Until this moment in time, humanity has fed itself at the expense of nature. Stone-age humans hunted, gathered, burned the forest and stole birds' eggs to provide themselves with food. Throughout eons of history, the human population expanded only at the expense of wildlife and wilderness
Ten thousand years ago, we invented farming to prevent famine by producing more food per acre. Farming was so successful that we expanded it to support larger and larger populations of humans. The higher population meant more land taken from nature -- not because it took so much land for peoples' homesites, but because it took lots of land for food production. A full one-third of the earth's land area is now devoted to cropland and pastures that produce human food.
Today, however, for the first time in history, man probably
has the capacity to feed all of the projected world human
population, with the kinds and qualities of foods people are
demanding -- without taking anything more from
nature.
If we can use high-yield technologies to their full potential -- cross-breeding, conservation tillage, crop residue management, animal health protection, modern pest control, biotechnology and all the rest -- we should not need any more agricultural land to feed 9 billion affluent people in the year 2050.
Today, humanity's food supply is secure enough that clearing more land for farming is no longer considered a triumph of humanity. Today, for the first time, we are almost as concerned about the fate of displaced wildlife as about the threat of human famine -- because we can afford to be.
The reason for this food security is high-yield farming. The reason our whole society can afford to be concerned about wildlife is high-yield farming.
Agriculture is already feeding twice as many people as it fed in 1960, and feeding them a far better diet, with more resource-costly foods such as fruits, vegetables, meat, milk and eggs. The truly remarkable thing is that we're doing this on no more cropland than we used in 1960! We have doubled and tripled the yields on the world's best and safest cropland -- with science and technology. Thus, science and technology are severing the historic link between expanding human population and the loss or degradation of wildlands. Pest management, animal health technologies and chemical weed control have played key roles in the tripling of world farm productivity. They will be equally critical for the future.
Without the higher yields already achieved on the world's farms, the world would already have expanded its cropland needs beyond the current 15 million square kilometers -- to at least 40 million square kilometers and perhaps a good deal more. Condemning a world with 9 billion affluent people to organic farming would force the destruction of another 50-75 million square kilometers of wildlife habitat.
Demographics indicate quite clearly that the world's peak human population will be 8.5-9 billion people. Births per woman in the Third World have already fallen three-fourths of the way to stability since 1965, from 6.1 births to 3.1. (Stability is 2.1.) The major forces behind the slowing birth rate have been increased affluence and the concurrent spread of education.
Most of today's 5.8 billion people are striving urgently to satisfy their hunger for better diets, including lots of meat, milk and eggs. There is no reason to doubt that most of tomorrow's 9 billion people will strive with equal urgency to eat lots of high-quality livestock protein.
We have no choice about supplying the additional food. Third World countries are already destroying forests to get dairy fodder, and clearing fragile tropical soils to grow chicken feed. We can either triple world food output by tripling yields again -- or we can do it by plowing down most of the world's wildlife habitat for low-yielding crops.
One of the most enduring myths of the modern world is that we're running out of food production potential. Millions of people -- who have no idea how the world's farmers have tripled their yields over the last 35 years -- are absolutely certain that it can't be done again. They conclude that famine must, therefore, be lurking right behind the barn, so we must do something really draconian about suppressing population growth.
Our most famous neo-Malthusian, Lester Brown, has published another of his "reports" predicting disaster. This one claims the world is paving over much of its cropland, while the cropland remaining is becoming too degraded to farm.
Unfortunately, our collective memories seem too short to
recall last year, when Brown and his Worldwatch Institute said
much the same thing. Or 1980, when Brown got international
headlines by saying the world had a soil erosion crisis that
would shortly lead to famine through destruction of the best
cropland. Or 1974, when Brown wailed about the exact same list of
world crop problems: vanishing cropland, diminishing returns from
fertilizer, and a supposedly-diminishing trend in world crop
yields.
But while Brown has been reciting his litany of doom for the last 22 years, the world's grain production has increased 46 percent and grain yields have risen 55 percent, outstripping a population growth of 42 percent.
For the next decade, Asian and Latin American populations are expected to grow at about 1.5 percent per year, while their crop yields are rising at 2.4 percent. Where's the hunger emergency? Only in Africa -- where they're not yet using high-yield farming!
Over the last five-year period for which the FAO has published numbers, Asian grain yields have been rising at 2.4 percent annually and South America's yields have risen 4 percent per year. When we compared 1987-89 and 1992-94, only Africa, Europe and the former Soviet Union failed to raise their crop yields strongly.
-- Africa hasn't even begun to use high-yield farming systems, so their stagnant yields certainly can't be due to diminishing returns from modern technology. Most African countries average about 0.8 ton per hectare of corn -- but their potential with fertilizer and hybrid seed is two to five times that much. Unfortunately, the governments typically gouge farmers on the price of fertilizer and hybrid seed. Additionally, consumers are simply too poor to buy more corn.
-- Africa has 200 million hectares of inland wetlands which could produce 4-6 tons of high-yield rice per hectare. None of the water management ditches have been dug, however, and no one is training African communities to produce wet rice.
-- The former Soviet republics have collapsed their old command economy, and are still trying to replace it with something that works. The Russian Federation's grain yields have dropped 12 percent in the most recent five years, due to the withdrawal of the fertilizers, pesticides and feed additives which the Kremlin used to supply to its farms.
-- Europe's grain yields have stagnated, primarily because of a major cutback in farm subsidies in the European Union and such countries as Hungary and Switzerland. Again, this has nothing to do with running out of technology. Farmers get lower prices, so they cut back their use of off-farm inputs. Because of continuing surpluses, the EU has also been holding cropland out of production last year.
None of this supports a theory of diminishing returns.
North America, of course, is where the Green Revolution started in the 1930s. Thus "diminishing returns" and soil degradation should long ago have stopped U.S. crop yields in their tracks. But U.S. grain yields gained at 4.2 percent per year in the 1989-94 period. American farmers are getting new seeds with bred-in pesticides. They are using supplemental irrigation and improved drainage to manage moisture more effectively. They are expanding their use of conservation tillage (most recently in wheat and cotton). They are boosting their plant populations per acre, and using integrated pest management more effectively. They are using better disease controls to cut death rates and improve feed conversion ratios in hogs and poultry.
Argentina could triple its farm output in two years, simply by giving up its current low-yield pasture-crop rotation and farming intensively like Illinois. (The Argentine soils and climate are just about as good.) Where is the diminishing return from wasting 75 million acres of the Pampas as cattle pasture?
Biotechnology has produced one of the first major gains against a crop virus -- a new rice variety resistant to the tungro virus that steals perhaps 7 million tons of rice production per year from Asia. Biotech should be one of the brightest stars in our research galaxy and hasn't yet even begun to shine.
Certainly there is a limit to how high we can raise crop yields. The theoretical limit to edible food production has been estimated for decades at 15-22 tons of edible food per hectare. But the world's current average rice yield is only 3.5 tons per hectare, and the average corn yield is 2.5 tons. The best Chinese rice growers are getting 6 tons per hectare, and China's national average is probably less than 2.5. The best American corn growers are getting 12 tons per hectare, and our national average (8 tons) is less than the theoretical potential.
Farmers are dealing with the serial removal of yield constraints, not diminishing returns.
Where would the world be if it had taken Lester Brown's advice in 1974? The world population wouldn't be any smaller; developing-country birth rates have already dropped faster than anyone predicted (because their incomes have risen faster than anyone expected.) If we'd stopped pursuing higher crop yields, hungry people would have taken hundreds of millions of additional acres of cropland away from forests and wildlife.
If high-yield farming has created room on the planet for both people and wildlife, and there are strong reasons to believe that we can raise the yields even higher, why aren't environmentalists praising this "environmental miracle?"
The opponents are still not satisfied. They claim high-yield farming is "unsustainable." They say high-yield farming is a fragile flower which cannot survive the onslaughts of soil erosion and pest resistance to insecticides over the decades and centuries.
Fortunately for the future of the world's wildlife, high-yield farming is not only the most productively sustaining agricultural approach in human history, it is also the most sustainable.
Both the World Bank and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research agree that the spread of low-yield farming is the most serious threat to the world's forests and wildlife (CGIAR, 1996).
The wild areas being protected from the plow of the low-yield farmer are urgently needed as the reservoir of genes and biodiversity for the world's future. Without high-yield farming, we would lose much more than the aesthetic pleasures of the earth's wild heritage, and the wildlands' contribution to our quality of life. We would also lose much of the world's genetic heritage. We would rapidly lose the opportunity to even survey and test the huge proportion of global genetic diversity which has not yet been cataloged -- just at the moment when biotechnology has opened the way to using that diversity more constructively than ever before.
One of the most recent reports of the World Bank says that biodiversity and agriculture are intertwined: "Biodiversity is a vital resource for crop and livestock management, but without improved agriculture, most of the remaining habitats for wildlife will be destroyed to make room for farms, plantations and ranches." (World Bank, 1996)
India is already stealing one-third of its dairy fodder in the form of leaves and branches from its forests, and the Indian public is clamoring for more milk. A forest can lose up to half its plant species in this way without ever being logged.
In West Africa, high food prices still lead to more cropland being plowed, rather than the use of better seeds or chemical fertilizer. A 10 percent increase in crop plantings looks at first glance to increase food output by 3 percent. Over time, however, clearing more cropland shortens the bush fallow period and thus reduces the fertility of the soil for subsequent tree and field crops. For the long term, a 10 percent increase in cropland in Ghana produces a net gain in farm output of less than 0.5 percent. And that's without reckoning any of the loss in wildlife and biodiversity. (World Bank, 1995)
In some parts of Nigeria, population growth and rising food needs have shortened the fallow period from five years to one year. This is unsustainable farming. That's why a broad coalition of environmental organizations have now joined with the World Rescues Institute in calling for the use of chemical fertilizer in Africa. They have not yet been able to bring themselves to recommend pesticides -- but they have finally admitted that Africa's unique wildlife cannot be saved from the plow without high-yield farming inputs.
The real problem in sustaining agriculture over the long term is soil erosion. For 10,000 years, humanity has grown crops and accepted unsustainable rates of soil erosion because the alternative was hunger. But we knew we were courting trouble.
Today, at long last, we see a realistic chance to manufacture topsoil faster than we lose it, as part of the very process of high-yield food production.
High yields are critical to the saving soil, because tripling the yields on the best farmland cuts per soil erosion ton of food produced by two-thirds. That's simple arithmetic. If we also eliminate the need to push crops onto the steep or fragile acre, high yields can cut soil erosion per ton of food by more than two-thirds.
In the past two decades, chemicals have given us another powerful weapon against soil erosion. Scientists discovered chemical weed killers, and farmers used the herbicides to invent conservation tillage. By using chemical weed killers instead of the bare-earth farming systems such as plowing and fallow, we are able to cut soil erosion by an additional 65-95 percent. In addition to cutting erosion to all-time low levels, conservation tillage makes other contributions to sustainability:
-- It radically increases the organic content of soils;
-- It increases water infiltration and water-holding capacity in the soil;
-- It encourages earthworm and soil microbe populations, which in turn increase soil tilth;
-- It generates less soil compaction because it requires fewer passes with machinery, and because it penalizes more heavily than other tillage systems the farmer who ignores compaction.
All of these benefits are major keys to the long-term sustainability of agriculture and human society.
What about the legends of "poisoned soils" with no earthworms or soil bacteria on farms that use chemicals? They are myths, not legends. Fields in Rothamsted, England, which have been getting commercial fertilizer since 1843 are more productive today than ever before. Humus and soil tilth increase with adequate plant nutrients. Fifty years of Danish experiments show commercial fertilizers have been better for the soil than organics.
High-yield farms want earthworms and soil bacteria too -- and get them without sacrificing yields. Conservation tillage, especially, encourages far more earthworms and soil microbes. Sub-soil creatures are hampered more by plowing (which organic farmers use) than by most pesticides (Zaborski and Stinner, 1995).
"Alternative Agriculture"--Awarded Medals It Hasn't Won?
In 1995 National Geographic Magazine carried a major article praising "alternative agriculture" -- the organic and low-input farming which many non-farmers associate with the term "sustainability." The author, Verlyn Klinkenborg, wrote that modern farmers had forgotten some of the important things their fathers and grandfathers used to know about farming without modern chemicals.
He's right. Probably the most important thing we've forgotten about our farming past is the phrase "worn-out farm." In America, this was one of the common phrases of the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the major reasons Americans settled the West is that they had worn out their farms in the East. Their only sources of plant nutrients then were legume rotations and animal manure. Pest protection was non-existent.
American corn farmers in 1900 could only produce a grain crop about three years out of seven, because of the need for pasture and rotation crops. Yields averaged about 1.6 tons per hectare per year (not much more than the current average for most African countries). Today, with better pest protection, the same farm can produce the equivalent of more than 10 tons of corn per year, every year, sustainably, with rising amounts of soil organic matter, increasing populations of earthworms and soil microbes, improving soil tilth, and fewer negative effects on the surrounding environment than the farmer in 1900.
During the 1960s, China, under Chairman Mao, tried to get higher crop yields without chemicals. Instead of producing chemical fertilizer to supplement their traditional use of night soil and manure, they tried to harvest more biomass from the hillsides to mulch their fields. Instead of getting higher yields, they got 200 million malnourished people, serious civil unrest, and the worst soil erosion in China's history. China's farms are now the most intensive users of chemical fertilizer in the world.
Organic farming actually made good sense when it was developed. In 1850, the fields were often short of organic matter. Yields were low, and small-grain farmers hauled the whole plant, grain and stalk, out of the field for threshing. Little of the crop biomass ever made it back to the field. The developers of organic farming stressed composting and organic matter to build up soil tilth. They stressed manure because that was an underutilized source of nitrogen for the plants.
They stressed crop rotation because it was the most effective pest protection available, even though it took lots of extra land. (The world then had extra land.) There were no effective pesticides -- either organic or synthetic -- except for lead arsenate which was deadly to insects, people, dogs and just about everything else that breathed.
Organic farming was a valid 19th-century response to the problem of the "worn-out farm."
But today's farmer has a wider range of agronomic choices than a farmer in 1850. When we can test our soils, and supplement the livestock manure with chemical fertilizer -- to make up for any shortfall in any of 29 plant nutrients -- we can grow much higher yields of crops, and grow them more often. When we grow 2 tons of wheat per hectare or 4 tons of coarse grains, and leave the straw and stalks incorporated in the soil surface, there's no shortage of organic matter.
Now that more effective insecticides are available, which protect the crops against pests without significant harm to people or wildlife, the inventors of organic farming would likely applaud their use.
Now that herbicides are available to radically reduce weed competition and allow us to protect soil from erosion more effectively than ever before in history, it would be a moral crime against nature and sustainability not to use them.
In the modern era, unfortunately, organic farming has too often become a religion instead of a production system. In Europe, most of the farms that use it are paid government subsidies to do so. Many of the world's other organic farms are operated by people who don't have to make their living from their farms. Some organic farms in rich countries are very creatively earning "entertainment value" along with their food sales. But most of the world's organic farmers operate traditional, low-yield Third World farms which have no hope of producing the world's food supply without destroying virtually all of the planet's remaining wildlands.
Despite all of the rhetoric, organic farming is not nearly as sustainable as mainstream farming. Organic farming on a global basis would mean doubling the world's current cropland, and immediately plowing down an additional 6 million square miles of wildlife habitat. To get enough plant nutrients, we would have to clear more millions of acres for legume crops like clover and alfalfa. Trading wildlife habitat for clover is a bad and needless trade if we can take chemical nitrogen from the air with industrial processes -- especially since crop plants can only use nitrogen in its chemical form.
Low-input "sustainable" agriculture is a cross-breed trying to please everyone and not getting the job done. It is either organic farming gone astray or high-yield farming done poorly.
LISA farms accept increased erosion per ton of food, to the exact extent that they accept lower yields. If a LISA farm does not allow itself to use herbicides and conservation tillage, it will also be hard put to match the low runoff and soil erosion of the high-yield no-till farmer.
For 30 years, the environmental activists have adamantly opposed farm chemicals. However, they have not been able to document any significant harm to wildlife from properly-applied pesticides.
-- Rachel Carson was wrong about DDT killing robins. And it is mercury which has been demonstrated to thin the eggshells of birds, not pesticide residues.
-- Last year, an institute which favors alternative agriculture accused the Hudson Institute and Dennis Avery of "perpetrating the newest agricultural myth" -- the "myth" that high-yield agriculture could feed the expected human population and still leave room for wildlife. Their report never dealt at all with the 10 million square miles of wildlife being saved by higher yields. And the worst charge they could level at pesticides was based on a 1991 study by the University of William and Mary, which found that 6 percent of the adult eagles in the James River estuary of Virginia were being killed by secondary pesticide poisoning. What the activists apparently did not know was that the offending pesticide had been taken off the market in 1993, as a result of the study. The problem involved a few hundred bird deaths per year (most of them doves) in a State with 44,000 square miles and literally millions of birds. But our pest controls are now so good and so varied and so overall safe for wildlife that we do not even have to tolerate a few hundred bird deaths per year. The alternative agriculture movement would apparently prefer that the State of Virginia eliminate most of the pesticides, accept lower yields, and plow down another half-million hectares of wildlands to make up the difference.
-- I've been carrying on a long-distance correspondence with a vegetarian lady from Melbourne through the pages of the Australian Farm Journal. Her last letter suggested that the world's humans could meet all of their nutritional needs by adding 150 grams of nuts per day to their diets, rather than eating resource-costly meat, milk and eggs. Her reason for suggesting this was that "the platypus needs water free of pesticide residues." In my reply, I noted her own admission that the platypus is not now endangered and pointed out that pesticides are getting safer for wildlife, not more dangerous. And it is not a question of whether people could balance their diets with nuts rather than meat, but their willingness to do so. At this moment, they do not seem willing. Therefore, I suggested, the worst thing for the platypus would be for the Melbourne lady to get her way: The pesticides would be banned, the crop yields would be reduced, and the platypus' home would be converted to a pasture or rice paddy to satisfy driving human hunger. I concluded it would be better if the lady in Melbourne converted the world to vegetarianism first. Thenwe could accept lower crop yields without endangering our wildlife. I also suggested that she hurry, because so-called environmentalists have been talking about a vegetarian world for 30 years. We are farther from that goal today than ever before, and China's meat consumption is now rising by 4 million tons per year.
That leaves only human health as a reason for opposing farm chemicals.
That may seem a strong card to the casual observer, because the opponents of farm chemicals have essentially kept their pesticide scare going with the cancer threat. However, that threat has now virtually disappeared.
The U.S. National Research Council, the preeminent science voice in America, has just published the definitive report on pesticides and cancer. It is the most thorough and wide-ranging evaluation of all the cancer risks in the human diet ever conducted in the United States and perhaps the known world. It is titled Carcinogens and Anti-Carcinogens in the Human Diet. (National Research Council, 1996.)
The report concludes that there is virtually no human cancer
risk from pesticide residues. It suggests that humans are at more
risk from the natural carcinogens in their foods than from
pesticide residues. The natural carcinogens are equally toxic,
and present in much higher quantities than the pesticide
residues. The NRC's strongest statement is that neither the
natural carcinogens nor the pesticide residues are present in
large enough concentrations to present a human cancer
threat.
The NRC report endorses earlier work by many toxicologists indicating that less than 3 percent of human cancers are triggered by the entire range of carcinogenic exposures in our environment: asbestos, radon, dioxin, pesticide residues, industrial effluents, etc. Most of our cancers are caused by heredity and diets that are too low in fruits, vegetables and fiber and too high in fat. (The latest discoveries are giving heredity a larger and larger cancer role.)
This NCR report will make it much more difficult for environmental activists to threaten the public with cancer fears over pesticide residues that are one ten-thousandth as dangerous as chlorinated drinking water.
In effect, the report recommends that people consume more pesticide residues if they want to cut their cancer risks -- because most of our consumption of pesticide residues is on fruits and vegetables. And those fruits and vegetables can cut our cancer risks in half. (That's where the "Anticarcinogens" get into the report's title; fruits and vegetables contain lots of them.)
We are thus offered quite a different picture of tomorrow's world than we usually see on the 6 o'clock news. We can see a world in 2050 which:
-- Nine billion affluent people average slightly less than 2 children per couple (because affluent, educated women want fewer children) and so the world's human population is gradually declining.
-- Ninety-plus percent of the people live in comfortable, well-appointed high-rise cities, and so occupy only 3.5 percent of the earth's land surface. (Cities currently take just 1.4 percent of the land area.)
-- The cities treat their sewage and invest in clean energy, so they represent no threat to the wildlife in the surrounding natural habitats.
-- They produce ample forest products, to avoid increased dependence on environmentally-worse steel and concrete, from high-yielding tree plantations growing on about 5 percent of the current wild forest area.
-- They produce their food from high-yielding crops and livestock on the one-third of the earth's land area already used for crops and pastures, so no additional wildlife habitat has had to be plowed down for crops. The high yields have been achieved because the farmers have been able to use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and biotechnology.
Unfortunately, the biggest question mark still looming over this pleasant scenario for the future is the question of pests developing resistance to our pesticides and pest control management.
There is little question that the potential exists for pests to launch new attacks on our crops, livestock and poultry. They will do this through their own wondrously-rapid natural potential for mutation, as well as through the synthetic stimulus of human pesticide application.
The one area where high-yield farmers, organic farmers,
environmental activists and politicians seem able to agree is
Integrated Pest Management. IPM is the attempt to protect our
food production as fully as possible using any or all of the pest
control measures at our disposal: resistant varieties, crop
timing, natural predators, crop rotation, moisture management,
hand hoes, mulching and anything else that works including
pesticides.
Let us not forget, however, the real reason for using the modern forms of integrated pest management: IPM makes the pesticides more effective. It uses less chemical per kill, and helps reduce the buildup of pest resistance. IPM may also help us farm with greater local sensitivity to the environment in the fields and immediately surrounding them, but that must be a secondary goal to minimizing the land required for food production. Little of the wildlife is in or around our crop fields. Virtually all of the wildlife is in the wildlands.
Let us not make the mistake of believing that IPM is a substitute for pesticides.
Nor should we make the mistake of believing that using less pesticide is somehow a virtue in itself. Radical opponents of farm chemicals say our goal should be the complete elimination of pesticides. But our real goal should be to retain all the wildlife while feeding all the people.
Less radical opponents say we should move strongly toward biological pest controls. However, such biological controls have been used throughout my lifetime, and to date they have been the weakest and most erratic pest control methods available to the farmer. How much wildlife habitat should we sacrifice to use less-effective biological controls?
Environmental stewardship also means continuing to research new, still-safer pesticides with still-different modes of action -- and keep the old ones on the registration list for occasional use to combat resistance. President Bill Clinton was wrong when he said recently, "America has kept too many bad pesticides on the market too long." America has not approved many bad pesticides, and the potential for resistance means we need to keep even the older ones sharp and battle-ready.
-- This means chemical companies should be encouraged to invest their shareholders' money in new pesticides, not be scorned in public.
-- It means government regulators should encourage and accept safe and sustainable pest controls on a reasonable basis rather than on a "zero risk" standard, which can never be achieved. (The latest Washington rumor is that America's EPA wants to eliminate all of the pre-emergence weed treatments; nothing could fly more fiercely in the face of everything we know about managing to avoid pest resistance.)
-- It means the public must be willing to have its tax dollars used for basic research to better understand pests and their interactions with crops, even if the result is more pesticides.
-- It means that crop varieties which can tolerate the environmentally-safest herbicides are an excellent next step in weed control, even if it takes genetic engineering to get the tolerance. The alternative is more weed resistance, sooner, and then lower crop yields. Hopefully, our continued investments in biotechnology will enable us to attack pest resistance at much more fundamental levels.
Ultimately, it may also mean that environmental activists must forego their best fund-raising technique -- the fear of pesticides and biotechnology which they themselves have helped to create and maintain -- in order to save the wildlife they are pledged to protect.
America's new "Freedom to Farm" policy is a major step toward liberalizing international farm trade -- so the world will be able to use its best and safest farmlands and its most productive and sustainable farming systems to meet the 21st century food challenge.
America's farm subsidies have now been decoupled from production for the next seven years. With the budget deficits and the public attitude which elected the Republican Congress in 1994, and with the increasing visibility of the Asian export opportunity, it is unlikely that we will ever see a return to U.S. farm price supports and cropland diversion. In fact, it is unlikely that the U.S. will continue to make farm income payments after the current bill expires.
This means that the farmers of the world's biggest trading nation and biggest farm exporter have now been fixed of necessity on Asian exports and farm trade reform.
At the same time, the European Union has been forced to further modify the Common Agricultural Policy. It is shifting rapidly from price supports for commercial farmers to direct income payments for small farmers -- and the need for a buffer against Russian adventurism will soon add more than 4 million small farmers to the EU, from countries whose governments cannot afford CAP payments. French and Dutch commercial farmers are already looking to the day when they will be able to sell their products to China, India and Indonesia.
Free farm trade is becoming more likely by the day. If the Cairns Groups works constructively with the emerging trade-oriented consensus of commercial farmers in America and Western Europe, it can probably achieved within five to seven years.
I have essentially come here today to affirm the reality that the future for both humanity and the environment is far brighter than the pessimists want us to believe. Garrett Hardin published his essay on "lifeboat ethics" 20 years ago, believing that famine for millions lay just ahead. Thankfully, Hardin was completely wrong when he wrote:
"...Western man has pretty well succeeded in locking himself into a suicidal course
of action by developing and clinging to a concept of the absolute sanctity of life.."
Not only have we avoided the famine, but we have kept nearly all of the world's wildlands too. If we had not spent the 20 years since Hardin presented his "lifeboat ethics" downgrading our priority on high-yield farming research and throwing unnecessary regulatory roadblocks in the way of agricultural technology, we might have saved all the wildlands and wildlife!
I am at a loss to understand why so many of the world's supposedly "best and brightest" have so eagerly and ardently accepted Hardin's "lifeboat mentality."
Hardly anybody in agriculture accepts that mentality. We know too well the potential for food production that lies all around us, waiting to justify our deep belief in the sanctity of human life and our deep respect for all forms of life.
We know that the world is not overcrowded.
We know the world doesn't need lifeboat ethics.
The world just needs higher-yield farming and tree plantations.
__________________________
Dennis T. Avery is Director of The Center for Global Food Issues, a project of the Hudson Institute, a think-tank located in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was formerly the senior agricultural analyst for the U.S. Department of State. He is the editor of the Global Food Quarterly and author of two books published by the Hudson Institute: Global Food Progress (1991) and Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming (1995).
He and his wife live on a small farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, USA. He can be reached by writing: Center for Global Food Issues, PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 USA or FAX 0019 1 540 337-8593.
Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic is
available through AVCARE or by faxing his office directly.