Tag: population
Presentation to the National Turkey Federation: The Moral Challenge of the 21st Century
By admin | February 10, 2004
Presentation to the National Turkey Federation: The Moral Challenge of the 21st Century
Dennis Avery
. . . farms obliterate empty places, ploughed fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts. . . and there are such great cities where formerly hardly a hut . . . everywhere there is a dwelling, everywhere a multitude. . . . We are burdensome to the world. The resources are scarcely adequate to us . . . already nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.
Quintus Septimus Florence Tertillianus, Roman citizen, bout 200 A.D., with a world population about 200 million
“. . . the Western World today is on the verge of the greatest ecological renewal that humankind has known; perhaps the greatest that the Earth has known. Environmentalists deserve the credit for this remarkable turn of events. Yet our political and cultural institutions continue to read from a script of instant doomsday. Environmentalists, who are surely on the right side of history, are increasingly on the wrong side of the present, risking
their credibility by proclaiming emergencies that do not exist.”
Greg Easterbrook, A Moment on Earth, 1995, p. xvi, with the world population 30 times as large and still increasing
“Here’s something for the Greens of the world to ponder: ‘genetic engineering may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries,’ Jonathan Rauch writes in The Atlantic Monthly. . . Noting that ‘world food output will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades,’ the author argues that ‘the great challenge’ is ‘not to feed an additional three billion people (and their pets) but to do so without converting much of the world’s prime [wildlife] habitat into second- or third-rate farmland.’”
New York Times, “Frankenfoods to the Rescue of Mother Earth,” Week in Review, Sept 21, 2003
For the past 40 years, human society has been in a unique anti-human mode. “Saving the planet” has been the watchword. For the first time in human history, kangaroo rats and flowerhead weevils have been deemed more important than people, because humanity had become so carelessly powerful that it threatened the whole environment. A million Africans (mostly children) have been, and still are, allowed to die each year of malaria rather than allow the use of DDT-indoors where it could be no threat to birds.
This orgy of anti-humanity was driven, almost certainly, not by Rachel Carson and her erroneous 1962 book Silent Spring, but by people-phobic Paul Ehrlich and his equally wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.
I think people certainly cared about the environment before, and will continue to do so. However, it seems clear now that the real motivating factor in much of our eco-fervor has been an irrational fear that our ways of living would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion poor brown and yellow people who don’t share Western culture or values. (And who might grab all the resources away from us.)
But the same moral codes that say humans are responsible for protecting Nature also say we’re also responsible for helping our fellow men. It doesn’t say we can become Druids, worship trees, and practice human sacrifice.
It would certainly be easier to leave room for wildlife if we eliminated all the humans. But that would be the conservation equivalent of “cheap grace.” Killing off our fellow men or enforcing billions of forced abortions are not moral solutions when we have the intelligence and societal skills to save both people and wildlife.
Fortunately, there’s good news for all in the 21st century. The population surge is nearing its end, and our resource base is increasing, not disappearing. Technological abundance is making it possible for the peak human population that we expect in 2050 (less than 9 billion) to live better than people do today, while doing less and less damage to the environment.
How can I say this?
Richer Means Fewer Wildlife Extinctions
The UN Environmental Program reports that the world lost only half as many species to extinction during the last third of the 20th century (20 among birds, fish, and mammals) as it did during the comparable period of the 19th century. Moreover, the UNEP says our rate of wild species extinctions is now as low as it was 500 years ago, when the world population was less than one-tenth what it is today (about 450 million).
The biggest reasons for the low rate of wildlife extinctions today are high-yield farming and high-efficiency meat production. High-yield farming has tripled the yields of crops on the world’s best farmland in recent decades. High-efficiency meat production has doubled the pounds of meat produced per acre of pasture and cropland in the past 30 years. While some activists rail against confinement feeding, moving the birds and animals indoors has made them more comfortable and increased their feed efficiency by 15-20 percent. It has also prevented the clearing of millions of acres of wildlife habitat for hog and chicken playgrounds.
We tend to forget that man has been using and abusing wildlife for eons. Stone Age man used to hunt birds and animals to extinction. North America lost more than 40 species of huntable birds and animals within a few years after the human hunters arrived from Asia some 14,000 years ago-including North America’s horses, camels, and elephants.
Equally bad, paleontologists tell us that up to 25 percent of the males (and perhaps 15 percent of the females) in primitive communities showed signs of violent death. They were essentially fighting over food: good hunting grounds and good farmland. Even the “peaceful” Anasazi Indians of the Southwest were eventually driven by long-term drought (associated with global cooling) from their scattered farmhouses into fortified cliff dwellings.
Only in the last 100 years, thanks to nitrogen fertilizer taken from the air, plant breeding, and integrated pest management, has man been able to support high populations of both people and wildlife in the same region. Only after World War II, when the Green Revolution extended high-yield farming over most of the world, did human society free itself from “food wars.” (In 1932, Japan invaded Manchuria for oil and soybean fields.)
The World Conservation Union today warns that more than one billion poor people are living in the world’s biodiversity hotspots (particularly tropical and mountain rain forests)-and trying to feed their children by hunting bushmeat and doing slash-and burn farming. We must either give these people high-yield farming or off-farm jobs if we hope to prevent massive wildlife extinctions in the next 50 years.
Yet the eco-movement holds up hunters and gatherers as the environmental models for the future.
Rich Countries Are Better for the Environment
Paul Ehrlich said the affluent people of the First World were: (1) the worst polluters in the history of the world; (2) would destroy half the world’s wildlife species in the next few decades; and, (3) would bring about the ruin of the whole planet. The eco-movement is holding up primitive people and peasant farmers as the models for conserving Nature in the 21st century.
Most of the Third World is already in the most polluting phase of industrialization- burning huge amounts of coal to smelt massive amounts of iron, cooking food with wood from trees that aren’t replanted and caring too little about water pollution.
Meanwhile, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling rhinoceros horn (a supposed aphrodisiac) and “bushmeat” from endangered gorillas and rare civet cats-harvested with AK-47s.
Mexico is losing three million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farming. More than half of the forestland cleared in Honduras in recent decades has been “steepland,” with a slope of more than 30 degrees; every few years, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.
How can the eco-movement present these hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future?
But there is hope for humanity and nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. A World Bank staff team has documented a bell-shaped curve in environmental protection. In the early years of industrialization, forests die and pollution surges. Rising populations and higher incomes demand more farmland and better diets. But when per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) a different set of factors take over. People are already well-fed and birth rates fall rapidly. With better inputs and management, crop yields rise, so less land per capita is needed for food. Diesel fuel, taken from under the land or sea, substitutes for firewood even as forests are replanted. Affluent people want cleaner air and are willing and able to pay for it. They begin to demand clean rivers, for both health and aesthetics.
The World Bank staff finds no hordes of high-pollution industries fleeing to unregulated Third World countries, nor any significant list of governments reducing their environmental regulations.
Richer Means a Cleaner Environment
Pollution trends are declining in virtually every affluent country. In England, air pollution has been declining since the 1920s, long before the “clean air” legislation was passed. In America, public sanitation has been improving since we began phasing out horses (along with horse manure and horse carcasses) in favor of trains and automobiles.
Remarkably, the waste volume from American homes today is one-third less than the waste volume from Mexican homes! This is due in sizeable part to the centralized processing of our food supply. Our broilers, for example, arrive at the store wrapped in sanitary, lightweight plastic-wrapped trays-with the feathers, heads, feet and many of the unwanted internal organs already separated out at the processing plant.
As you know better than anyone else, these poultry waste products are then recycled into livestock feeds, and many other products, far more effectively than they could be handled without the centralized processing and waste management.
The rendering industry is one of the largest and most critically needed recyclers, treating 50 billion pounds per year of waste that urgently needs to be treated, even if it were only going into a landfill. However, it would be a horrible waste if the products from the rendering industry were consigned to a landfill. It would take millions of additional acres of farmland to replace the nutrients salvaged and put to use through rendering.
21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable in History
Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago, with good reason: soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human society.
Environmental activists today rely on our long-held and valid fear of soil erosion to undermine our confidence in the sustainability of modern high-yield farming. They tell us that today’s high crop yields give only an illusion of a sustainable food supply because the farmers are “mining the soil.” That’s not the truth.
Thanks to chemical fertilizer, modern farmers no longer need to “wear out” their soils. In the traditional farming of the 19th century, growing crops often took more nutrients out of the soil than farmers could replace with manure. As yields and soil organic matter declined, the farm would be abandoned as “worn out.” (Or the depleted soils combined with drought to give us a “Dust Bowl.”) Today’s farmers use soil testing and industrially supplied nutrients to keep their soils rich and productive.
In addition, modern farmers invented conservation tillage. Sometimes called “no till,” this farming system eliminates plowing by using herbicides to control weeds, planting through the unplowed soil. It cuts erosion by up to 95 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria. Organic farmers refuse to use conservation tillage because they don’t allow themselves to use herbicides. Organic farmers are still forced to use bare-earth, erosion-inviting weed control techniques like plowing and hoeing.
Industrial fertilizers and conservation tillage are two of the major reasons why the Soil and Water Conservation Society of the U.S. calls modern high-yield farming “the most sustainable in history.”
Richer Means Upgraded Diets - But Less Population Pressure
The absolute best news for the planet is that the world’s recent population surge is nearly over. Since I started my career with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1959, the average births per woman in the poor countries of the Third World has dropped from 6.2 to 2.7, and is still declining rapidly. (The rich countries are at 1.7 births and declining too.)
This is apparently the first major change in global birth rates in all history. (The population surge was not caused by higher birth rates, but by lower death rates due to modern medicine.) Paul Ehrlich did not know in 1968 that the world would become so much richer and more urban. Poor farmers always have large families, while affluent urban couples always have small ones. As a result, the current world population of six billion will probably rise to a peak of between eight and nine billion about the year 2035, and then begin a long, very slow decline-as more and more people become rich and urban and have 1.7 children per woman.
The end of the population surge will ease the pressure on agriculture to some degree-but the continued rise of incomes (which has been strong and steady for more than 40 years now) will mean billions of additional high-income consumers. Most of the Third World will emulate Japan, South Korea, and China in the coming decades, industrializing their populations and generating more income and more attractive lifestyle choices. Instead of feeding high-quality diets to only one billion people as we do today, we’ll have to offer high-quality diets to about seven billion people in the future.
There’ll even be a pet challenge. America has 112 million companion cats and dogs today. A rich, urbanized China in 2050 may still have the one-child policy, but it will have no shortage of people with parenting instincts. We expect China to have 500 million companion cats and dogs in 2050, and woe unto the politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.
In Southern Africa, last winter, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. They convinced African government leaders not to distribute U.S. corn donated as food aid. America co-mingles corn that is genetically altered with conventional corn, since both are equally nutritious and approved as safe by three U.S. government agencies. However, the president of Zambia said the activists told him the U.S. corn was poison.
People who were boiling poisonous roots because they had nothing else to eat were denied food approved for safety by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The environmental movement has been broadly involved for many years in an even more deadly effort-to ban the use of DDT on the planet. The campaign against DDT has cost at least a million malaria deaths per year in the Third World-and tens of millions of lives ruined by the disease, the suffering it causes, and the disability it inflicts. There is no evidence that DDT harms humans, and only shaky evidence that it harms birds. Nevertheless, the eco-movement has tried to ban even the indoor use of DDT in malarial regions, which could not possibly harm wildlife. On the inside walls of homes, it’s by far the most cost-effective mosquito killer, and also the longest-lasting and most effective mosquito repellent. Fortunately, the World Health Organization has so far blocked the final ban, but just barely.
Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior? Does nature-worship always push society over that thin line?
The New Surge of Support for High-Yield Technologies
After the success of the Green Revolution became clear in the 1970s, a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation-that founded the key agricultural research stations in Mexico and the Philippines-spoke of his profound regret. He said that agricultural research had turned humanity into a cancer on the earth.
We know now that he was wrong. We know now that poor rural people always have large families and high death rates-while affluent urban couples have small families because they recognize the low death rates. (And the high cost of raising kids in the city.)
For 30 years, the First World has been terrified of an upward population spiral that never happened. For 30 years, the environmental movement took advantage of overpopulation fears to advance an anti-human agenda. Agriculture was condemned for “producing too much food.” Modern agriculture could get no credit, either for saving billions of people or millions of square miles of wildlife habitat. Now, with the end of the population surge, the activist campaign against biotechnology has brought the issue of high-yield farming to a head- and modern agriculture is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.
We at the Hudson Institute take some of the credit for the turnaround. In May of 2001, we presented at the National Press Club in Washington two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the then-latest winner of the World Food Prize, and the British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, as signers of our “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry.”
This remarkably broad coalition was led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, Chairman Emeritus of our Center, and the 1970 winner of the Peace Prize for his work on high-yield crops for the Green Revolution. The other Nobel Peace laureate was former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, directly representing the Third World.
The Declaration didn’t endorse any agricultural technology or system. It simply stated that the world urgently needs higher yields based on sustainable advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology-to save room for wildlife.
At the time of the Press Club event, we feared it had been a failure. The biggest media outlet to feature the event was the American Farm Bureau News. But in the months since that event, the concept of high-yield conservation has been praised by David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly carried an article lavishly praising both high-yield farming and biotech. More startling by far, the editorial page of the New York Times recommended the Atlantic Monthly article to its readers-in a newspaper which has been editorially praising organic food and condemning high-yield farming for decades.
The October 17th issue of the journal Science carries an editorial by Dr. Donald Kennedy, the magazine’s editor. Kennedy states that world hunger is now the overarching issue for world health-and concludes:
“Unless agricultural production is increased on the good lands, population pressures will cause farmers to move upslope and deforest the hillsides. That’s a double whammy: a loss for those families, and a loss for the environment. And on already marginal lands, GM technology may offer the best hope for producing crops that can withstand drought, impoverished soils and disease. For both these reasons, we’d better resolve the GM controversy.”
To understand the importance of this statement, the recently appointed Dr. Kennedy was introduced to the journal’s readers?on its own pages?by his old Stanford colleague, Dr. Paul Ehrlich!
Kennedy is now urgently endorsing the very agricultural research that Dr. Ehrlich has so long blamed for overpopulating his planet.
Canada’s Globe and Mail on Oct. 20 editorialized:
“GM food could be an especial boon to the Third World, where traditional farmers are eating up vast swaths of rain forest and other rich habitats. Just as the Green Revolution of the 1960s, 70s and 80s all but ended famine in the Third World by introducing high-yield crops, GM agriculture could help save what is left of these precious environments. It is odd, then, that the environmental movement has become so fixated on the threat it sees in GM foods. Yes, we need to be careful how and where we introduce them. . . . But we also need to remember the power of good they can do.”
These statements were true 10 years ago, and 30 years ago. But they are only now being made. I think the First World has become more serious about Third World hunger and poverty in the awful aftermath of the World Trade Center’s destruction. I also think the eco-activists damaged themselves severely by carrying their fear campaign against biotech foods to Southern Africa last winter. But the African hunger didn’t attract much media coverage.
I think the underlying factor that has seemingly created a sudden turnaround in the American attitude toward high-yield farming is the visible end of the human population surge.
That means modern farmers and their supporting industries have a better opportunity to tell their positive stories than they’ve had in 30 years. It probably means that animal rights activists and eco-terrorists will face more public approbation and less public tolerance. It should mean that the efforts to strangle high-yield farming and modern meat production with over-regulation can be eased by effective industry presentations to the public.
Half Again As Much Meat Demand in 2025
All of that comes in the nick of time because the worlds’ demand for meat and livestock produce will continue to soar.
Given the still-rising population, we expect that if per capita meat demand simply held steady, meat consumption in 2025 would be 25 percent higher. However, my Hudson colleague Tom Elam (formerly of USDA and Elanco Animal Health) notes that meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. He projects that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, Dr. Elam says this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025. (He expects a 31 percent increase in beef consumption, a 61 percent increase in pork consumption, and a 73 percent rise in poultry consumption.)
This meat increase will be good for children, since it provides them with high-quality protein and key micronutrients. Without livestock products, children do not reach their full genetic stature, and may lag in cognitive learning. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, thanks to the fact that birds and animals can nourish themselves on things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat is just about what it would cost in resources to get the same number of non-meat protein and calorie.
Dr. Elam realizes that such a major meat production increase will require higher grain yields (perhaps 30 percent higher), higher oilseed yields (25 percent higher?) and still-better feed conversion ratios. He says these will only be possible if we continue to invest in research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted. The current regulatory war against farmers, renderers, fertilizer makers and virtually anyone else involved in high-yield farming must stop.
Tom notes than the current “organic agriculture” cannot possible feed high-quality diets to the 21st century. Its yields are at least 20 percent lower, and often 40 percent below those of conventional farmers.
Worse, there’s a global shortage of organic nitrogen. The Danish government in the mid-1990s appointed a high-level technical committee to examine the impact of an all-organic farming mandate. The committee concluded that would cut Danish food production by 47 percent, because most Danish farmland would have to be planted to forage crops, for green-chop delivery to feedlot cattle, so the manure could be slathered thickly over the Danish landscape.
Dr. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba says America would need the manure from another 1 billion cattle to go all-organic. (We have 200 million now.) Since there are only 2.1 billion acres in the lower 48 states, the United States would have room for its cities, and manure production-but no room for food, forests, or Yellowstone National Park.
It’s hard to see that clearing the earth’s forests for enough forage for another 8 billion cattle is good for the environment-let alone water quality.
If it’s free range chickens and pigs you prefer, understand that their feed conversion is 15-20 percent lower, so they take lots more land for feed crops. And putting the world’s chickens outdoors would take 20 million acres of land just for their playgrounds (at 1200 broilers per acre). Putting the hogs outdoors, even at a crowded 4 hogs per acre, would take 250 million acres. Is that a constructive trade-off for nearly 300 million acres of the world’s wildlife habitat?
More Globalization, Not Less
Obviously, most of the increase in global meat consumption will occur outside of North America. It is also true that much of the meat consumption gain will occur in densely populated countries that will be critically short of land and water to produce their own livestock products cost-effectively.
Liberalization of farm trade remains a strong imperative, despite the recent collapse of the World Trade Organization talks at Cancun. I say this because the world’s big agricultural players will all need farm trade reform in the coming decades:
The EU is now admitting it will have to change its Common Agricultural Policy as it takes in millions of additional farmers and farming acres in 10 new member countries that include Poland and Romania. The EU can be expected to shift from price supports and import barriers to a more trade-friendly farm policy of direct income payments to small farmers.
The United States recently passed a lavish farm bill-but did it during a period of supposed budget surplus. Now the budget surplus has disappeared (economic slump and war on terror). Worse, we are rapidly approaching the time when the federal government must begin to pony up the money for Social Security reform. The Congressional Budget Office says the costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the baby boomers’ retirement will force a 36 percent increase in all federal taxes-or a 91 percent increase in the payroll tax and 81 percent increase in the individual income tax. Obviously, the next farm bill will look radically different from the last one.
Meanwhile, China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and 7 percent of its arable land, and its only spare land is thousands of miles from its cities (and beyond the Gobi Desert) in its far-western provinces. Three-fourths of India’s Hindus say they will eat meat when they can afford it, and their GNP is now rising twice as fast as their population. India is urgently short of water and will be short of livestock feed. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Egypt are other major population centers which are likely to bid happily for farm imports in the decades ahead.
How Agricultural Biotechnology Could Help the Planet
It looks now as though agricultural biotechnology is winning its place in the 21st century. I’m thankful, since I do not know how we would triple the world’s crop yields again in the next 50 years without it. And unless we triple the crop yields again, we risk losing large amounts of wildlife to the expansion of low-yield crops. Fortunately, agricultural biotech is already showing what it can do:
The first blight-proof potato will ensure that neither China nor Bangladesh (increasingly dependent on potatoes because of their high food output per acre) will suffer a modern replay of the Irish potato famine.
Biotech is taking the natural allergens out of such naturally dangerous foods as soybeans and peanuts, so allergenic consumers will no longer have to fear potentially-fatal anaphylactic shock.
Crops that can grow in highly-salty water will ensure that our irrigated land can continue to produce high yields of food into the foreseeable future, instead of lying useless due to high soil salt levels.
Did Farming Destroy the Salmon in the Pacific Northwest?
If you are still reluctant to speak up for modern farming and processing in the face of eco-opposition, please note that last year, the Columbia River had its biggest salmon run in its modern history. It hasn’t been logging, farming or hydroelectric dams that had reduced salmon numbers, but Nature herself responding to a 25-year cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents take the salmon food to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon/Washington salmon fishery shrinks. Then, for the next 25 years, the Oregon/Washington salmon fishermen flourish, while the Gulf of Alaska shrinks. I’ve seen fishing records that go back a century and the pattern of co-variance is dramatic and clear. The Columbian salmon began to decline in 1977. Now they’re returning, right on schedule.
Did the Sierra Club not know about the 25-year cycle? Or did they know and not tell us?
Is Global Warming A Rich-Country Betrayal of the Planet?
The eco-activists say that the rich countries are about to burn up the planet with fossil fuels, but the ‘man-made warming’ evidence has always been weak. Virtually all of the warming in the past 120 years occurred before 1940, before much greenhouse gas was emitted by human industries and autos. After 1940, the climate stubbornly refused to warm for 40 years, despite huge greenhouse emissions.
The world’s known temperature history includes a Medieval Warming of perhaps 3 degrees Fahrenheit (950 to1300 AD), followed by the much-colder Little Ice Age, from 1300 to 1850 AD. History also tells us about a Roman Warming, from 200 BC to 400 AD, followed by an Ice Age from 400 to 950 AD. The world has been moderately warming and cooling for as far back in history as we have records.
Recently, an elegant and careful analysis of iceberg debris from the floor of the North Atlantic showed that the world has had nine moderate global warmings and nine global coolings in the last 12,000 years-coinciding exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. By this analysis, we are about 150 years into a mild, natural, global warming that will last another 600 years. The cycle will return us to what history calls the Medieval Climate Optimum-the finest weather humanity can remember.
Why would environmentally concerned activists seize on the global warming issue?
“[Global] warming . . . is capable of realizing the environmentalist’s dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population’s eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”
Dr. Aaron Wildavsky, Professor of Political Science, University of California/Berkeley
“No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment, as quoted by the Calgary Herald, 1998
Why would European governments aid and abet a global warming scare not supported by science? First, many European governments are run by coalitions including Green parties, and its politicians are anxious to give Green concessions that won’t cost money before the next election. Second, the barrel of Saudi crude that nets the Saudis $25 nets the British government about $150 in taxes-all of it now conveniently justified by the global warming theory.
Make Your Case to the Public
Nothing else humanity does for conservation in the 21st century will be nearly as important to the planet’s wildlands and ecosystems as high-yield farms and high-efficiency meat production. Nothing else will affect so much land.
However, too many in the environmental movement demand we achieve sustainability by massive numbers of forced abortions or by minimizing human consumption. Neither is a valid way to achieve conservation. Neither is likely to occur. What can occur is a technological abundance that will maximize the world’s ability to have people and wildlife thriving economies and thriving ecologies, all at the same time.
You have been and are a vital component in this technological abundance, and co-sponsors of the conservation that has occurred through it.
Now is the time to state this loudly and confidently to the urban public. It is not easy to talk to the public about farming, but the last 30 years had demonstrated that it’s too dangerous to let urbanites get all of their information about farming from its opponents. Greenpeace and the other eco-groups will continue trying to demonize agriculture, and the farming industry we have today of necessity looks little like the traditional red barns and Percheron horses in the Christmas Budweiser commercials.
We must help the whole world finally understand that saving both planet and people are possible, and that our moral challenge in the 21st century is to achieve nothing less.
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Who Will Produce the World’s Food (and Pork) in the Next Decade?
By admin | February 4, 2004
Presented at the Hyologisk 25th Anniversary Conference Braedstrup, Denmark
Alex Avery
February 4, 2004
A dozen years ago, I retired from the U.S. State Department-and began a mission to convince First World farmers they had more to gain from free farm trade than they did from continued heavy government subsidies.
The Bullish Demand Forecast for Farm Products and Pork
My key point was that the world was rapidly increasing its demand for better diets, driven not only by population growth but even more by rising incomes. I predicted that world farm demand would nearly triple by 2050. I expected the demand for high-quality foods-meat, milk, eggs, fruits, and vegetables-to increase even more than three-fold.
I also pointed out that virtually all of the demand growth would be occurring outside the First World countries with heavy the farm subsidies, in the densely populated countries of the Third World.
Twelve years ago, I predicted that Asia, with its rapid economic growth, would be the key market for export farmers. However, I warned that without liberalized farm trade, First World farmers would see relatively little farm import growth in the Asian Tiger countries.
Was I right?
The Fading Specter of World Overpopulation
Back in the 1970s, I can understand why people were afraid of population growth. Agricultural research had just created the Green Revolution, which was tripling crop yields on good land over most of the world, except Africa. Famine was becoming outmoded. In addition, DDT and other synthetic chemicals and vaccines were radically cutting death rates. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, wrote eloquently of human population rising above 20 billion.
Since then, we have learned that while poor farmers mostly have large families, affluent, urban people have small families. The world is moving rapidly toward urban affluence, and its birth rates are plummeting. Europe is now down to a fertility rate of about 1.7 births per woman, with Germany, Italy and Spain at 1.2. Italy is now offering a $1200 subsidy for 2nd Italian children, to ensure the country is not totally abandoned to Albanian and North African immigrants.
In the Third World, birth rates have fallen 80 percent of the way to stability, from about 6.2 births per woman in 1960 to about 3.1 births today with birth rates continuing to decline rapidly. Stability is 2.1. The UN Population Division has just lowered its peak projection for human numbers-again-to between 8 and 9 billion people. That still means a substantial increase in people, but not enough of a population increase to ensure prosperity for European farmers.
That leaves income gains in countries not yet well fed as the farmers’ best friend, and such gains are continuing.
China, with its massive population of 1.3 billion people, had been increasing its GNP by roughly 8 to 9 percent per year, with virtually no population growth. That meant very rapid increases in consumer incomes. (The Chinese economy grew about 8 percent in 2003.) The “precious three” most-sought-after household consumer items in China progressed from a bicycle, a digital wristwatch, and a transistor radio in the 1970s to a telephone, a TV, and a refrigerator in the 1980s-and today, China’s “precious three” are a cell phone, a computer, and a car. (Yes, they will have cars, lots of them.) China has about 20 percent of the world’s population and about 7 percent of its arable land.
India has been expanding its GDP by nearly 6 percent annually since Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister in 1990 while its rate of population growth has declined from 3.2 percent to 2.9 percent. (India’s economy grew nearly as fast as China’s in 2003, at about 7 percent.) That means India’s per capita incomes are also rising rapidly. India has 17 percent of the world’s population and about 2.4 percent of its arable land.
Indonesia, with 225 million people, has not recently achieved the 7 percent annual GDP growth it registered from 1990 to 1997. However, the economy has lately been expanding by 3 to 3.5 percent annually, and household consumption has been rising by 6 percent per year. Indonesia has 3 percent of the world population and only 0.2 percent of the world’s arable land.
To date, my long-term demand growth forecast has been largely on target. Chinese pork consumption increased nearly 70 percent in the decade of the 1990s, and is currently expanding by more than one million tons per year. Unfortunately for the EU, China is supplying virtually all of that pork domestically, fostered by import barriers, high consumer prices and investments in its own animals and facilities. Chinese pork imports this year will about match the EU’s pork imports at a pittance of 70,000 tons. China has become a member of the World Trade Organization, but the WTO farm trade rules are so inadequate that it is hard to see much expansion in Chinese pork imports in the foreseeable future.
India’s milk consumption increased by 14 million tons in the decade to 2001, and its poultry consumption rose by 80 percent. (Even India’s pork consumption has risen 43 percent in the last decade, though from a small base.) Again, the expansion in demand has been met through domestic price supports protected by import barriers, and much consumer demand has been constrained by high prices. India is a member of the WTO, but the WTO rules do not favor trade expansion. Moreover, India has always pleaded balance-of-payments problems to excuse its policy of not importing farm products. (India imports significant amounts of pulses and palm oil, but virtually no other farm products.)
Indonesian poultry consumption increased from 512,000 tons to 864,000 tons during the 1991 to 2001 period, despite the ravages of the “Asian Collapse” of 1997. However, Indonesia is a Moslem country and eats virtually no pork. (It does produce some pork on its northern islands to supply Singapore.)
Total world demand for farm products has been increasing, as we knew it would. World grain consumption has been increasing by about 18 million tons per year, world oilseed demand by about 7 million tons per year, and world meat demand by more than 5.5 million tons per year. As in the past, most of the demand has been met domestically, behind trade barriers.
The strongest growth in pork imports has been in Mexico, where the U.S and Canada now get duty-free access through the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mexico’s pork imports have risen by 155,000 tons per year in the past five years, to a projected 345,000 tons in 2004.
The strongest growth among pork exporting nations in the past five years has been in Brazil, where low land costs and the construction of new pork processing facilities have enabled Brazil to reach more export markets with processed products. (Transport costs from the interior for fresh pork are still prohibitive.)
The Forecast for Farm Subsidies
The stifling of world farm trade by subsidies is a well-known story, and farm trade was stifled anew during 2003 by the collapse of the WTO farm trade talks in Cancun, Mexico.
First World countries with good farmland have a strong history of favoring their own farmers with import barriers, price supports, quotas and phony “health” requirements. Western Europe and the U.S. both have ugly histories of subsidizing their farmers in these ways.
On the other side of the equation, Third World countries still have lots of farmers who resent farm imports as an intrusion on “their” markets. To prevent unrest among their large numbers of small farmers, such important would-be importers as China and India have state policies of importing farm products only when that could not be avoided. This means their consumers are taxed at the grocery stores for import exclusion. Food prices are often much higher in countries that refuse to import farm products and their industrial labor costs are thus raised artificially.
Unfortunately, farm subsidies have only one guaranteed result: they raise farm land prices in the subsidizing country. Essentially, that means the subsidizing countries are raising their farmers’ costs, and gradually pricing them out of their markets.
Cropland prices in the U.S. Corn Belt today average about $6,000 per hectare, up nearly 10 percent since the 2002 farm bill was passed, but still far below typical cropland prices in Western Europe.
I recently saw a cost comparison for soybeans grown in the Corn Belt versus those grown in the Matto Grosso region of Brazil. The imputed land cost for Iowa soybeans was $140 per acre, while the land cost for Brazil was $23. (That implies an Iowa land value of $1,000 per hectare.) The Iowa farmers’ non-land costs were lower, especially transportation. But the high land costs put Iowa farmers at a disadvantage in export markets.
That’s why the U.S. in 1996 passed a different sort of farm bill that was supposed to phase its commodity subsidies down and then out. The farmers’ “golden parachute” payments were essentially to buy down U.S. land values.
In 2002, political events overtook the new farm policy. During 2001, the U.S. election split the country 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. The House and Senate were divided almost 50-50 as well. Control of the whole U.S. government seemed to turn on a few farmer votes in the Midwest. To make matters worse, the federal budget seemed to be in surplus at the time, so there was no political constraint against buying the farmers’ votes. A lavish new farm bill was passed by the Congress, and President Bush did not dare to oppose it.
Unfortunately for farmers, the 2002 election also proved that American voters were ready to hear about reforming our massive Social Security system, which has some $25 trillion in unfunded obligations. It’s basically a pyramid scheme, and we will soon have less than three workers to support each of the 77 million “baby-boom” retirees-an impossible burden for our younger generation. Reforming Social Security and our old-age medical care programs to put them on a sustainable basis would require an 81 percent increase in our individual income taxes. We’d like to keep putting off the reform, but Social Security receipts will fall below payments about 2011, and the huge baby boom generation is starting to retire. A few years ago, any politician who mentioned Social Security reform lost. In the last election, those who talked of pension reform won - by big margins.
The reform of entitlements for the elderly and the costs of the “war on terror” pretty much ensure that when the U.S. farm bill comes up for renewal, probably in 2007, there will be cut-throat competition for federal dollars. The farmers will probably be in a much weakened position-to the point that some of our farm groups have actually proposed give-backs on the current program to help stave off cuts in the next farm bill. I predict that American farmers will lose a lot of their farm subsidy dollars in the years ahead.
You know the farm subsidy situation in Western Europe better than I. The EU is taking in 10 new countries, including Poland (4.2 million farmers and 14 million hectares of land); Hungary (490,000 farmers and 4.8 million hectares of land); Bulgaria (270,000 farmers and 5 million hectares of land, much of it disadvantaged); and Romania (1.5 million farmers and 10 million hectares of land, much of it fine quality in the Danube Valley.)
The two-tier farm subsidy structure now envisioned for the expanded EU is likely to last less than a year after the new member countries reach voting status. The new member countries will not be content with lower subsidies for their farmers. Germany, the traditional source of most EU farm payments, is now cash-strapped and unwilling to expand its farm subsidy obligations. The French feel they have an inherited right to their current subsidy levels. Something will have to give.
Meanwhile, the farmers in Poland, Hungary and Romania will soon catch up to their colleagues in the current EU 15, in both technology and yields. Poland and Romania, in particular, will be capable of major production increases, including pork production. There is nowhere in Europe to sell their additional output.
Nor does Western Europe’s capacity to finance farm subsidies look very promising. EU economic growth is currently less than 2 percent per year, and Germany has lately been achieving about half of that. Europe has not been creating many additional off-farm non-government jobs in recent decades, and there is no indication of a new flow of off-farm income that could be “painlessly” shared with EU farmers.
My prediction is that EU expansion will at least dilute the subsidy payments of current EU farmers. It may even trigger a more fundamental Common Agricultural Reform keyed not to commercial production but to direct income payments that will favor small farmers.
All of this was apparently well-known to the participants at the Cancun meeting of the World Trade Organization last fall. The U.S. offered what it regarded as radical surgery on its farm subsidies-cutting them by nearly half as part of a deal for Third World countries to permit more farm imports. The EU was less forthcoming, but its proposal went beyond what it had earlier said it could do, especially in reducing export subsidies.
Both the U.S. and the EU thought they might have to give more as the WTO negotiations went forward, but hoped the concessions would not have to be too politically costly back home.
They reckoned wrong. India, speaking for a group of 25 developing countries, announced that the U.S. and EU must begin the negotiations by promising to eliminate all of their farm subsidies-without any promise of improved market access in the Third World. In other words, the Third World said the First World must drop all farm protectionism, while the Third World countries would be allowed to continue theirs.
It was breathtakingly naive.
Unfortunately, when the First World rejected the demand, the Third World packed up and went home. It refused to negotiate at all. A farm trade negotiation that had been scheduled since 1994 was terminated overnight with not a word of agreement on anything, or even a discussion. WTO and First World officials are trying to restart the Doha Round, but there is not yet any agreement to do so.
With the WTO round dead, First World companies will not be able to gain any additional Third World access in such area as services and government procurement. No doubt they find this disappointing. But, the average tariff on nonfarm manufactured goods has already been cut from about 40 percent in 1946 to 4 percent today. Much of the world’s nonfarm trade is already liberalized.
First World farmers are in much worse shape. The U.S. Special Trade Representative says the current average tariff on farm products is 65 percent. I don’t know how he can tell, since so much of the potential farm trade is barred completely by governmental non-import policies like those of China and India. Whatever the real farm tariff average, it is dauntingly high. The odds of bringing it down are hauntingly low.
After the new U.S. farm bill was passed in 2002, I hoped that American farmers would have the best of both worlds: They would have high government subsidies until a WTO liberalization allowed them to phase into a freer global farm market where increased exports would take up the slack when Washington could no longer afford the lavish subsidies.
Now, I see crash landings for both American and European farmers.
First World farmers waited one trade round too long to offer up reform. We thought the Third World would try to negotiate half a loaf. Instead, the Third World took us at our word, and decided they’d rather buy political peace at home by subsidizing their own farmers.
There will not be much farm trade growth in the next decade as a result.
Who Will Be the Winners in the Export Markets of the Next Decade?
The winners in the export markets of the next decade will be few, and they will not win very much. Mostly, they will be the farmers who do not currently get very much subsidy, and thus have been forced to keep their production costs low. The biggest of these winners are likely to be the South American giants, Argentina and Brazil. Of these, the biggest is likely to be Brazil.
The other winners in farming for the next decade will be the farmers in China, India, and other Third World countries where economic growth is raising incomes for formerly poor consumers. Their governments are likely to continue to resist farm imports, both within and beyond the rules of the World Trade Organization. (China recently refused to accept biotech soybeans from the U.S. while continuing to grow biotech cotton and corn, and developing Chinese biotech soybean varieties.)
Brazil will almost certainly be the first claimant of any farm demand that is not domestically supplied. For some years now, the Brazilians have been expanding their production from the interior, essentially converting acid-soil scrubland into cropland through the addition of lime to the soils, planting acid-tolerant crop varieties bred in Brazil, and using no-till farming systems to prevent soil erosion on the rolling, volcanic soils.
Until recently, I believed that the Brazilian land available for cropland expansion was fairly limited-about 60 million hectares of acid savannah on its central-western frontier, far from markets and without railroads. Recently, however, the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service re-examined Brazilian potential. They note that America’s pasturelands cannot be converted to cropland; they are too arid or too steep. But Brazil’s pastureland has no such limitations. FAS believes that 70 to 90 million hectares of Brazilian pasture could be converted to cropland in the future, if international commodity prices are high enough to finance even paved roads, let alone railroads, into the interior. That would represent a very significant increase in the world’s cropping resources.
Turkey, too, is capable of major increases in crop production, partly through the development of its new irrigated projects in the Upper Euphrates Valley, but also by extending conservation tillage across its large tracts of semi-arid rainfed land. Conservation tillage radically reduces soil erosion, and retains much more of the rainfall in the root zone of the soils.
Biotechnology: Wave of the Future?
Europe is still blocking the advent of genetically modified crops and most biotech foods (though not the cheeses and wine made with biotech enzymes). Most of the world is taking quite a different approach, welcoming the improved productivity of genetically modified organisms.
I continue to believe that “golden rice” will be a major long-term benefit for the children and women of poor rice-eating countries, and I commend the EU for developing it.
I am impressed that Bt corn test plots in the Philippines outyielded farmers corn fields by 80 percent, and that biotech has given us our first victories over plant viruses (in bananas, papayas and sweet potatoes).
I note that, far from unleashing new allergens on the consuming public, biotech researchers have learned how to take natural allergens out of some of nature’s most allergenic foods: peanuts and soybeans.
I think I am most impressed-to date-by the new blight-proof potatoes bred in both the U.S. and Europe. The blight-resistance gene had been discovered in a wild potato some 50 years ago, but it had defied efforts to cross-breed it into modern potatoes that taste good and yield well. Now, biotech will prevent a recurrence of the Irish Potato Famine in modern Asia.
The biggest factor in spreading the acceptance of biotech crops around the world, however, has been Bt cotton. It’s not a food crop, and no amount of fearmongering has served to frighten farmers or consumers about the cotton it produces. Instead, farmers and governments have been enormously impressed by the ability of biotech cotton to resist the voracious pests that had always made cotton the most intensively pesticide-sprayed crop in agriculture.
China, India, and South Africa now feel heavily dependent on biotech cotton to preserve not only their cotton farmers’ livelihoods but also the millions of industrial jobs that depend on their cotton production.
Famine has been another winning issue for biotech. The activist efforts to bar American food aid corn from the famine stricken regions of southern Africa last winter seem to have backfired. When the president of Zambia said he would not distribute U.S. food aid corn to starving people who’d already been reduced to boiling poisonous roots, the world shuddered. The reality that no harm has been linked to biotech crops was extended to many more people. The inhumanity of the eco-activists was exposed in a new way.
This year, Brazil has decided to permit the planting of biotech soybeans. According to that country’s major soybean growers, this is likely to stimulate another expansion of soy production there, because it will sharply reduce growers’ costs.
In the future, if Europe wants to continue importing non-biotech soybeans, it may actually have to pay a premium to get them. Will Europe do this? If so, that will put EU hog producers at a further disadvantage in world competition.
Will the WTO uphold the EU constraints of biotech development and trade? That will be highly interesting as well.
In almost any case, it seems likely that the rest of the world will proceed with genetically modified crops, and eventually even biotech animal developments.
The Organic Path?
Many non-farmers have praised organic farming as the appropriate path for Europe’s agriculture. We can understand why they believe it. Non-farmers see modern agriculture as employing too few farmers and producing too much food. They think organic farming will solve both problems at once.
The reality is that few people want to be organic farmers, doing the hand weeding, the composting, being too often at the mercy of insects and crop diseases, and needing far more land (or imported manure) to get the same food production.
In America, organic has been increasingly taken over by agribusiness. A large proportion of our organically grown vegetables are now produced by four California farms. Horizon Dairy, the international conglomerate, provides 70 percent of America’s organic milk. Such major corporations as General Foods and ADM now have organic divisions.
Meanwhile, the organic premiums have often weakened in the face of increased production and a limited number of consumers willing to pay them. A significant percentage of the organic milk produced in Europe is sold as non-organic for lack of demand.
From a public policy standpoint, moreover, the major problem with organic farming becomes more pressing the more it expands: the large and global shortage of organic nitrogen. Buried in the 1999 report of the Bichel Committee, Denmark’s high-level technical assessment of organic strategies, is the reality that a true organic mandate would cut Denmark’s human food production by 47 percent. Its pork and poultry industries would be slashed 70 percent for lack of feed. Much of the countryside would have to be planted to green-chop forage, to be hauled to feedlot cattle, so their manure could be slathered over the countryside. All of this to replace the natural N from the air (which is 78 percent N) captured today by the Haber-Bosch industrial process invented in 1908.
If Europe went all-organic, it would probably not be able to export any farm products at all, even with the best efforts of newly energized farmers in Poland and Romania.
Dr. Vaclav Smil, author of Enriching the Earth, a fine book on thje history of nitrogen in agriculture, says the world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of N we currently take from the air industrially. America would need the manure from another 900 million to one billion cattle, at three to 30 acres of forage per beast. The U.S. has only 2.1 billion acres in its lower 48 states, so we’d have room for our cities and manure production, but no room for food, forests or national parks.
Dr. Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, says that organic farming could support only four billion people on the planet, even if we convert all the forests to fields.
The Environmental Movement
A great deal of the urgency behind the environmental movement has come from the fear of overpopulation. In the 1970s, the Green Revolution had just showed how to triple the yields on much of the world’s cropland-eliminating the famine constraint on human numbers. Then DDT came along, eliminating millions of deaths from typhus and malaria. Can we blame people for fearing that human population would soar to 20 or 50 billion?
Unfortunately, the fear of being overrun by third world babies also meant a fear that high-yield modern farming would foster overpopulation. This hasn’t been the case; the population growth overwhelmingly resulted because of a reduction in death rates. It is highly unlikely that the world would have quietly accepted massive famines if the Green Revolution had not occurred. But the environmental movement remains implacably opposed to virtually every aspect of modern food production, including pesticides, antibiotics for livestock, fertilizers, feed additives, and on down a long list.
In the U.S., the state of North Carolina has had a moratorium on confinement hog expansion for seven years, supposedly because confinement hogs were reducing the water quality in the state’s streams. Recently, under threat of legal action, our Center got the State water quality data for the “hog rivers” that drain America’s most intensive hog producing region. Thanks to “zero-discharge” hog management, an expansion from 2 million hogs to 9 billion has occurred with no reduction at all in the state’s stream water quality. The Black River, the major hog river, is still rated an outstanding resource with fine water quality. But the hog moratorium remains in place, because the urban voters of North Carolina do not like the idea of hogs in their state, even if they’re beyond the horizon and beyond smelling distance.
By the end of the next decade, Europeans will probably be far less sensitive to the population issue, and may be more flexible on environmental questions as well. But not yet.
European farmers can also expect that their eco-regulation will continue to become more and more invasive, and their costs in meeting these eco-restrictions will continue to rise.
Animal Rights Constraints
Animal rights constraints will continue to plague livestock producers in both Europe and America. People who eat meat but have not grown up on farms will never be fully comfortable in confronting the reality of livestock slaughter. As they treat their own pets more and more like children, they will be less and less comfortable with having your livestock not treated almost as well.
I note that in Germany, it is no longer legal to kill an ant colony if it invades your home. Instead, you must call a government ant warden who will come, trap the colony, and move it to some other location. The U.S. state of Florida recently amended its constitution to forbid farrowing crates for sows.
Never mind that the policies of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are a fraud. They would result in no domestic animals living at all, and would even deny people and their kids the right to have pets. The public will never allow its pets to be taken away, of course, just as they will never allow themselves to be driven to vegan diets. However, the more strident activists have no compunctions about imposing more and more and more regulations on how you raise your livestock, and the urban public will applaud.
Pig farmers in China and Brazil do not face these constraints. Their customers and neighbors are not yet nearly as sensitive as those in Europe and America.
The Next Decade for European Farmers
I cannot be optimistic about the next decade for commercial farmers in either the United States. or Europe. Their governments are faced with farm subsidy programs they will not be able to support. They remain sealed off from the world’s increasing food demand by trade barriers which will not be overcome during the decade. Their competitors have lower-cost land, and unused land on which to expand, and are beginning to use biotech seeds to further lower their costs. The farm cost structures in both the U.S. and Europe seem out of line with reality, and there is no visible way to rescue them.
I wish I could be more optimistic than this.
In the past, I believed that farm trade liberalization offered a new lease on commercial viability for the farmers in both the U.S. and Europe. It still might, but not during the upcoming decade.
It will take years to craft any meaningful change in the world’s farm trade barriers. The first problem is that the U.S. and EU have not yet “hit the wall” of unsupportable farm subsidy costs. The second problem is that China and India have not yet hit that wall. In the long run, all of these countries will want farm trade reform, especially under cover of an international mandate, but not yet. Even when they do, it will take more years to craft and phase in an agreement.
The “collapse at Cancun” was a disaster for First World farmers.
The answer to the question: Who will take the yellow jersey in global pig production is now simple-China. Second place will go to Brazil. Europe and the U.S. will suffer.
I wish you all good fortune, but I do not expect you will get it until the world has liberalized farm trade.
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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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Will the World Throw Away High Yield Agriculture?
By cgfi | March 17, 2000
Speech to the National Potato Promotion Board, Denver, Colorado
The Rev. Thomas Malthus’ famous question about whether humanity can continue to feed all the people was posed exactly 200 years ago.
It has taken us nearly all of that 200 years to be sure of an affirmative answer. Only recently have we been certain that the opening of the 21st century should see a new and fully-sustainable balance between food, population and the environment because of:
- 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, certainly more than double, its farm output in the next 40 years.
What About Potatoes?
As you all are likely well aware, the market of the future for North American potato growers is Asia, as Asia is the future market for almost all North American farmers. Whereas in Ireland, potatoes were the food of the poor, in Asia, potatoes are percieved as a luxury food—sold almost entirely as french fries in Western-style fast food outlets, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonalds. However, as Asia’s economy grows, fast food is loosing its label as a “luxury” food and is entering the mainstream of Asian society.
So we can look to the fast food sectors as an indicator of where the market for potatoes is likely to go in the next several decades.
The Fast Food Industry is skyrocketing in Asia. One Hong Kong-based market analysis firm, Asian Market Intelligence, estimates China’s fast food sector have nearly $5 billion US dollars in sales in 1997, 20% from Western fast food outlets. Even better, the fast food sector has grown at an average rate of 50 percent annually in recent years. But this hardly does justice to the phenomenal growth in the frozen french fry market in recent years.
The US agricultural attache in China reports that China’s direct purchases of frozen french fries have increased ten-fold in the past three years, and re-exports through Hong Kong have tripled. McDonalds and KFC account for two thirds of the market share in french fries, demonstrating the close connection between french fry consumption and fast food chains.
Even more promising, from a long-term perspective, China’s supermarkets are beginning to stock frozen french fries for home consumption. This trend is especially marked in the north, where deep frying at home is common.
These trends indicate that french fries and potato products are making significant cultural inroads in Asia. A wave of young Chinese consumers raised on “treats” of McDonalds and other fast food is transforming the Chinese market. These trends will only increase in both scope and depth. More restaurants beyond simply fast food will start serving french fried potatoes, just as salsa and nachos have extended their base beyond Mexican restaurants. Already, french fries have moved out of simply Western-style fast food restaurants, and into Chinese fast food outlets.
Currently, China is estimated to import as much as 20,000 tons of french fries in 1997, with greater than 95 percent of this coming from the United States. China recently decided to lower import duties on french fries and the sector is making improvements in infrastructure to ensure the maintainence of high quality. China, although it produces potatoes, has yet to produce a quality potato with the proper characteristics for french fries.
Even in Japan, where Western foods have been popular for several decades, french fry consumption has been increasing recently. Because of the rising popularity of hamburger joints, french fry imports have been rising at 7-10 percent annually. This is a 250,000 to 300,000 ton potato import market, with almost 90 percent of these coming from the United States.
If China consumed half of the Japanese French fry consumption, it would be a 2 million ton potato import market. Is that possible? You bet, but it will take time for the Chinese to reach that level of individual income and for Chinese tastes to be Westernized to the level of the Japanese. However, it is not just the Chinese who will be our ultimate consumers. Asia includes three of the four largest nations: China, India, and Indonesia. And let’s not forget Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan, and Pakistan. The opportunity for export growth is simply astonishing.
Legislating Scarcity?
But at the same time that this enormous opportunity is emerging overseas, there are significant uncertainties arising here at home. Many thought just a couple of years ago that the only thing we had to worry about was opening up the trade barriers. Once we got that, we’d be OK. After all, we’d just solved that darned old “Delaney Clause” mess with the passage of the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) and the Freedom to Farm bill was going to get the government off our backs. Well, as Dennis and I were saying then, “hold on a minute.”
Everyone realized fairly quickly that the FQPA was going to cause some problems. Beyond the basic problems I have with methedology in assessing exposure of pesticides and the aggregate/cumulative risk cup analysis done by the EPA, the process is happening quite fast and growers are going to have to watch the process like a hawk from this point onward.
When Tim asked me to speak here today, he wanted me to cover the current FQPA situation and where it is going. The simple answer is that it’s going fast and loose.
The EPA is basing their pesticide review decisions on old data in some cases. As a result, the agency is not fully accounting for how important some of these compounds really are to potato growers. Methamidophos or Monitor is one example.
The fungicide TPTH was saved because potato growers demonstrated that it was a key chemical to many growers. But the EPA’s estimates were inaccurate and if the industry hadn’t been watching closely, it would have been lost. It’s that simple. Does that mean that you will be able to save every chemical currently allowed? Don’t bet on it.
At this point, Carol Browner has only a short time left. With Al Gore in the Presidential race, things could change rapidly. That is exactly how the FQPA was enacted in the first place. My advice and the advice of many I’ve spoken to is to watch the agency like a hawk. More importantly, if there are data gaps on the use of specific chemicals undergoing review that are important to the potato industry, GET THE DATA!! With FQPA already the law, the only significant defense you guys have is solid data. The more data the better because in the absence of data, the EPA will make “default” assumptions about pesticide exposure.
I must add, that potato growers have a few things in their favor over growers of some other crops. While the market for pesticides is larger in corn or soybeans, your market is no small potatoes. You are an important market for fungicides and insecticides, a market that the chemical companies want to keep. That means, under FQPA’s unified risk cup, where chemicals with similar modes of action and from other crops are combined when calculating consumer exposure and risk. As the risk cup gets full, manufacturers will have to dump pesticide uses in order to keep the risk cup from overflowing. Potatoes, while not the biggest, will likely be behind many other commodities when it comes time to ditching uses.
To make things doubly uncertain, on top of FQPA, biotechnology is now controversial. We went from getting rid of Delaney and going after trade access, to overly stringent pesticide laws and a consumer confusion crisis in three years. The Chinese curse of “May you live in Interesting times” is definitely upon us.
For those of you who think that pesticide issues are completely separate from biotechnology issues, let me clarify things for you: it is all part of one, much larger conflict.
Robert Shapiro, head of Monsanto, actually believed when they started developing biotech crops that the activists would see the virtue in biotech crops and would eventually support the technology. After the biotech fiasco broke in Europe, Shapiro was so niave that Monsanto’s advertising campaign gave out the web site addresses of the opposition!
The promise of biotechnology is immeasurable. We couldn’t begin to forecast what developments will be coming in twenty years if biotech is allowed to move forward and there is even modest consumer acceptance. Already we have the New Leaf and New Leaf Plus potatoes. I’m told that the New Leaf Plus is good, but not perfect. There may be some yield drag. But the trial results I’ve seen so far look pretty good. A drastic reduction in the average amount of insecticide sprays and excellent virus protection. One set of photos even showed pheasant tracks in a NLP potato field, and the researcher mentioned that it was the first time in here over ten year career that she’d seen such tracks.
In the pipeline are a whole range of biotech potato improvements, ranging from greater virus and fungus resistant varieties to bruise resistant potatoes.
The reality is, however, that if we fail to communicate the benefits and need for biotechnology, we risk loosing it to over regulation and consumer fear. It was no surprise that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were vehemently against the new agricultural technology. It was a surprise, however, that many in agriculture were caught off guard by the environmentalist opposition. Where have such people been during the last 20 years. There hasn’t been a single new agricultural advancement in this century that hasn’t been opposed by some group, mostly environmentalists.
In the early part of this century, some, despite the high risk of milk-borne tuberculosis, vehemently opposed milk pasteurization. Then it was hybrid corn. The it was insecticides, especially DDT. Then it was herbicides. Now it’s biotechnology.
As proof that the opposition is to modern agriculture, not social or human health concerns, I call your attention to the comments of two prominent critics of biotechnology in response to the announcement of the development of the Golden Rice by scientists funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Golden rice is rice engineered to contain Beta carotene, the precursor to Vitamin A, and inactivates a protein in rice, phytase, that inhibits iron availability. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the research to develop golden rice because Vitamin A deficiency and iron deficiency plague many rice-based cultures. It is estimated that 4 million children go blind each year because of vitamin A deficiency. An estimated 2 billion women suffer birth complications as a result of iron deficiency. Golden rice was developed as a humanitarian effort to relieve these simple dietary deficiencies. The International Rice Research Institute is now developing regional varieties of rice which incorporate golden rice’s traits and will then give the germplasm to national governments for free.
But just look at the response from environmentalists and activists. Margaret Mellon is with the Union of Concerned Scientists, in Washington, D.C. She claims that golden rice is simply a ploy by the agribusiness community to put a humanitarian face on a dangerous technology. She says “there are ten simple things we can do to solve these problems without biotechnology, from building roads and distributing iron tablets to encouraging people to grow gourds.”
Let me get this straight, instead of allowing people access to a rice seeds they could grow themselves which would alleviate all of these problems, we’re supposed to just build an entire network of roads and infrastructure so that we can distribute pills and pumpkin seeds? News flash, Ms. Mellon, if they had such diverse backyard gardens and infrastructure, they likely wouldn’t be nutritionally deficient to begin with.
Vandana Shiva, an Indian “community activist,” is even more silly. She states that all we have to do is get poor Asians to eat more meat, milk, eggs, dairy products, and green leafy vegetables. Even sillier, she suggests that golden rice is dangerous because it could poison people with too much vitamin A! These are people suffering from chronic vitamin A deficiency. Besides, Ms. Shiva is extremely ignorant of the physiological realities. The golden rice contains only Beta carotene, not vitamin A. Beta carotene is a precursor to vitamin A, which means it is extremely difficult to overdose on Beta carotene. One nutritionist I spoke to said that a person would have to eat 10 times the normal amount of rice each day for months before any problems would show, and even then, they would have ample warning that something is wrong because their skin would begin to turn orange well before toxic levels of vitamin A occurred.
The activists opposition to golden rice exposes their real colors. They aren’t against bad biotechnology, the activists are against all biotechnology. How else to explain their opposition to golden rice. It can’t be because they fear it will be used as a tool of multinational corporations to monopolize agriculture—it was funded by a philanthropic charitable foundation and will be given away to farmers free. It can’t be because they fear environmental or ecological consequences—the golden rice contains no new plant genes, only existing genes from wild plants. The only explanation is that these people are luddite elitists pandering to their own paranoia.
“Golden rice” will offer improved health to billions of women and children in rice-eating countries who could not have been helped through factory-food additives—at a tiny cost to society and no cost to them.
We must stop hoping and waiting for people to realize how important these technologies are for us and the planet and begin communicating on a level that consumers understand.
Land—the Scarcest Natural Resource
We in agriculture have a duty to help people understand that the intense increase in food demand I spoke of earlier will force even greater competition between farming and wildlife for land.
· Agriculture already uses about 37 percent of the earth’s land surface, and any land not already in a city or a farm is wildlife habitat.
· If the world has 30 million wildlife species (a reasonable biologist’s “guesstimate”) then 25-27 million of them are probably in the tropical rain forests, with most of the remainder in such critical habitats as wetlands, coral reefs and mountain microclimates. These are places we have not farmed, and should not farm.
Through pesticide use, fertilizers, confinement meat production and modern food processing, modern high-yield farming has already saved millions of square miles of wildlife habitat.
Our peer-reviewed estimate is that the modern food system is currently saving something on the order of 15-20 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield food production. That makes it the greatest conservation triumph in modern history.
Thus the key to conserving the natural world in the 21st century will be what the Hudson Institute calls “high-yield conservation.” Meeting both the food and forestry challenges, while leaving room for nature, will depend on our ability to continue increasing the yields per acre from plants, animals and trees on our best land, and transporting to where the people are demanding it. Our success will also depend heavily on how urgently we explore such high-tech methods as biotechnology in food and forestry.
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