By Dennis Avery
“Farming relies on reducing biodiversity. Pests are species that compete directly with humans for the plants and animals raised on farms. The use of agricultural chemicals has enormously increased the productivity of existing farmlands. By reducing the amount of new land that must be cleared to feed the exploding human population, the use of these chemicals helps to maintain biodiversity elsewhere”.
“Environmental zealots will make it impossible for American farms to produce a food abundance. The fact is that high-yield farming has made bigger contributions to human health and environmental sustainablity than all the environmental activist groups together. High-yield farming is a hunger triumph. Without it we would have had massive famines.
High-yield farming today is feeding twice as many people as the planet supported in the 1950’s, and feeding them better diets, without using more cropland. If we had not tripled the world’s crop yield potential - combining high powered seeds, irrigation fertilizer, pesticides and mechanization - the world’s expanding population would long since have destroyed much of the wildlife on earth. The Third World cannot hire enough game wardens to protect the wildlife if people are starving.
The food challenge for the 21st century is to triple world farm output again by the year 2050, with less impact on wildlife habitat than farming has today. High-yield farming is the only visible strategy for meeting that challenge. It is already saving 10 million square miles of wildlife habitat. Without high-yield farming we would not be cultivating 5.8 million square miles of land. We would be plowing 15-16 million square miles, the land area of the western hemisphere.
Farm chemicals do not threaten wildlife. The key is not how many spiders and weeds survive in an acre of monoculture corn. There is never much wildlife in a crop field, organic or not. It is the billions of wild organisms that thrive in the two acres left unplowed, because we tripled yields on the best and safest acres.
High-yield farming is more sustainable today than farming has been in 10,000 years. It is reducing soil erosion by 50-98% because farmers are using herbicides for weed control instead of plowed and “bare earth” farming systems. The world’s sever soil erosion is in primitive countries trying to support rising population by extending low-yield traditional farming into fragile lands.
High-yield farming does not poison soils with chemicals. Poisoned soils are in badly done irrigation systems where too much water and too little drainage have built-up salts.
The environmental movement claims farm chemicals are a danger to the environment and people. They are wrong. Chemicals used in modern farming do not cause cancer, they prevent it. The suppress molds and toxins in our food and ensure ample supplies of fruits and vegetables. Pesticide residues are one-thousandth as dangerous to humans as the natural chemicals in our food.
Organic farming is no alternative. A global commitment to organic farming would mean massive destruction of wildlife. Its yields are too low. If we plan to depend on organic farming, we had better steel ourselves to plow down another 25-30 million square miles of wildlife habitat.
The world and its wildlife urgently need the farm productivity of the western hemisphere’s huge tracts of temperate cropland and need them amplified by fertilizer and pesticides. Without exports from the western hemisphere, most of the Third World will plow down its environment resources for food.”
Dennis Avery is director of the Centre for Global Food Issue at the Hudson Institute in Washington.
Reprint permission given by AgAirupdate, P.O. Box 850, Perry, GA 31069 - an international agricultural aviation publication.
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