The world’s farm pesticide death toll has been cut radically with biotech seeds that carry their own internal pesticide. A new study in India has found that biotech cotton has reduced pesticide spraying by 50 percent, and spraying of the most toxic poisons by 70 percent. The reduced spraying is helping avoid “several million cases of pesticide poisoning in India every year.”

This is important progress—which should be enough by itself to embarrass Greenpeace and the other anti-technology groups opposing biotech. But the big news on the biotech crops is that they’re slashing the toll from farmer suicides, perhaps by a million deaths per year. Suicides have been the primary cause of the WHO’s estimated 10 million annual deaths from pesticides. The most frequent cause of rural suicides is debt, often because the farmer’s rice or cotton crop has failed and he has no way to pay back loans or feed his family. All he has is his ruined fields, which lie there mocking his attempts at success.

Even though the vast majorities of accidental farmer pesticide “poisonings” are mild, and pass quickly, they are unpleasant and some have lasting effects. Some professionals say about two-thirds of the acute pesticide poisoning deaths in the developing countries are intentional. The World health Organization tells us that in Sri Lanka, 70 percent of the farmers who commit suicide choose pesticide poisoning. In China, the percentage of farmer suicides by poison is 60 percent, in India 30 percent. And these are only the victims treated in hospitals. We have poor statistics on the number of farmer suicides because the farmers are rural, often far from medical care; and, there is always family reluctance to admit the shame of suicide.

Bollworm losses in India typically take half the farmer’s crop and often 90 percent. When Bt cotton was introduced, the insects were showing resistance to parathyroid, organophosphates, carbomates and cycledienes. India seemed likely to lose not just its cotton farmers, but the millions of textile jobs for its urban workers too. The suicide potential was vast.

A study in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry reported that pesticide self-poisoning had “become a fashion in the entire Sunderabad region [in the center of India], and is fast replacing hanging and immolation [setting oneself on fire].”

The Bt cotton contains a natural pesticide found in soils around the world. The bollworms are more likely to be killed by the biotech application because it’s not just sprayed in their general direction, they swallow it. That sharply reduces the development of resistance. Ultimately, if Bt resistance does develop, other pesticides could be delivered through similar biotech seeds.

Crop failures have always been a widely recognized problem for all farmers, but in the old days, farmers diversified their crops and spread their risk the low-yield way. Mostly, they could barely feed their own families, but family food security was the top priority. Today’s high-tech farming requires special seeds and purchased inputs to deliver the higher per-acre yields—but that feeds more people, saves more land for wildlife, and provides a better life for the families in the farming community.

The new problem is the concentrated financial risk for the farmers. This risk became intolerable for many when insects began to develop resistance to the more common pesticides. Indian cotton farmers found themselves spraying a dozen times per season, spending far more for the chemicals—and still losing their crops. Chinese rice farmers were faced with similar epidemic problems of such insects as stem borers and leafhoppers.

Will the quadruple benefits of fewer crop sprayings; lower costs, higher yields, and more financial security—plus reduced misery that leads to suicide—finally soften the hearts of anti-technology activists? Stay tuned.

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—I learned last week how to live longer.

 

Four of us had wrangled through 90 minutes of public debate in New York City about food regulation. In a forum sponsored by the Smith Family Foundation, we were essentially arguing about organic versus conventional farming.  

 

• Michael Hansen of Consumers Union continued his decades-long contention that farm chemicals make our foods dangerous and unsustainable. (Never mind the century of lengthening life spans and no age-adjusted cancer increase—except among smokers.)

 

• Curtis Ellis, producer of the movie King Corn, claimed most of our corn goes to produce meat and canned sodas that “help make us fatter.”

 

• Will Vogt, of Progressive Farmer, said the farmers will produce whatever kind of food we demand—if we can just agree on what type of food that is

 

• Dennis Avery, lonely advocate for higher-yield farming, said it’s the only way to feed 9 billion affluent people in 2050—without plowing down millions more acres of forest to get more cropland.

 

After Hansen condemned pesticides, I noted that conservation tillage is the most sustainable farming system in history;  it cuts soil erosion—the farmers’ arch-enemy—by up to 95 percent!  But no-till depends on herbicides to control weeds instead of plowing.  Organic farmers refuse to use the herbicides, so must suffer the continuing erosion,.

 

I also said the world’s farmers are facing their biggest challenge in history:  providing more than twice as much food and feed by 2050. This means tripling the world’s crop yields per acre, again, and quickly. Organic farming has lower yields, and there’s a crucial worldwide shortage of organic nitrogen.

 

My fellow panelists weren’t willing to give up their food safety and obesity scares just to save wildlife. They went back to minutia, such as one farm wife whose non-Hodgkins lymphoma the doctors said “might have been caused by pesticides.” Except there’s no consistent evidence linking pesticides to this cancer, despite reams of studies.

 

I also pointed to Dr. Bruce Ames of Cal-Berkeley, who found that 99.99 percent of all the carcinogens we swallow are natural pesticides that Nature put in the fruits and vegetables to fend off diseases, insects and herbivores. Hansen grumbled, “That’s been disputed.”  Disputed by whom? Ames recently won the National Medal of Science, largely for that work.

 

After the debate, we went out to dinner with the Smith family and friends—but were still sniping across the table.

 

Two of the New York guests finally resolved the debate. One was a breast cancer surgeon, the other an epidemiologist at Columbia University. The two women asked, “Do you really want to know how to live longer in the modern world?”

 

Of course we did. Everybody does.

 

“First,” they said, “don’t smoke. Second, wear your seatbelt. Third, choose your parents carefully, because many diseases—including several types of cancer—have a hereditary link. Fourth, get plenty of exercise. Fifth, women increase their breast cancer risk when they delay childbearing.” 

 

The final known factor in reducing cancer is eating more fruits and vegetables—no matter whether they’re organic or not. The one-fourth of our population that eats the most fruits and eatables gets only half as much cancer as the one-fourth who eat the fewest fruits and vegetables.   . 

 

Those are the secrets of a long life. The rest is trivial, unsubstantiated, or combat-related.

 

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