straight talk from billionaire Bill Gates at the World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines October 15^th  

 

Gates could have said with equal truth that the same environmentalists, by demanding organic-only farming, are risking the future of the planet’s wildlife. The world will need more than twice as much food by 2050 to feed a peak population of 8 billion affluent humans and their pets. Gates believes we should get that additional food from higher yields on the 37 percent of the earth’s land area we already farm, not by threatening massive numbers of wildlife species by clearing more land for low-yield crops.

 

Gates has thus delivered the most important speech on food and the world’s future since Dr. Norman Borlaug accepted his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Borlaug’s “miracle wheat” had made him the symbol of the original Green Revolution, which tripled yields on the world’s best cropland through scientific research after 1960. Dr. Borlaug spent the last years of his amazing life trying to extend the Green Revolution to Africa and many farming regions with marginal lands, where today more than 1 billion people try to feed their families with hunting and slash-and-burn farming.

 

Now, Gates has committed more than $1 billion of his personal fortune to improving crop yields in Africa and marginal farming regions. He announced in Des Moines another $120 million in gifts for additional farm productivity research, including support for drought-tolerant corn and pest-resistant sweet potatoes. Until this moment, Gates had not spoken out on the use of biotech and chemicals to continue raising world crop yields.

 

Britain’s Royal Society has also just produced a study, Reaping the Benefits:  Science and the Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture. Led by Dr. David Baulcombe, this report also concludes that biotech crops are one of the technologies urgently needed to avoid a global food crisis.

 

The eco-activists have claimed that organic-only farming could provide all the food needed—but only if humanity became vegetarian. Otherwise, there’s a severe global shortage of cow manure and “extra” land and water to plant vastly more nitrogen-fixing green manure crops. However, history tells us that only a tiny percent of humans voluntarily choose to be vegetarian.

 

The Center for Global Food Issues and the reports of the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology say even going vegetarian wouldn’t save enough land from the plow.  More research must be brought to the farms in the coming decades to avoid wildlife disaster. The saving grace to date is that we’ve farmed the best land, which had large numbers of a few species; expanding onto the poor soils will threaten huge numbers of species.

 

Ironically, another speaker at the World Food Prize Symposium—economist Jeffrey Sachs who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University—criticized agriculture as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Sachs, of course, was implying that either the world’s people must somehow sharply cut back on food and manufacturing, or cut human numbers by some enormous percentage.

 

It was an ironic reminder that the first Green Revolution lost its momentum after its funding from the Rockefeller Foundation had been drastically cut back. Ethicist Garrett Hardin tells us that Allan Gregg, a Rockefeller vice president, was one of the first to refer to population growth as “a cancer on the earth.”  The government agencies that took over support for the international agricultural research network after Rockefeller dropped it have not been able to stand up to the political clout of the green movement.

 

Once again private philanthropy may provide the final step toward a world of adequately fed people and abundant wild-lands, as it did during the first Green Revolution.

 

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

 

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It was 1950. World War II, with its 40 million deaths, was over. Doctors were conquering smallpox with vaccines, protecting millions from malaria and typhus with new pesticides, and treating infections with the miraculous new antibiotics.

 

Then we realized that humanity was still at massive risk—from hunger. With death rates falling radically, there was suddenly a real possibility that medical progress could be overwhelmed by lack of food. Experts predicted a billion people would soon starve in Asia, followed by similar disasters in Latin America and Africa.  

 

Enter Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. The young plant breeder from the University of Minnesota had been hired by the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation, because Mexico could no longer feed itself.

 

The semi-dwarf wheat that made him famous was a cross between Mexican wheats and a dwarf Japanese variety that didn’t fall over even under the weight of enormous seed heads. It was also disease-resistant. Given fertilizer, the new wheat could produce four times as much food per acre. It was also indifferent to day-length, so it could be planted widely across the world’s good soils. The International Rice Research Institute used the same semi-dwarf strategy for similarly high-yielding new rice varieties. .  

 

The Green Revolution was born. Over the ensuing decades, crop yields were tripled with improved seeds, industrial fertilizer, irrigation pumps and pesticides.  The Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug’s seeds, and the research stations and agricultural extension services he founded, saved a billion human lives.

 

Tragically, Borlaug’s triumph has been tarnished by complaints from the environmental movement that should have applauded him. The Greens complained the high-yield seeds benefited big farms more than small ones. Studies show both benefited, but the biggest gains went to billions of consumers worldwide through lower-cost food abundance. And to the wildlife that wasn’t displaced by their habitat being destroyed for cropland.  

 

The Greens complained the new seeds needed too much fertilizer. But high-yield wheat takes no more fertilizer per ton of food than low-yield wheat—high yields just grow the grain on far less land

 

Borlaug told writer Gregg Easterbrook that “most Western environmentalists have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. . . .  If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals. . .”

 

I suspect much of the environmental movement blames Norman Borlaug for preventing the massive famines that would have solved the “population problem” quickly in the 1960s—with starvation.  But the starving would have raped the wildlife habitat before they allowed their children to die. Today, we’ve solved the population problem with affluence.

 

Not surprisingly, Borlaug spent the last decades of his richly productive life working to bring the Green Revolution to Africa. He hadn’t yet succeeded when death claimed him. Fortunately, however, the challenge of a second Green Revolution has now been picked up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with enormous support from the Warren Buffet family.

 

Hopefully, they will be able to lead the completion of Dr. Borlaug’s work: feeding the hungry and saving the planet’s wildlife with science. It’s the only food-success strategy humanity has ever found. 

 

Sources:

 

Gregg Easterbrook, “Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity,” The Atlantic Monthly, Jan., 1997.

 

Badgley et al, 2007, “Organic Agriculture and World Food Supply,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, Vol. 22, pp 86-108.

 

Kramer et al, 2002, “Combining fertilizer and organic inputs in alternative cropping systems,” Agricultural Ecosystems and Environment 91, 233-243; Ladd and Amato, 1956, “The fate of nitrogen from legume and fertilizer sources in soils, “ Soil Biology and Biochemistry 18, 417-425; Harris et al., 1994, “Fate of legume and fertilizer N in  long-term cropping,” Agronomy Journal 86, 910-915.

 

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

 

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Rudolph Steiner, a founder of organic farming in the 1920s, started the “great organic nitrogen swindle” that threatens the world with hunger to this day. Steiner didn’t believe in nutrients, he believed in “vital forces.”  He said a cow has horns to send into itself “astral-ethereal formative powers.”  He claimed you could fertilize a whole farm by burying a handful of manure inside a cow’s horn for a year—so that the manure is “inwardly quickened.” 

 

The organic movement is still trying to swindle the world into believing the world can get enough nitrogen from animal waste and green manure crops to produce our food.   In 1978, two experts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded the U.S. had only 33 percent of the manure needed to support food production then. The rest of the world had far less pasture and manure per capita than the U.S. The world population was then 4.3 billion. Today, of course, human numbers are at 6.3 billion, on their way to 8 billion

 

Obviously, the world has only a small fraction of the organic manure needed to support food for today and into the future. We use all the manure we have. Commercial hog and poultry farms added tremendously to our ability to collect and use animal waste efficiently, no matter how ugly Greenpeace makes them sound. But we also add about 90 million tons per year of industrial nitrogen:  natural nitrogen, taken from the air around us which is 78 percent N. About 60 percent of humanity is surviving and thriving today on that aerial nitrogen.

 

Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba claims an all-organic U.S. alone would need the manure from another billion cows. That would force the clearing of 4–6 billion acres of U. S. forest to make room for their pasture.

 

The organic movement, however, continues to claim that farmers don’t need fertilizer.

The UN led a recent big-tent effort to lay out a 50-year blueprint for global farming. Originally, universities, agribusiness, consumers, governments and eco-activists were all involved.

 

At the end of five-years, however, the activists had outlasted everybody else. The report director, Robert Watson, assured us that farm chemicals had “harmed the soil structure,” though he gave no evidence. He even claimed today’s food was “less healthy” than food 60 years ago. Never mind that today’s people are living longer and healthier lives while eating it and no nutritional differences have ever been identified. Watson’s previous job was also anti-science—leading the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

In 2007, the University of Michigan issued a report saying that “organic farming can feed the world.” Unfortunately, their data contained a massive, fundamental error on nitrogen. Geologist Catherine Badgley cited a single study claiming green manure crops had put 150 kg of organic nitrogen into the soil, and two-thirds of that had been delivered to the grain crop. But the Michigan report is wildly inconsistent with a century of farming and agricultural research. The nutritive value of nitrogen fertilizer is rated at only about 33 percent and a whole raft of studies have confirmed that the less-efficient green manure system gets only about 20 percent of its N to the grain seeds.

 

Getting only 20 percent of the organic nitrogen into the seed heads, instead of 66 percent as the Michigan report claimed, would mean massive waves of organic hunger, nutrition-related disease, wars, and global agony.

 

Why push organic farming past what it can realistically do?

 

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