Tag: pesticides myths
The Nine Most Dangerous Myths About Pesticides and High-Yield Farming
By admin | December 1, 2004
Presentation in New Delhi, India for a Seminar on Pesticides: Myths, Realities, and Remedies
Dennis Avery
It is a tremendous privilege to be in India, a key site of the Green Revolution, to discuss pesticides, the modern miracle of high-yield agriculture, and the future of our world.
For thousands of years, mankind was constantly threatened by hunger and famine. Ancient civilizations were often destroyed by crop failures. Graneries were stocked for “the lean years” whenever possible, even though rats and beetles ate much of the stored grain; no one knew when the next drought or plague of locusts would create the next hunger emergency.
Paleontologists tell us that the skeletons of our prehistoric ancestors reveal a high level of violent death—nearly 30 percent among males and about 15 percent even among females. Since many violent deaths don’t leave skeletal evidence, that means huge numbers of prehistoric people died at the hands of their fellow men. Most of the fighting was over food: the richest hunting grounds, the favored river valleys full of wild rice, the best groves for finding tree nuts.
After humans learned to farm, they fought over cropland. As recently as World War II, Japan invaded Manchuria, in part for its cropland. Hitler told us he invaded the Soviet Union so his German farmers could take over the fertile fields of the Ukraine.
The world been largely freed of hunger-driven violence and the almost constant fear of famine only since the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Even now, in Africa where the Green Revolution is only now beginning to express itself famine stalks the land during the drought years.
In the densely populated highlands of Rwanda, it was only ten years ago that a lack of rising crop yields contributed to genocide. The Hutus and Tutsis doubted there would be enough land to support both tribes. Neighbor wielding machetes against neighbor resulted in the murder of a million.
Only the must recent generation of humans has been freed for the first time in history from the chronic, traditional human fears of hunger, violence, and being crowded away from crucial resources.
How ironic that the well-fed children of the first generation of well-fed humans is now trying urgently to destroy the very high-yield agriculture that freed them from fear and violence.
The well-fed elite are attempting to persuade humanity to throw itself back into fear and violence with a cavalcade of myths, which are proving amazingly successful in the very countries where education should have made myths an untenable strategy.
They are being aided by the very journalists who have sworn to free their readers, viewers and listeners from ignorance and untruth. Why? Because the mythical scares gain the journalists more attention and prominence. Even some scientists have put the hope of bigger government grants ahead of sound research.
Let me offer what I believe are the most dangerous myths threatening the world.
Dangerous Myth #1: DDT Causes Human Cancer.
I put this as the most dangerous myth about the modern farming because this is the myth that started the movement to reverse the Green Revolution.
It was invented by Rachel Carson, the widely revered and even more widely read author of Silent Spring, in 1962. She had no evidence that DDT caused cancer, but she hated the pesticides that she thought were killing too many birds and bees. She said that DDT and “six or seven other” pesticides then in use would be proven carcinogenic. None have been so proven. In fact, the only proven carcinogen among farming’s widely used pesticides to date has been the lead arsenate, the deadly blue powder the modern synthetic pesticides have displaced.
DDT and its metabolites are long-lasting molecules, and they do build up in the fatty tissues of people, fish, and animals. So, how do we know DDT doesn’t cause cancer?
Primates have been fed more than 33,000 times the average daily human exposure to DDT during the heyday of widespread DDT spraying. The test was “inconclusive with respect to a carcinogenic effect of DDT in nonhuman primates.” That means the primates didn’t get cancer, even when exposed to massive doses of DDT.
Even today, more than 30 years after DDT was banned in the United States, huge numbers of urbanites are still terrified that they will get cancer from DDT residues. The federal government was recently forced by congress to spend millions of dollars on a massive test of women in the New York City area, where elevated breast cancer rates were being blamed on the DDT that helped New York and America eradicate malaria decades earlier. The results of the study were published in 2002. They concluded that the elevated breast cancer rates were due to more women smoking, and having their children later in life. Both are well-known cancer factors. The women of New York are still not convinced, and are demanding still more studies, which they hope will allow them to blame their cancer risks on a pesticide instead of on their own life choices and genetics.
The cancer myth lingers because modern medicine has eliminated so many other causes of death in the modern world. Cancer is one of the few things left for us to die from. All over the world, city people eating pesticide-grown food are living 30 or 40 years longer than their ancestors did,. They are also spending far less time being sick than did their forebears. But they still fear pesticides.
Humanity, which evolved one paw-swipe away from death, has few real un-chosen risks left—and thus few places to target its numerous fear genes.
Our cancer researchers, our medical professionals, and our food safety experts tell us that consumers need not fear pesticides. Yet organic food is the fastest-growing segment of the food industry in the richest, safest cities of the planet.
This is the most dangerous myth because it could lead us to renounce the use of the pesticides that protect our food supplies, both in the field and during storage, and bring back the famines that the pesticides have done so much to help us escape.
Pesticides are also helping to protect us from dangerous natural toxins such as aflatoxin and fumonisin that are far more deadly than pesticide residues. Britain recently pulled all of the organic corn meal brands from its supermarket shelves because all of them were dangerously contaminated with fumonisin, which causes cancer in rats. Our food safety standards normally permit pesticide residues at a rate one hundredth or less of the “no-effect” levels in test animals, and not even one-thousandth of the levels of anything that triggers cancer. However, the organic corn meals were contaminated with as much as one-third of the fumonisin that caused cancer in the test rats.
British authorities said the organic corn meals averaged more than 9,000 parts per billion of fumonisin, more than 20 times the new EU standard for the toxin. Twenty brands of conventional corn meal averaged a tiny 130 parts per billion, because they were better protected with synthetic pesticides than the organic corn crops. Better insecticides helped prevent damage to the seed heads, so the fungi could not attack successfully, and better fungicides meant fewer fungi to attack.
Dangerous Myth #2: DDT thins the eggshells of birds.
My second ranking myth also is based on DDT. This myth is a proven global danger, having caused more than 30 million human malaria deaths, and perhaps a billion ruined human lives from chronic, debilitating malaria. This is the myth that caused the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban DDT in 1972, leading to the banning of DDT in most of the non-tropical countries (after they had eradicated their malaria mosquitoes, of course).
Worse, the “righteous” concern of well-fed elites for the birds also led them to discourage the use of DDT in tropical countries where poverty was as endemic as the mosquito-born malaria, yellow fever, and dengue that kept the populace debilitated and poor, if not actually dead.
During the DDT hearing in Washington in 1972, Dr. Charles Wurster, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, testified that DDT was a danger to birds. Asked if a DDT ban would lead to more human deaths, he stated that the world had too many people. “We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”
The First World’s concern about birds has been so strong that it has often tied tropical countries’ foreign aid to their not using DDT, even sprayed indoors where it is not only the most cost-effective, long-lasting mosquito killer, but also the most cost-effective, longest-lasting mosquito repellent we have.
The myth about DDT thinning birds’ eggshells also came directly and wrongfully from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. She wrote, “Dr. Dewitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diets DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.”
Ms. Carson was lying. Dr. Dewitt’s study actually showed no significant difference in hatching rates between the quail fed DDT (80 percent) and the control quail (83.9 percent). When Dr. Dewitt tested pheasants, he found that those fed with DDT hatched more than 80 percent of their eggs, while the controls birds hatched only 57 percent.
What about raptor birds, the smaller myth that has persisted longest (being the hardest to disprove)? Researchers for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fed captive eagles heavy doses of DDT for months, and found no impact on the birds or their eggs. Canadian peregrine falcons were found thriving with 30 times as much DDT in their tissues as were supposedly threatening the extinction of U.S peregrines. Dozens of studies of birds fed large doses of DDT have failed to thin their eggshells. Some of the studies achieve thin eggshells-but by reducing the calcium in the birds’ diets. Stress, old age, and mercury pollution have all been shown to produce thin eggshells in the wild, but DDT has not.
Yet the myth of DDT causing declines in bird populations has been allowed to ruin a billion lives. Why?
Dangerous Myth #3: High-yield Farming is the Cause of “Overpopulation.”
The world’s population has sharply increased since the Green Revolution, from 3 billion to more than 6 billion. The world’s rapid population surge began in the 1950s, before the Green Revolution, thanks to the rapid spread of modern health care: vaccinations, clean water, sewage treatment, sulfa drugs, antibiotics, etc.
High-yield farming did not create the population growth, but on the contrary helped to create a virtuous circle of lower birth rates. Poor farmers the world over and throughout history have traditionally had large families. Kids quickly become useful on a farm—and parents needed two or three adult children to support them in their old age. With the threat of famines and epidemics, no one felt safe without five or six kids. Throughout history, the fertility rate was probably about six or seven births per woman.
High-yield farming, however, created more food security, even as it permitted more people to move to high-value jobs in the cities—where children are an expensive luxury. The countries that raised their crop yields the most rapidly also turned out to be the countries where birth rates declined most rapidly.
Births per woman in the developing world have dropped from about 6.2 in 1960 to 3.1 today, three-fourths of the way to population stability at 2.1. First World fertility has dropped to 1.7, and in many European countries it is at 1.2. Italy is now offering $1200 bonuses for families which have a second child.
It is the hungry countries that still have high birth rates In Ethiopia, the average woman still has seven births.
Dangerous Myth # 4: Pesticides are dangerous to wildlife.
Nothing could be more dangerous to the future of the world’s wildlife than getting rid of pesticides.
Virtually every tree and wild creatures alive on this planet today owes its existence to high-yield farmers and farm-science researchers. The Green Revolution technologies essentially tripled the crop yields on the Earth’s good cropland since 1960—and even so we are farming half the planet’s land not covered by deserts or ice. Without the Green Revolution, the wildlands and their species would already have been plowed down for low-yield crops.
The plant breeding, irrigation, and fertilizer of the Green Revolution would simply have created the perfect environment for insects, weeds, bacteria, and plant diseases without pesticides. Without pesticides, crops would have been decimated, and along with it, much of humanity.
Without veterinary pharmaceuticals, our livestock and poultry would have had their energies and feed efficiency ruined by diseases and by internal and external parasites. As they still are in Africa. Without chemistry, we’d be starved and stunted for lack of high-quality protein and the micronutrients we get from livestock products.
The well-fed elitist children announce that the world should go back to organic farming to produce “natural” food that it claims, without any proof whatsoever, would somehow be more nutritious. But organic farmers’ yields in the First World are usually 20 to 40 percent lower than high-yield farmers’ yields. More wildlands would have to be plowed down for crops.
In addition, there is the “organic fertilizer penalty.” The world has less than half enough organic nitrogen to nourish its crops. Farmers globally use 80 million tons of nitrogen per year that’s taken from the air through an industrial process. Giving up that industrial fertilizer would require fertilizing our crops with the manure from another 7-8 billion cattle. Where would we get the forage? There isn’t enough land on the planet to feed the expected 8 billion people plus another 8 billion cattle. The forests would be cleared—to produce manure. What a ghastly prescription we are getting from the children of the elites.
Pesticides, badly used, can threaten birds, bees, and other wild creatures. However, pesticides properly used are the most important protection for wildlife habitat. Ultimately, it is the amount of habitat we can leave unplowed that protects the wildlife.
Only high-yield agriculture protects both people and Nature.
Dangerous Myth #5: Modern farming is Unsustainable.
The farming-ignorant children of the well-fed elitists crusade against high-yield farming with the claim that it allows too much soil erosion.
Let’s think about that soil erosion claim logically. If the high-yield fields get three times as much yield, than we can get the same amount of food by planting only one-third as much land. One-third as much planted land should mean one-third as much soil erosion.
If we need only one-third as much land, moreover, we can concentrate our crops on the land with the least erosion potential—and we do. That means high-yield farming must allow less than one-third as much erosion as would a global mandate for organic farming.
Finally, we must look at a recent marvel of accidental technology called conservation tillage. During the first world oil shock after 1974, farmers trying to conserve diesel fuel discovered that the newly developed chemical weed killers—the herbicides—could control weeds even if they didn’t plow their fields. They could just disc the top inch of topsoil to create a seedbed, and it took far less diesel.
Then they discovered that discing the crop residue into the soil surface created billions of tiny dams that defied the efforts of wind and water to carry soil away. Erosion per planted acre was reduced by 65-95 percent, with lower production costs. Water retained in the fields often doubled, because the residue encouraged it to infiltrate instead of running off. Soil microbes and earthworms doubled, too, because they fed on the residues. Conservation tillage was born.
Conservation tillage is now being used on hundreds of millions of hectares, around the world. Its latest expansion has been here in South Asia, where it not only reduces erosion and increases soil moisture, but radically speeds the preparation of wheat land after a rice crop. That allows the wheat crop to mature before the worst heat of summer.
One important soil study in the American state of Wisconsin found that a highly-erodable farming region is now suffering only 6 percent as much erosion as it did during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s.
Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history. The study’s author, Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA, says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. They lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.
The Soil and Water Conservation Society of America says modern high-yield farming is the most sustainable in history, thanks to high-yield seeds, irrigation, chemical fertilizers, pesticides-and especially conservation tillage.
Dangerous Myth # 6: There is already plenty of food to go around.
Population is like a train, it has momentum. When the brakes are applied, it still has a long stopping distance. World population is likely to increase further in the next three decades, from 6.3 billion to between 8 and 9 billion, before it stops and then retreats.
Even more importantly, humans throughout history have displayed an urgent hunger for high-quality protein. In India, this is reflected primarily in the very strong growth in the demand for milk. India’s annual consumption of milk has risen nearly 25 million tons here since 1990. All over the world, as incomes are rising strongly, the demand for meat, milk and eggs is amplifying the demand for farming resources.
Thanks to technology, free trade, and democracy, we can expect incomes to grow more rapidly in the next half-century than ever before. India and China, with the two largest populations in the world, are now both expanding their incomes faster than any big countries in world history. By 2050, we can expect the world to have 7 billion affluent consumer buying meat, milk, and eggs, rather than the 2 billion or so affluent consumers the world has today.
The world demand for farming resources will more than double by 2050. We will need not only the pesticides and fertilizers we use today, but twice as much yield per hectare of farmland as we get today. Whether it comes from biotechnology, chemistry, physics, or some other scientific source, we must at least double the world’s crop yields again in the next several decades. The alternative is to watch human poverty, hunger, and the needless destruction of wildlands increase.
Dangerous Myth #7: High-yield seeds risk destroying the world’s natural biodiversity.
Traditional farmers used to plant thousands and thousands of locally developed seed varieties. Today, they tend to plant a few specialized, high-yield seed strains developed by universities and seed companies. The activists say that we must stop this march of seed uniformity before some genetic or natural disaster creates a huge famine disaster.
Fortunately, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is being created to assist the world’s gene banks. These gene banks already have most of the world’s farm crop diversity in their hundreds of thousands of selections. The Trust will help them protect that diversity. The latest storages keep their seeds at -18C to -55C, so they need to be regrown only once every 50 to 100 years instead of every five or ten.
Other good news: The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico has demonstrated we can restore or even amplify crop genetic diversity through “wide crosses” between the traditional, modern and wild wheat seeds in the gene banks. Over the past 15 years, CIMMYT researchers crossed banked wheats that represented the original wild parents of durum wheat and then crossed their progeny with another wild wheat. This effectively duplicated the natural events that originally gave rise to bread wheat some 10,000 years ago.
These efforts are far more effective for people and wildlife than turning half the world’s scarce cropland into a giant low-yielding gene museum.
Dangerous Myth #8: Affluence and fertilizer production are destroying the planet with too much CO2.
The Earth’s average temperature has increased about 0.8 degree Celsius since 1850. The children of the well-fed elites are telling us it’s because humans are emitting too much greenhouse gas, from factories and autos, rice paddies, and fertilizer factories. They say we’re overheating the planet. The well-fed elites tell us we must give up fossil fuels, or the planet will become too hot for humans to prosper.
They have no evidence of this, however, beyond the fact that the planet has warmed and that there is more CO2 in the air. The computer models predicting drastic warming are completely unverified. And unverifiable.
The planet warmed in two surges, one from 1850-1870 and another from 1920-1940. These warming periods came before humanity emitted much CO2. Since 1940, the Earth has not gotten significantly warmer despite a huge increase in CO2 emissions and more rice and cattle production.
The lower atmosphere (up to 10,000 meters) that the Greenhouse Theory says must warm before the Earth’s surface hasn’t been warming much at all. Instead, our satellites show a very modest linear upward trend since 1979—about 1 degree C per 300 years! Even that small increase may be an artifact of a recent, natural El Nino event in the Pacific. The satellite readings had virtually no upward trend before 1998. The trend for 1979-1999 with the El Nino year deleted is tiny—0.0003 degrees C.
Meanwhile, in the last two decades scientists have found from the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores that the Earth has a moderate, natural 1500-year climate cycle driven by changes in the sun’s irradiance. The 1500-year cycle has also been found in seabed sediments in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, in cave stalagmites from Ireland to Oman to South Africa, and in carbon-dated glacier advances and retreats all over the world.
The Medieval Warming and the recent Little Ice Age were the two halves of a moderate climate cycle that goes back at least 1 million years.
Based on the million years of the cycle, we are 150 years into a moderate, unstoppable, natural warming that could last another 600 years. It will be followed by either another Little Ice Age or a big Ice Age.
Why would we expect a climate, which has been cycling up and down for 1 million years, to remain stable in the 21st century, with or without fossil fuels? The Greenhouse Effect may be real, but the evidence says it’s not very important. The Modern Warming started too soon, has been too abrupt and too erratic, and has too little warming in the lower atmosphere to blame on CO2. However, it fits the pattern of the 1500 year cycle very neatly.
Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly millions of years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species. But over the past 150 years, we’ve already had that much warming—and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result. Trees and plants are cold-limited, but they are rarely heat-limited, so our forests have become more diverse in the past century. Most species extend their ranges as the cold-tolerant species hold theirs.
Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and the physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.
Will there be more and worse droughts? We don’t know, but there are always droughts somewhere. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. That means conservation tillage will become even more important.
Will malaria sweep over Europe? History says malaria was rampant in Europe and North America until after World War II, when window screens and DDT allowed it to be eradicated. If their temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, they’ll still have window screens and pesticides-and I am quite sure that if the First World is at risk, the elite will be more amenable about doing whatever it takes, including DDT. However, remember that the medical doctors of the world have had to beat back a proposed worldwide ban on DDT within the last three years, and the UN machinery is still straining to produce that result.
Dangerous Myth # 9: The Children of the Well-fed Elites Are Benevolent
The same well-fed elitists have been pushing an organic farming mandate that would be unable to feed more than half the world’s current human population—apparently not realizing that the hungry people would destroy the remaining wildlife before they grew too weak to slash, burn, and hunt.
And they are against biotech in food production—although they are happy enough to have it in their personal medical arsenal. Two years ago, the children of the well-fed elites told the governments of famines-stricken countries in southern Africa that American food aid was “poison.” This was the same biotech corn that Americans have been eating in their breakfast cereals and snack foods for a decade with no documented danger whatsoever. This is essentially the same biotech corn that the government of the European Union has now belatedly approved for sale in the sanctified precincts of the EU countries.
We don’t know how many poor Africans starved as a result. Fortunately, it was less than the 30 millions deaths we must already lay at the door of Rachel Carson’s ghost.
How many additional people would die if the world suddenly shut off the fossil fuels and rationed the electricity for schools and hospitals, the heating oil for homes, the fuel for ambulances? How many more forest trees would be cut for firewood? How many more women would die of lung disease from the smoke of their unsustainable cookfires?
The Arrogant Selfishness of the Well-Fed Elites
Why are the First World elites trying to push low-yield farming? Apparently, they would like a world with fewer, poorer people. Remember that classic book sponsored by the wealthy industrialists of the Club of Rome’s book, Limits to Growth. The eco-movement has always said there were too many people, and fought against affluence for more people.
Such constraints might be justified if the world were truly a lifeboat without adequate resources for all of its passengers. Instead of a lifeboat, however, we live on a planet, and one of the most important resources is humanity’s ability to learn and use technology— including conserving technologies such as the herbicides which are making humanity more sustainable through conservation tillage.
Africa today averages only about 2300 calories per capita per day, compared to Europe’s 3400, and Africa’s average is declining. The International Food Policy Research Institute warns that by 2020, current farming and population trends would leave Africa with more than 200 million malnourished people—even after African farmers clear wildlands equal to the land area of France.
Africa averages about 13 grams of animal products per capita per day, compared to about 60 grams of livestock products per capita per day in Europe. This means that many, perhaps most, African children are suffering from key deficiencies in amino acids, zinc, and iron that can stunt their growth, cause such nutritional diseases as rickets, and retard their cognitive development.
Somehow, I think that if 200 million Europeans were starving and its children stunted, even after Europe had destroyed European wildlands equal to the land area of France for additional low-yield farming, Europe would have welcomed the development of genetically enhanced crops.
I think the well-fed elites have mainly been concerned about losing their own wealth and access to resources—in a world they mistakenly see as having too few resources to go around. Their fear of overpopulation is driven by a fear that the extra people would take their wealth instead of creating the new wealth that economic growth has historically produced.
In a world of increasing human knowledge, the environmental movement is revealed as inhumane and immoral. I have little doubt that if the anti-technology elites succeeded in shutting down the energy systems, and the chemistry laboratories, and the biotech fields, the world would all too soon look again as it did in prehistory when nearly half the humans died violently at the hands of their neighbors.
Only in the most recent era of world history, since World War II, has the world largely gotten beyond the geopolitics of envy. (If, indeed, Moslem extremism is not itself an exhibition of that envy, and it may be.)
The danger is not so much that Nature will be shortchanged as that humans will forget how to be humane. That is why civilization has had such a high value on human life. Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden remind us that we abandon that precept at everyone’s peril.
We must rein in the arrogant ignorance of the children of the well-fed elites. We must defeat them in the public debates and at the polls. We must reclaim the right to pursue the technological abundance that already supplies our food, our medical care, and most of our attractive lifestyle choices—while preserving our wildlands.
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