Agriculture / Food Scenario Answers

Economic growth is the only solution to famine

It is well established that there is a strong correlation between famine and economic development or growth. Economic growth leads to development and reduction in poverty and famine. Real economic growth embracing and benefiting all the citizens of a country produces safety mechanisms which are of vital importance in alleviating or avoiding displacements and live destruction emanating from famine. The suffering and significant loss of lives resulting from persistent famines which are hitting Ethiopia could not be avoided or even mitigated owing to the shrinking economy or increasing poverty in the country. On the other hand, one can can not avoid but face the irony of Ethiopia failing to be self sufficient and feed its population despite possessing all the potential to do so. Thus a critical examination of the major stumbling block or factor acting as a bottleneck and preventing the country from eradicating or even coping with famine is necessary.

Thomas Sowell, senior fellow Hoover Institution, 1/2/02

It turns out that food prices on the world market tell us very little about global hunger. International markets for food, like most other international markets, are used most heavily by the well-to-do, who are far from hungry. The majority of truly undernourished people -- 62 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization -- live in either Africa or South Asia, and most are small farmers or rural landless laborers living in the countryside of Africa and South Asia. They are significantly shielded from global price fluctuations both by the trade policies of their own governments and by poor roads and infrastructure. In Africa, more than 70 percent of rural households are cut off from the closest urban markets because, for instance, they live more than a 30-minute walk from the nearest all-weather road.

Poverty -- caused by the low income productivity of farmers' labor -- is the primary source of hunger in Africa, and the problem is only getting worse. The number of "food insecure" people in Africa (those consuming less than 2,100 calories a day) will increase 30 percent over the next decade without significant reforms, to 645 million, the U.S. Agriculture Department projects.

What's so tragic about this is that we know from experience how to fix the problem. Wherever the rural poor have gained access to improved roads, modern seeds, less expensive fertilizer, electrical power, and better schools and clinics, their productivity and their income have increased. But recent efforts to deliver such essentials have been undercut by deeply misguided (if sometimes well-meaning) advocacy against agricultural modernization and foreign aid.

In Europe and the United States, a new line of thinking has emerged in elite circles that opposes bringing improved seeds and fertilizers to traditional farmers and opposes linking those farmers more closely to international markets. Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that "sustainable food" in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn't work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.

If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we've developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe. In other words, a lot like the hunger-plagued rest of the world.

Original Sins

Thirty years ago, had someone asserted in a prominent journal or newspaper that the Green Revolution was a failure, he or she would have been quickly dismissed. Today the charge is surprisingly common. Celebrity author and eco-activist Vandana Shiva claims the Green Revolution has brought nothing to India except "indebted and discontented farmers." A 2002 meeting in Rome of 500 prominent international NGOs, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, even blamed the Green Revolution for the rise in world hunger. Let's set the record straight.

The development and introduction of high-yielding wheat and rice seeds into poor countries, led by American scientist Norman Borlaug and others in the 1960s and 70s, paid huge dividends. In Asia these new seeds lifted tens of millions of small farmers out of desperate poverty and finally ended the threat of periodic famine. India, for instance, doubled its wheat production between 1964 and 1970 and was able to terminate all dependence on international food aid by 1975. As for indebted and discontented farmers, India's rural poverty rate fell from 60 percent to just 27 percent today. Dismissing these great achievements as a "myth" (the official view of Food First, a California-based organization that campaigns globally against agricultural modernization) is just silly.

It's true that the story of the Green Revolution is not everywhere a happy one. When powerful new farming technologies are introduced into deeply unjust rural social systems, the poor tend to lose out. In Latin America, where access to good agricultural land and credit has been narrowly controlled by traditional elites, the improved seeds made available by the Green Revolution increased income gaps. Absentee landlords in Central America, who previously allowed peasants to plant subsistence crops on underutilized land, pushed them off to sell or rent the land to commercial growers who could turn a profit using the new seeds. Many of the displaced rural poor became slum dwellers. Yet even in Latin America, the prevalence of hunger declined more than 50 percent between 1980 and 2005.

In Asia, the Green Revolution seeds performed just as well on small nonmechanized farms as on larger farms. Wherever small farmers had sufficient access to credit, they took up the new technology just as quickly as big farmers, which led to dramatic income gains and no increase in inequality or social friction. Even poor landless laborers gained, because more abundant crops meant more work at harvest time, increasing rural wages. In Asia, the Green Revolution was good for both agriculture and social justice.

And Africa? Africa has a relatively equitable and secure distribution of land, making it more like Asia than Latin America and increasing the chances that improvements in farm technology will help the poor. If Africa were to put greater resources into farm technology, irrigation, and rural roads, small farmers would benefit.

Organic Myths

Where industrial-scale food technologies have not yet reached into the developing world, contaminated food remains a major risk. In Africa, where many foods are still purchased in open-air markets (often uninspected, unpackaged, unlabeled, unrefrigerated, unpasteurized, and unwashed), an estimated 700,000 people die every year from food- and water-borne diseases, compared with an estimated 5,000 in the United States.

Health professionals also reject the claim that organic food is safer to eat due to lower pesticide residues. Food and Drug Administration surveys have revealed that the highest dietary exposures to pesticide residues on foods in the United States are so trivial (less than one one-thousandth of a level that would cause toxicity) that the safety gains from buying organic are insignificant. Pesticide exposures remain a serious problem in the developing world, where farm chemical use is not as well regulated, yet even there they are more an occupational risk for unprotected farmworkers than a residue risk for food consumers.

Here's why: Less than 1 percent of American cropland is under certified organic production. If the other 99 percent were to switch to organic and had to fertilize crops without any synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, that would require a lot more composted animal manure. To supply enough organic fertilizer, the U.S. cattle population would have to increase roughly fivefold. And because those animals would have to be raised organically on forage crops, much of the land in the lower 48 states would need to be converted to pasture. Organic field crops also have lower yields per hectare. If Europe tried to feed itself organically, it would need an additional 28 million hectares of cropland, equal to all of the remaining forest cover in France, Germany, Britain, and Denmark combined.

Not only is organic farming less friendly to the environment than assumed, but modern conventional farming is becoming significantly more sustainable. High-tech farming in rich countries today is far safer for the environment, per bushel of production, than it was in the 1960s, when Rachel Carson criticized the indiscriminate farm use of DDT in her environmental classic, Silent Spring. Thanks in part to Carson's devastating critique, that era's most damaging insecticides were banned and replaced by chemicals that could be applied in lower volume and were less persistent in the environment. Chemical use in American agriculture peaked soon thereafter, in 1973. This was a major victory for environmental advocacy.

These "precision farming" techniques have significantly reduced the environmental footprint of modern agriculture relative to the quantity of food being produced. In 2008, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a review of the "environmental performance of agriculture" in the world's 30 most advanced industrial countries -- those with the most highly capitalized and science-intensive farming systems. The results showed that between 1990 and 2004, food production in these countries continued to increase (by 5 percent in volume), yet adverse environmental impacts were reduced in every category. The land area taken up by farming declined 4 percent, soil erosion from both wind and water fell, gross greenhouse gas emissions from farming declined 3 percent, and excessive nitrogen fertilizer use fell 17 percent. Biodiversity also improved, as increased numbers of crop varieties and livestock breeds came into use.

Industrial ag key to solve hunger

Rayner 10 Jay Rayner, The Observer – The Guardian, 11 September 2010, Big agriculture is the only option to stop the world going hungry http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/12/food-riots-farming, jj
Any consumer of gastroporn in print, online and on our TV screens would imagine we were already having this debate. Words such as local, seasonal and organic have become a holy trinity. But these are merely lifestyle choices for the affluent middle-classes, a matter of aesthetics, and nothing to do with the real issues. Start in the fruit aisle of your supermarket. The major supermarkets are not inherently evil. On balance, they probably help our lives more than they hinder them, but they only respond to consumer demand and what the consumer demands is not always right.

Look at the bags of perfect fruit, shiny, unblemished, the supermodels of the apple world. They only look like that because of the grading out of fruit which, while perfectly edible, is not comely enough for harried shoppers. In Kent recently, I met David Deme, for decades an apple farmer, who a few years ago decided he had to stop supplying supermarkets because he was being forced to "grade out" 30% to 40% of his fruit. He found this unacceptable and chose to move into a premium market, by making apple juice. Other English apple growers have similar stories to tell.

Which goes some way to explaining why Britain, a country perfectly suited to growing apples, now imports 70% of those we eat. The apple shelves are a global tour, from Chile to South Africa, from New Zealand to China, even as we head into prime British apple season. We will never become self-sufficient in apples, but it is possible to reverse the numbers so that only 30% come from abroad, if we stop being obsessed over the look of the fruit and are prepared to pay more for what we buy, so that fruit farmers could invest in new varieties and the best storage techniques.

Cost is key. In the early 90s, we spent roughly 20% of our wages on our shopping bill. Today, it's nearer 10%, even allowing for recent inflation, and we assume these low prices to be a right. The result is margins for our farmers that are so tight many are giving up. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the dairy industry which is not only shedding farmers every week, but losing its future workforce too, as the traditions of family succession dwindle. Farmers' kids don't want to go into the business and their parents don't want them too, either. A country suited to dairy farming is no longer self-sufficient in milk. We're importing the stuff.

The solution, embracing of the kind of super dairy proposed at Nocton Heath in Lincolnshire, which will house more than 8,000 cows, bedded down indoors on sand, is met with howls of derision because it's not "natural". The dairy farmers I've talked to may take issue with it for the impact it could have on smaller farms, but none of them sees animal welfare as an issue. Unhappy, ill animals do not produce milk, so it's not in the farm's interests to mistreat them or shorten their lifespan. Also, the carbon footprint of such a large facility may actually be many times smaller than that of the traditional dairy farm.

If we are to survive the coming food security storm, we will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming. We need to abandon the mythologies around agriculture, which take the wholesome marketing of high-end food brands at face value – farmer in smock, ear of corn, happy pig – and recognise that farming really is an industry, much like car manufacturing or steel forging, one which always works better on a mass scale, but which can still be managed sustainably.

Bespoke is fine for those with deep pockets. As for the rest, we live on a small, overpopulated island with a growing head count and for many big is the only way to go. This is not an endorsement of the worst excesses of the factory farming system. Indeed, only by accepting it can we as consumers get the producers to work to the exacting standards we demand.

Can we afford to ignore these issues? I don't think so. An elitist, belly-obsessed minority, the ones who think the colour plates in the Sunday supplements are a true reflection of real lives if only we all made the effort, may rage against big agriculture and refuse to engage with it. However, when basic ingredients become scarce and prices shoot up on the international markets, their cries will sound increasing hollow, compared to the screams of those who really cannot afford to feed their families. Yes, it has been a very long time since a British food riot, but that does not mean it cannot happen again.

Only way to meet demand and protect the environment

Hurst 09 Blake Hurst – The American – Online Magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, July 30, 2009, The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals, http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals, jj

Industrial Farming and Its Critics Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase. Since it is difficult to sell a religion with so many readily quantifiable bad results, the trusty family farmer has to be thrown into the breach, saving the whole organic movement by his saintly presence, chewing on his straw, plodding along, at one with his environment, his community, his neighborhood. Except that some of the largest farms in the country are organic—and are giant organizations dependent upon lots of hired stoop labor doing the most backbreaking of tasks in order to save the sensitive conscience of my fellow passenger the merest whiff of pesticide contamination. They do not spend much time talking about that at the Whole Foods store. The most delicious irony is this: the parts of farming that are the most “industrial” are the most likely to be owned by the kind of family farmers that elicit such a positive response from the consumer. Corn farms are almost all owned and managed by small family farmers. But corn farmers salivate at the thought of one more biotech breakthrough, use vast amounts of energy to increase production, and raise large quantities of an indistinguishable commodity to sell to huge corporations that turn that corn into thousands of industrial products. Most livestock is produced by family farms, and even the poultry industry, with its contracts and vertical integration, relies on family farms to contract for the production of the birds. Despite the obvious change in scale over time, family farms, like ours, still meet around the kitchen table, send their kids to the same small schools, sit in the same church pew, and belong to the same civic organizations our parents and grandparents did. We may be industrial by some definition, but not our own. Reality is messier than it appears in the book my tormentor was reading, and farming more complicated than a simple morality play. On the desk in front of me are a dozen books, all hugely critical of present-day farming. Farmers are often given a pass in these books, painted as either naïve tools of corporate greed, or economic nullities forced into their present circumstances by the unrelenting forces of the twin grindstones of corporate greed and unfeeling markets. To the farmer on the ground, though, a farmer blessed with free choice and hard won experience, the moral choices aren’t quite so easy. Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. Are people who refuse to use them my moral superiors? Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river. Finally, consumers benefit from cheap food. If you think they don’t, just remember the headlines after food prices began increasing in 2007 and 2008, including the study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations announcing that 50 million additional people are now hungry because of increasing food prices. Only “industrial farming” can possibly meet the demands of an increasing population and increased demand for food as a result of growing incomes.

Only industrial ag solves hunger

Hurst 09 Blake Hurst – The American – Online Magazine of the American Enterprise Institute, July 30, 2009, The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals, http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals, jj
The Omnivores’ Delusions Michael Pollan, in an 8,000-word essay in the New York Times Magazine, took the expected swipes at animal agriculture. But his truly radical prescriptions had to do with raising of crops. Pollan, who seemed to be aware of the nitrogen problem in his book The Omnivore's Dilemma, left nuance behind, as well as the laws of chemistry, in his recommendations. The nitrogen problem is this: without nitrogen, we do not have life. Until we learned to produce nitrogen from natural gas early in the last century, the only way to get nitrogen was through nitrogen produced by plants called legumes, or from small amounts of nitrogen that are produced by lightning strikes. The amount of life the earth could support was limited by the amount of nitrogen available for crop production. In his book, Pollan quotes geographer Vaclav Smil to the effect that 40 percent of the people alive today would not be alive without the ability to artificially synthesize nitrogen. But in his directive on food policy, Pollan damns agriculture's dependence on fossil fuels, and urges the president to encourage agriculture to move away from expensive and declining supplies of natural gas toward the unlimited sunshine that supported life, and agriculture, as recently as the 1940s. Now, why didn't I think of that? Well, I did. I've raised clover and alfalfa for the nitrogen they produce, and half the time my land is planted to soybeans, another nitrogen producing legume. Pollan writes as if all of his ideas are new, but my father tells of agriculture extension meetings in the late 1950s entitled "Clover and Corn, the Road to Profitability." Farmers know that organic farming was the default position of agriculture for thousands of years, years when hunger was just around the corner for even advanced societies. I use all the animal manure available to me, and do everything I can to reduce the amount of commercial fertilizers I use. When corn genetically modified to use nitrogen more efficiently enters the market, as it soon will, I will use it as well. But none of those things will completely replace commercial fertilizer. Norman Borlaug, founder of the green revolution, estimates that the amount of nitrogen available naturally would only support a worldwide population of 4 billion souls or so. He further remarks that we would need another 5 billion cows to produce enough manure to fertilize our present crops with "natural" fertilizer. That would play havoc with global warming. And cows do not produce nitrogen from the air, but only from the forages they eat, so to produce more manure we will have to plant more forages. Most of the critics of industrial farming maintain the contradictory positions that we should increase the use of manure as a fertilizer, and decrease our consumption of meat. Pollan would solve the problem with cover crops, planted after the corn crop is harvested, and with mandatory composting. Pollan should talk to some actual farmers before he presumes to advise a president. Pollan tells of flying over the upper Midwest in the winter, and seeing the black, fallow soil. I suppose one sees what one wants to see, but we have not had the kind of tillage implement on our farm that would produce black soil in nearly 20 years. Pollan would provide our nitrogen by planting those black fields to nitrogen-producing cover crops after the cash crops are harvested. This is a fine plan, one that farmers have known about for generations. And sometimes it would even work. But not last year, as we finished harvest in November in a freezing rain. It is hard to think of a legume that would have done its thing between then and corn planting time. Plants do not grow very well in freezing weather, a fact that would evidently surprise Pollan. And even if we could have gotten a legume established last fall, it would not have fixed any nitrogen before planting time. We used to plant corn in late May, plowing down our green manure and killing the first flush of weeds. But that meant the corn would enter its crucial growing period during the hottest, driest parts of the summer, and that soil erosion would be increased because the land was bare during drenching spring rains. Now we plant in early April, best utilizing our spring rains, and ensuring that pollination occurs before the dog days of August. A few other problems come to mind. The last time I planted a cover crop, the clover provided a perfect habitat in early spring for bugs, bugs that I had to kill with an insecticide. We do not normally apply insecticides, but we did that year. Of course, you can provide nitrogen with legumes by using a longer crop rotation, growing clover one year and corn the next. But that uses twice as much water to produce a corn crop, and takes twice as much land to produce the same number of bushels. We are producing twice the food we did in 1960 on less land, and commercial nitrogen is one of the main reasons why. It may be that we decide we would rather spend land and water than energy, but Pollan never mentions that we are faced with that choice. His other grand idea is mandatory household composting, with the compost delivered to farmers free of charge. Why not? Compost is a valuable soil amendment, and if somebody else is paying to deliver it to my farm, then bring it on. But it will not do much to solve the nitrogen problem. Household compost has somewhere between 1 and 5 percent nitrogen, and not all that nitrogen is available to crops the first year. Presently, we are applying about 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre to corn, and crediting about 40 pounds per acre from the preceding years soybean crop. Let's assume a 5 percent nitrogen rate, or about 100 pounds of nitrogen per ton of compost. That would require 3,000 pounds of compost per acre. Or about 150,000 tons for the corn raised in our county. The average truck carries about 20 tons. Picture 7,500 trucks traveling from New York City to our small county here in the Midwest, delivering compost. Five million truckloads to fertilize the country's corn crop. Now, that would be a carbon footprint! Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it is easier, and because it is cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible reasons. Nitrogen quadrupled in price over the last several years, and farmers are still using it, albeit more cautiously. We are using GPS monitors on all of our equipment to ensure that we do not use too much, and our production of corn per pound of nitrogen is rapidly increasing. On our farm, we have increased yields about 50 percent during my career, while applying about the same amount of nitrogen we did when I began farming. That fortunate trend will increase even faster with the advent of new GMO hybrids. But as much as Pollan might desire it, even President Obama cannot reshuffle the chemical deck that nature has dealt. Energy may well get much more expensive, and peak oil production may have been reached. But food production will have a claim on fossil fuels long after we have learned how to use renewables and nuclear power to handle many of our other energy needs. Farming and Connectedness Much of farming is more "industrial," more technical, and more complex than it used to be. Farmers farm more acres, and are less close to the ground and their animals than they were in the past. Almost all critics of industrial agriculture bemoan this loss of closeness, this "connectedness," to use author Rod Dreher's term. It is a given in most of the writing about agriculture that the knowledge and experience of the organic farmer is what makes him so unique and so important. The "industrial farmer," on the other hand, is a mere pawn of Cargill, backed into his ignorant way of life by forces too large, too far from the farm, and too powerful to resist. Concern about this alienation, both between farmers and the land, and between consumers and their food supply, is what drives much of the literature about agriculture. The distance between the farmer and what he grows has certainly increased, but, believe me, if we weren't closely connected, we wouldn't still be farming. It's important to our critics that they emphasize this alienation, because they have to ignore the "industrial" farmer's experience and knowledge to say the things they do about farming. But farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined notebook and a pencil, but I'm still farming the same land he did 80 years ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have learned tells me this: we have to farm "industrially" to feed the world, and by using those "industrial" tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us.

Big ag key

Grunwald 09 Michael Grunwald, a senior correspondent at Time magazine, is the author of The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise. 2009, Washington Monthly, The Case for Big Ag, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0907.grunwald.html, jj
In the future, for the same reason we won’t want to sacrifice valuable cropland for biofuels, we won’t want to sacrifice it for low-yield organic kale either. As much as we love Michael Pollan’s delicious prose, as much as we feel we ought to love locally grown, pesticide-free, genetically unmodified, naturally fertilized, antibiotic-free, multigrain whatever, we’re going to need the world’s farmland to produce as much sustenance as possible on as little ground as possible, so that we can leave the Amazon alone. Just as we’ll have to increase people-per-acre urban densities to rein in exurban sprawl, we’ll have to increase calorie-per-acre farm production to rein in agricultural sprawl. Michelle Obama’s little garden is a lovely gesture, but it’s not going to feed a world where food demand is rising much faster than food supply, where overpumping is lowering water tables and imperiling agriculture in China and India, and where grain reserves dwindled to an all-time low last year. To feed that world, we’ll need Big Ag to do what it does best. This will require a jolting paradigm shift. Industrial farmers have a well-earned reputation in policy circles as obesity-promoting, pesticide-spewing, water-wasting, energy-hogging, illegal-alien-hiring, politician-buying corporate welfare queens who wax hypocritical about family farmers and the "heartland" while driving small farms out of business and hollowing out rural towns. Their subsidies help deplete aquifers, destroy rivers, intensify Third World poverty, and scuttle free trade deals that would boost the nonagricultural sectors of the U.S. economy. But now that their high yields look like the best way to limit agriculture to a sustainable footprint that would leave enough trees and marshes to avoid a planetary emergency, it might be time for good-government types, environmentalists, anti-hunger activists, free trade supporters, health advocates, and other perennial Big Ag bashers to start thinking about how to work with them. Those taxpayer-supported amber waves of grain have environmental benefits as well as costs. That doesn’t mean we have to support agro-fuels—although we should support efforts to convert crop waste into energy as long as it doesn’t remove land from production. We don’t have to support egregious subsidies for multimillionaire farmers, either—although given the hopeless politics of the issue it might make sense to agree to support them if they’re tied to soil, water, and energy conservation requirements. But we ought to recognize and encourage the potential of genetically modified crops to produce high-yield, drought-resistant crops that require fewer petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides. And we ought to acknowledge that agricultural consolidation, while painful for family farmers and rural communities, is not only inevitable but in many ways desirable. Big Ag can use the advantages of bigness not only to boost production (by buying the best seeds and inputs and tractors) but to reduce waste (with precision GPS gadgets that adjust spraying and watering according to the topography of the field). We might even rethink our opposition to those icky confined-feeding operations, especially when they’re clumping together (more greenhouse-friendly) chickens rather than cows. In exchange, maybe those feedlots could stop destroying the Chesapeake Bay. That would be Big Ag’s end of the bargain: Eliminate its most egregious and least sustainable practices. Stop farming to the edge of the river, and stop draining wetlands. Keep the cows out of the stream, and more runoff on the farm. Stop spreading petroleum-based fertilizer when and where it isn’t needed. Stop creating a massive dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The industry made strides dealing with its erosion problems in response to federal incentives; perhaps it could clean up the rest of its act with proper inducements. Big Ag has been so politically successful for so long that it might resist any compromise, but the farm lobby knows its cue-the-violins baloney about humble tillers of the heartland soil might not justify redistribution from taxpayers to agro-industrialists forever. And one positive by-product of the trend toward corporate farming is that corporations tend to worry about their images. If agriculture keeps producing more than 30 percent of the world’s emissions, including the deforestation effect, it’s going to get stuck with the mother of all image problems. Brazil is an interesting example. Its larger producers make our Big Ag look like Jeffersonian yeomen, and they’ve become international pariahs to the save-the-rainforest crowd. But they’re much lighter on the land than the slash-and-burn subsistence farmers on the Amazon frontier. It’s probably too late for another green revolution; we’re bumping up against the limits of photosynthesis, and global yield increases have dwindled to about 1 percent per year. And there would be social costs to a large-scale expansion of industrial agriculture in Africa and the rest of the low-yield Third World, as well as political costs; it’s no coincidence that the world’s biggest soybean farmer is also the governor of a large Brazilian province on the Amazon frontier. But agricultural consolidation is going to continue no matter what; economies of scale create huge efficiencies, and they give large producers at least some counterweight against the vastly consolidated processing, shipping, and retailing industries. Searchinger’s epiphanies remind us that if it’s going to happen eventually, it might as well happen now, while there’s still a rainforest to save. World hunger and global warming are two of the great challenges of this century, and they are inextricably linked through agriculture and the land. About five million children already die of nutrition-related causes every year, and about fifteen million acres of carbon-rich forests already get converted into farms every year. As the world population rises, both of those figures are likely to explode unless agricultural productivity can explode as well. So by all means, we should ask industrial farmers to clean up their act. But first, we might want to beg them to save the planet and feed the world.

A2: Agricultural Biodiversity

Current measures solving ag-diversity and ensuring access to genetic material—guarantees resiliency

CWR, 2/20-’14 (Crop Wild Relatives, Global Crop Diversity Trust, “Project set to improve the resilience of agriculture under climate change with the help of wild genes – new paper released” http://www.cwrdiversity.org/project-set-to-improve-the-resilience-of-agriculture-under-climate-change-with-the-help-of-wild-genes-new-paper-released/, jj)
Plant collectors and crop breeders from around the world have teamed up to collect, protect and prepare the wild relatives of our most important food crops in a form that can be used to create new varieties that are resilient to climate change. The project, jointly run by the Global Crop Diversity Trust and Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank with support from the Government of Norway, is called Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change and focuses on 29 crops; including globally important crops such as wheat, rice and potato as well as crops of major regional importance in the developing world, such as finger millet, sweet potato, cowpea and sorghum. Scientists working on the project released a paper earlier this week emphasising the relevance of the work for food security and outlining the main phases which will lead to the development of these new varieties. Climate change is acknowledged to be one of the biggest threats to food security in the 21st century. Many decades of modern selective breeding, while greatly improving yield in major crops, has unfortunately left them low in genetic diversity and therefore vulnerable to stresses such as rising temperatures, drought, and diseases. One way to introduce genetic diversity, and therefore resilience, in our crops is to include their wild relatives in breeding programs so that the useful traits they contain (e.g. higher yield, disease resistance, drought tolerance) can be passed onto our crops. The main phases of the project are as follows identify those crop wild relatives (CWR) that are missing from existing gene bank collections, are most likely to contain diversity of value to adapting agriculture to climate change, and are most endangered; collect them from the wild and conserve them in gene banks for conservation; evaluate these and other CWR materials already in collections for useful traits and prepare them for use in crop improvement; and make the resulting products and information widely available. With the first phase of the project already completed, and the second phase well underway, we will soon have a more comprehensive collection of CWR stored in seed banks as well as more active breeding programs to develop new adapted varieties.

New advances ensures protection of ag-diversity

UN News Centre, ’10 (10/26 “Conserving plant genetic diversity crucial for future food security – UN” http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=36564#.U7RZNPldWZA, jj)
On a more positive note, the report states that over the past 12 years, there has been an increase in awareness of the importance of protecting and utilizing the genetic diversity of food crops. Gene banks have increased in both size and the number. There are now some 1,750 gene banks worldwide, with about 130 of them each holding more than 10,000 plant genes. In 2008, the ultimate back-up of global crop diversity, the Svalbald Global Seed Vault, was opened in Norway.

Status quo solves—new programs protect agro-biodiversity

CNN, ‘9 (Eco Solutions, 9/6 “Feeding the future: Saving agricultural biodiversity” http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/09/04/food.biodiversity/index.html?iref=24hours, jj)
(CNN) -- When the chips are down, the world may one day owe a debt of gratitude to a group of potato farmers high up in the mountains of Peru. Thanks to a new $116 million global fund established this summer, the Quechua Indians are being paid to maintain their diverse collection of rare potatoes and ensure that they will be available to help the world adapt to future climate change. The Quechua are one of 11 communities around the world, chosen for the important collection of crops they farm, which together are part of a major new initiative to ensure that the world has the options it might need to cope with future food crises. Other countries involved include Cuba, where they will be focusing on maize and beans, as well as oranges in Egypt and wheat in Tanzania. The fund, a cornerstone of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), aims to maintain a reservoir of essential species for all our major food crops. "Agricultural biodiversity is essential," Dr Shakeel Bhatti, Secretary of the Treaty, told CNN. "It is really the global insurance that in the future we will be able to adapt to problems like climate change and population growth." Just as biodiversity is now seen as the cornerstone of the resilience of natural world, so having a broad variety of agricultural crops is essential to the resilience of agriculture. Different species of plants are often able to cope with widely differing environmental conditions and many obscure varieties could hide vital disease resistance. But the world's valuable diversity is disappearing incredibly fast. "The figures are quite disturbing," said Dr Bhatti. Over the millennia, humans have relied on more than 10,000 different plant species for food. Today, we have barely 150 species under cultivation -- and of those only 12 species provide 80 percent of all of our food needs. Four of those -- rice, wheat, maize and potatoes -- provide more than half of our energy requirements. As global markets have grown and seed production and agriculture become more commercialized, the old system of farmers saving their own seeds - and by doing so a myriad of different crops, often closely adapted to local conditions - has almost disappeared. As a result variety is dwindling towards a vanishing point. China has lost 90 percent of the wheat varieties it had just 60 years ago. In the United States more than 90 percent of fruit tree and vegetable varieties found in farmers' fields at the beginning of the twentieth century are no longer there. Mexico has lost 80 percent of its corn varieties. India has lost 90 percent of its rice varieties "They're gone; they've disappeared forever," said Dr Bhatti. "From a food security point of view this makes the world's farmers much more vulnerable to pests... and increases the vulnerability of some poor countries to price shocks in global commodity markets." The ITPGRFA has two major aims: to prevent the loss of underused crops and ensure the full diversity of common crop species is maintained. It has already enabled the establishment of a seed bank containing 1.1 million varieties that opened in Svalbard, Norway, in 2008. But now the focus is on crop varieties than cannot be stored in this way -- such as potatoes. Historically, both the 19th century Irish Potato Famine and the Bengal Famine, in India, are hard lessons in what happens when we rely too much on a small range of species that are hit by disease. But, according to Dr Bhatti, there are problems around the world now that offer a glimpse at what could happen in the future if we don't maintain our vigilance. Wheat Stem Rust is a devastating wind-born disease affecting cereals that has spread across Africa and is now in the Middle East, and migrating further eastwards. "If it reaches South Asia and China then millions could face a major threat to food security," says Dr Bhatti. In southwest Australia years of drought, believed to be linked to climate change, have had a huge impact on rice production. "It has almost wiped out the sector," said Dr Bhatti. Although the ITPGRFA was agreed in 2001, and came into affect in 2004, but for the last five years signatories have been locked in negotiations over how the scheme would be financed. It wasn't until a conference in Tunis in June 2009 that the deadlock was broken with the new $116 million benefit sharing fund, which will fund the 11 projects. There are also contracts to ensure those countries that are centers of diversity -- often poorer nations -- benefit when species are used commercially by richer nations. "That was a major step forward," said Dr Bhatti. "We now have tremendous confidence in the system; the treaty is on track." Rich signatories, such as Norway, Spain and Italy, have agreed to provide the rest of the funds within five years, and according to Dr Bhatti the U.S. has expressed a desire to sign up after disinterest during the Bush administration. So successful is the model established by the ITPGRFA that the World Health Organization is looking at it as a way of sharing information on viruses, including influenza; there are also plans for a bank of animal genetic material. "I must say I have been so delighted by the Tunis conference this year," said Dr Bhatti. "To a certain extent we were at a crossroads, but we completely came through. It was a quantum leap; a major thing. We are moving forward."

A2: Soil Erosion

1) USDA requirements are solving soil erosion

Smith, Director, Resource Economic Division, USDA, 2001 (Katherine, Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrion & Forestry, Feb 28, http://agriculture.senate.gov/Hearings/Hearings_2001/February_28__2001/0228smi.htm, Kel)
Since 1985, agriculture's environmental gains have been impressive, both in physical terms and in estimated economic benefits due to environmental improvement. Neither the full costs nor all the benefits of conservation programs have been estimated, primarily because benefits from conservation are largely not priced in markets. While it is difficult to separate the influence of programs from the effects of changing market conditions and technical advances, ERS analysis suggests that conservation and environmental policies have played a critical role in producing these gains.

Soil erosion on cropland fell nearly 40 percent from 1982 to 1997, dropping from 3.08 billion tons per year to 1.89 billion (1997 National Resources Inventory, National Resources Conservation Service, USDA). Both wind and water erosion declined, and reductions occurred on both highly erodible and non-highly erodible cropland. Benefits of erosion reduction enjoyed by producers and society as a whole due to conservation compliance are estimated to exceed $1.4 billion per year. Benefits from erosion reductions alone on acreage enrolled in the CRP are estimated to exceed $690 million per year, compared with average annual program outlays of $1.5 billion.

2) Modern farming practices have reduced significantly the amount of soil erosion over the last 15 years

Francl, Sr. Economist of the American Farm Bureau Federation, Nadler, and Bast, President of the Heartland Institute, 1998 (Terry, Richard, & Joseph, “The Kyoto Protocol and US Agriculture,” Heartland Institute, No. 87, Oct. 30, www.heartland.org/archives/studies/gwag-study.pdf, Kel)
Erosion reduces biomass per acre and below-ground carbon sequestration. It also costs farmers money by removing land from productive use. U.S. farmers are making significant progress against soil erosion, reducing by 24 percent the amount of erosion per farm acre in the last 15 years.60

3) Modern farming practices do not cause massive soil erosion

Rothbard & Rucker 1996 (David & Craig, “Defending the bounties of modern farming,” Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, July 1, http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=3&idarticle=199, Kel)
The second major criticism leveled against modern farming is that the amount of agriculture needed to feed the world's growing population is simply using up too much land. The "Agenda 21" platform from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit warns "massive erosion is causing a rapid loss in the fertile soil of our planet," while environmental leader Jeremy Rifkin blames farming, among other things, for destroying "the flora and fauna of the planet at a breathtaking pace." But just what are the facts?

Well first of all, erosion is always occurring. It is what is making the Appalachian Mountains smaller as time continues to go by. The question is, is topsoil being lost quicker than it is being naturally replenished?

According to Dr. Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, two technologies currently in use are working toward this end. "Conservation tillage" cuts soil erosion by 65% by leaving a heavy layer of crop residue in the upper soil. And "no-till" farming, which keeps a layer of sod on the field throughout much of the year, can cut soil erosion by 98%.

This all means that while topsoil eroded in the early half of this century at a rate of some 30 to 40 tons/acre/year, current no- and low-till methods, where employed, have slowed erosion down to 1 ton or less. Since topsoil is replenished at the rate of 2 to 4 tons per year, modern agriculture apparently can be quite sustainable after all.

Turn: organic framing leads to worse topsoil erosion and soil nutrient damage.

Conko, director of food safety policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2003 (Gregory, “Benefits of Biotechnology,” Spring, http://www.igreens.org.uk/benefits_of_biotech.htm, Kel)
Also, because organic farmers must control weeds by using frequent mechanical tillage (or else sacrifice yields), organic agriculture contributes to topsoil erosion and disturbs worms and other soil invertebrates. Compared with modern conservation tillage practices, organic weed control is much more environmentally damaging.

A2: Species Destruction

Pesticides have no impact on species

Rothbard & Rucker 1996 (David & Craig, “Defending the bounties of modern farming,” Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, July 1, http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=3&idarticle=199, Kel)
As for the effects of pesticides on animals, concerns are generally reserved for their impact on birds. But the fact is that since the Pilgrims dropped anchor at Plymouth Rock, only four species -- the Labrador duck, great auk, passenger pigeon, and Carolina parakeet -- have gone extinct, and these were well before the use of agrochemicals. Even more significantly, there are now two billion more songbirds in the U.S. than there were in the late 16th Century, and according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, most of the 254 bird species monitored over recent decades have been on the rise.

A2: Habitat Destruction/Land Use

Modern agricultural practices increase crop production on least amount of land and has no effect on habitat destruction

Rothbard & Rucker 1996 (David & Craig, “Defending the bounties of modern farming,” Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, July 1, http://www.cfact.org/site/view_article.asp?idCategory=3&idarticle=199, Kel)
Finally, for those concerned about wildlife habitat, modern agriculture should be the last thing they oppose because unless they want to eliminate the vast number of people living on the earth, these high-tech methods are the best way to grow the most food on the least amount of land.

Since the advent of modern farming, nations including the U.S. and some in Europe have actually increased, not decreased, the size of their forests. And now, thanks to efforts like the Conservation Reserve Program, the U.S. is even setting aside hundreds of thousands of acres of previously farmed land to be reverted back to duck-happy wetlands.

It should further be noted there is little direct conflict between farming and efforts to preserve biodiversity because, as explained by Michael Huston of the Oakridge National Laboratory, the best areas for farming, like Kansas, Iowa, and Indiana, just happen to be the regions with the least variety of species while those with poorer soil, like Texas and Florida, are exactly the opposite.

No impact: modern agriculture has already used all the habitats that it can—no additionally habitat loss can occur

Ruhl, Professor of Law, Florida State, 2000 (JB, Ecology Law Quarterly, pp. LN, Kel)
The consequences of modern agriculture on wildlife habitat are undeniable, from habitat elimination to more direct effects on water and wildlife species. n37 The "structure and diversity of the agroecosystem can also influence the movement of wildlife [*275] between natural and agricultural systems and affect their use of such systems." n38 Despite the ability of perennial, vegetationally diverse agro-ecosystems with complex structure to provide important habitats for many birds and other animals typically found in undisturbed habitats, n39 farms pose an enormous net negative to wildlife.

Farming no longer poses a significant direct threat of habitat loss. Most direct loss of habitat resulting from conversion of land areas to farming has already occurred. n40 In fact, the United States loses a small portion of its available farmland each year, mainly to urban and suburban land uses. n41 But the magnitude of the historical transformation of undisturbed habitat to farming was immense - after all, at one time virtually all of the 930 million acres currently in farming uses were undisturbed habitat.

Directory: file -> view
view -> Western Europe after wwii
view -> Author study: paul fleischman
view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide
view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg
view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh
view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce
view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy
view -> Table of Contents Lesson #
view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad

Download 1.56 Mb.

Share with your friends: