Tag: sustainability
The Most Sustainable Farming In History Gives The World Its Finest Food Choices
By admin | April 3, 2002
A group of academics from Johns Hopkins University says the world should abandon the high-yield science-based agriculture that has doubled the world’s food supply in 50 years. However, as their paper makes clear, the authors have little expertise in agricultural sustainability.
Posted in CGFI Reports, Materials and Publications |No Comments »
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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