These estimates cover only the costs of the “user permits” that companies will have to buy. They don’t even try to measure the massive reduction in our economic output as energy costs double and triple with scarcity.

Let’s look at a couple of “case studies”: 

First, we use a lot of natural gas to make fertilizer, pulling 90 million tons per year of natural nitrogen from the air (which is 78% N). The world has only about one-third of the cow manure needed to nourish today’s crops, so nitrogen fertilizer is feeding 2 billion of the world’s 6.5 billion people through higher food yields per acre.

Imagine that ten years from now the carbon taxes have eliminated half of the nitrogen fertilizer: global food production has fallen massively— say by 25–30 percent; world food prices have tripled; and storage bins are empty. What price would we pay to keep the other half of the nitrogen fertilizer so our kids won’t starve?

Would farmers and the public defend the remaining fertilizer factories with roadblocks—or even firearms? Will governments overcome the “fertilizer fanatics” with force?  How would the governments convince troops to fire on their own people? By giving the troops food the public can’t get? 

Moreover, the BBC has just admitted what careful observers already knew—the planet hasn’t warmed since 1998!  Many climatologists say we’re in a 30-year cooling driven by Pacific Ocean cycling. Will “global warming” come to be viewed as just a “weapon of mass taxation”?

Second case:  Britain is supposed to lose 40 percent of its electrical generating capacity in the next eight years. All but one of its nuclear plants is due for decommissioning, and the EU declares that nine of its big coal-fired plants emit too much CO₂. As the blackouts spread across a shivering winter countryside, will the UK government carry through its fossil-reduction commitments while elderly people are dying in their homes? 

None of the taxes, remember, will bring fossil fuel use down enough to actually forestall man-made global warming—even if the embattled Greenhouse Theory was valid. The energy taxes will be “all pain and no gain.”

Remember, too that the “Green alternatives” aren’t working out well.

• Denmark’s massive investment in wind turbines has produced electricity mainly at night, when no one wants it.   

• Biofuels nearly doubled world food prices when the U.S. corn ethanol plants were all running. The proposed energy taxes will quickly drive gasoline and corn back up to food-inflation levels again. They’re supposed to.

Meanwhile, the natural, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle predicts only 0.5 degree C of warming over the next several centuries. The ice cores and seabed fossils tell us this has all happened many times in the past—including five natural global warmings in the last 9,000 years.

Politicians can pass fossil fuel taxes through today’s “tame” legislatures—but they can’t make the public obey those laws after they clearly begin to violate human rights and common sense.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Gates could have said with equal truth that the same environmentalists, by demanding organic-only farming, are risking the future of the planet’s wildlife. The world will need more than twice as much food by 2050 to feed a peak population of 8 billion affluent humans and their pets. Gates believes we should get that additional food from higher yields on the 37 percent of the earth’s land area we already farm, not by threatening massive numbers of wildlife species by clearing more land for low-yield crops.

Gates has thus delivered the most important speech on food and the world’s future since Dr. Norman Borlaug accepted his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Borlaug’s “miracle wheat” had made him the symbol of the original Green Revolution, which tripled yields on the world’s best cropland through scientific research after 1960. Dr. Borlaug spent the last years of his amazing life trying to extend the Green Revolution to Africa and many farming regions with marginal lands, where today more than 1 billion people try to feed their families with hunting and slash-and-burn farming.

Now, Gates has committed more than $1 billion of his personal fortune to improving crop yields in Africa and marginal farming regions. He announced in Des Moines another $120 million in gifts for additional farm productivity research, including support for drought-tolerant corn and pest-resistant sweet potatoes. Until this moment, Gates had not spoken out on the use of biotech and chemicals to continue raising world crop yields.

Britain’s Royal Society has also just produced a study, Reaping the Benefits:  Science and the Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture. Led by Dr. David Baulcombe, this report also concludes that biotech crops are one of the technologies urgently needed to avoid a global food crisis.

The eco-activists have claimed that organic-only farming could provide all the food needed—but only if humanity became vegetarian. Otherwise, there’s a severe global shortage of cow manure and “extra” land and water to plant vastly more nitrogen-fixing green manure crops. However, history tells us that only a tiny percent of humans voluntarily choose to be vegetarian.

The Center for Global Food Issues and the reports of the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology say even going vegetarian wouldn’t save enough land from the plow.  More research must be brought to the farms in the coming decades to avoid wildlife disaster. The saving grace to date is that we’ve farmed the best land, which had large numbers of a few species; expanding onto the poor soils will threaten huge numbers of species.

Ironically, another speaker at the World Food Prize Symposium—economist Jeffrey Sachs who directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University—criticized agriculture as the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Sachs, of course, was implying that either the world’s people must somehow sharply cut back on food and manufacturing, or cut human numbers by some enormous percentage.

It was an ironic reminder that the first Green Revolution lost its momentum after its funding from the Rockefeller Foundation had been drastically cut back. Ethicist Garrett Hardin tells us that Allan Gregg, a Rockefeller vice president, was one of the first to refer to population growth as “a cancer on the earth.”  The government agencies that took over support for the international agricultural research network after Rockefeller dropped it have not been able to stand up to the political clout of the green movement.

Once again private philanthropy may provide the final step toward a world of adequately fed people and abundant wild-lands, as it did during the first Green Revolution.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist and senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Dr. Borlaug literally saved a billion people from starvation, and his high-yield farming systems are still feeding the hungry and saving millions of hectares of wildlife habitat from being plowed for low-yield crops. “Food wars” such as Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia for “living room” and Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria for soybean fields were rendered needless and counterproductive. Any of those Borlaug achievements would have been worth the Peace Prize, but his achieving all three together was incredible.

In 2007, the Peace Prize went to Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The awards ceremony was hardly over before the global temperatures turned downward, essentially falsifying all those learned predictions of runaway warming triggered by burning fossil fuels. It’s not just that the global temperature is declining, it’s that the world has never seen any evidence of the runaway warming they predicted. The world’s sea ice has been stable for 30 years, and the Antarctic is gaining 45 billion tons of ice per year. Worse, the UN’s Nobel Peace Prize seems to have rested on a few tree rings in the Sierra and in Siberia that turned out to be aberrations.  

Gore’s Nobel contribution was especially iffy, since his Inconvenient Truth told us the Antarctic ice record showed higher CO₂ levels inevitably led to higher temperatures. Research, even then, had already documented the reality that past temperatures in the Antarctic have changed 800 years before the CO₂ levels! Gore had it backwards and must have known it! Does he have to give back the Nobel and but keep the Oscar for his acting? 

I don’t want to demean President Obama, a young politician whose career is still pretty much in front of him. In fact, he’d been in office less than two weeks when this year’s Peace Prize nominations closed! This was not so much Obama winning the Peace Prize as the Norwegian award committee petulantly hitting President Bush with the “bad war prize” as he left the White House.

So far, despite the Obama rhetoric, he has mainly led the United States into a massive debt load that may well have delayed our economic recovery from the worst slump since the Great Depression. “Bush’s war” in Iraq has freed that country from a vicious dictator who was destabilizing a whole tinder-box region. Iraq has now been able to conduct free elections, and U. S. troops will be home in less than a year. By all standards, this is a win for both Iraq and for the security of the world. Meanwhile Obama’s “necessary war” in Afghanistan is threatening to burst into open flames, fueled by opium money and the Taliban, al Qaeda’s erstwhile allies.

The Iranians continue to openly defy the UN in pursuit of nuclear weapons, which they threaten to drop on Israel. Kim Jong-Il in North Korea feels slighted that his own nuclear blackmail is taking a back seat to Ahmadinejad.   

Obama’s place in history is still on the drawing-board of history. For our country’s sake, I hope he achieves something worthwhile during the next three years. But, he hasn’t yet; and  hadn’t even unpacked 12 days after the inauguration when he was nominated for the 2009 Nobel.

This year’s award only reinforces the impression that the once-honored Peace Prize has degenerated into a political harangue.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

By 2050, the world will probably have 8–9 billion people, up from the current 6.5 billion—as the final surge of human population growth ends.  Trade and technology will increase per capita incomes and more demand for grain, meat, and milk will follow. Plus, rich people have fewer kids, but millions more companion cats and dogs. Taken together, more than two times as much food will be needed.

The good news is that global warming now doesn’t sound so scary.   

• Global temperatures have lately been rising at 1.4 degrees C per century, not the awful 3.9 degrees C predicted by some global climate models. And, rising CO₂ has already delivered most of its potential climate forcing.
• Contrary to computer predictions, the earth has been cooling for seven years now, and the Pacific Ocean forecasts another 25 years of cooling 
• Sea levels have been rising at the “normal,” eight inches per century, with no significant rise at all in the last four years.
• Polar sea ice has been roughly stable over the past 30 years.

The bad news is that even the modest warming forecast by the natural 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycle—0.5 degree C— will apparently produce major drought problems, especially in the heavily populated tropics. The tropical rain-belts have moved about 300 miles north since 1600. Meanwhile, Oxfam reports that the 23 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Uganda— being left behind by the rain shift— are currently threatened with drought and hunger.

There will also be extended droughts in unusual places as the Modern Warming continues. California had two century-long droughts during the Medieval Warming (950-1300 AD). A cave stalagmite in West Virginia records seven century-long mid-Atlantic droughts over 7,000 years—all during natural global warmings.     

One of the secrets of the Roman Empire was the massive amount of wheat North Africa could grow as the Sahara became wetter. Most of it sailed across the Mediterranean to Rome. When the tropic rain belts moved back south in the Dark Ages, however, the Roman Empire collapsed. Coincidence? The Mayans also thrived during the Roman Warming and their empire also collapsed after the rain-belt shift into the cold Dark Ages  brought extended drought to Central America.

Will the corn-growers of Kenya and the yam farmers of West Africa have to go on extended food aid as the rain-belts move north again to the Sahara? They could walk to the cities and eat food imported from newly productive counties such as Canada and Siberia—if there were jobs in their cities

Canada and Siberia will get warmer and wetter, but farmers there aren’t ready to begin supplying more food. Russia gave up on Siberian grain after Khrushchev’s massive crop failures in the 1950s. Canada’s farms are thriving, but would need extra farm machinery, storage, and rail capacity.

Are we preparing for the wrong emergencies?  It looks like we’ll need much higher crop yields—and far more food trade—to protect the world’s children in the coming centuries.

Resources: 

1. Climate Change and Agriculture, Gerald Nelson, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, D.C. Jan. 29, 2009.

2. Ayisha Yahya, “Are the deserts getting greener?” BBC News, July 16, 2009.

3. “Tropical Rainfall Moving North,” LiveScience, Fox News.com,  July 2, 2009.

4. Scott Stine, “The Great Droughts of Y1K,” Sierra Nature Notes, May 1, 2001.

5. West Virginia’s century-long droughts:  Gregory Springer et al, “Solar Forcing of Holocene Droughts,” Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35, 2008.  

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

The bay that yielded 25 million bushels of oyster per year in the 1940s has lately produced only about 200,000 bushels annually. Chesapeake seafood restaurants mostly import their crabmeat and oysters. Watermen have left for other jobs. A massive federal restoration project began in 1983, aiming to cut “over-fertilization” in the Bay by 40 percent—but regulating sewage plants and farm fertilizer has failed to make much difference.

We hadn’t done the science. Blaming “pollution” was no adequate prescription for restoring the Bay’s health. But research has apparently now found the key. A recent massive experiment in the Great Wicomico River found that oysters on high shell reefs (16–18 inches above the bottom) are thriving. The test-bed oysters are fighting off the diseases and grow above the sediment, while oysters on the river bottom and on lower shell mounds failed again.

The Great Wicomico now has as many oysters as all the waters of Maryland—185 million. The journal Science reports “unprecedented restoration of a native oyster population.”    

It wasn’t pollution. It was the gradual permission for power dredges in the Bay, which traditionally had permitted only sail-powered dredges. The power dredges tore at the shell piles that were vital to the health of the oysters and the baywater they filtered. Viruses attacked successfully because the oysters were no longer growing high up at optimum-flow depths. After the oysters failed, the water then clouded, hampering the eelgrass and the baby crabs.

The eco-activists’ cries of “overharvesting” and “pollution” led us in the wrong direction. The money spent on the bay’s restoration up until now has been largely wasted. But now the future of the by looks bright: give the oysters high starter-reefs, protect them from harvest until they reach sustaining numbers, and guard the shell reefs against power dredging.   

Obviously, we need a better way to harvest oysters—which will provide major benefits to oyster populations in Europe, Australia and affluent regions around the world where oysters and their water-filtering have been 90 percent lost.   

It seems so simple suddenly!  Since we did the research.

The environmental movement hasn’t been much help at fixing things: 

• Farmers, not environmentalists, invented the herbicide-based no-till farming that cuts soil erosion by up to 95 percent.     

• The behavior of the ozone hole in the Arctic hasn’t changed since we banned the supposedly-evil CFCs.

• School children found frogs with too many legs or too few, and the activists blamed it on pesticide runoff. Science has shown the deformities were caused by natural parasites burrowing into the leg joints of the tadpoles—and dragonfly larvae eating them off.

Conservation is a wonderful thing, but it is science that gives us the capacity to achieve it.

Resource:

D.M. Schulte et al; “Unprecedented Restoration of a Native Oyster Population, Science, vol. 325, August 28, 2009; pp. 1124–1127.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Then we realized that humanity was still at massive risk—from hunger. With death rates falling radically, there was suddenly a real possibility that medical progress could be overwhelmed by lack of food. Experts predicted a billion people would soon starve in Asia, followed by similar disasters in Latin America and Africa.  

Enter Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. The young plant breeder from the University of Minnesota had been hired by the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation, because Mexico could no longer feed itself.

The semi-dwarf wheat that made him famous was a cross between Mexican wheats and a dwarf Japanese variety that didn’t fall over even under the weight of enormous seed heads. It was also disease-resistant. Given fertilizer, the new wheat could produce four times as much food per acre. It was also indifferent to day-length, so it could be planted widely across the world’s good soils. The International Rice Research Institute used the same semi-dwarf strategy for similarly high-yielding new rice varieties. .  

The Green Revolution was born. Over the ensuing decades, crop yields were tripled with improved seeds, industrial fertilizer, irrigation pumps and pesticides.  The Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug’s seeds, and the research stations and agricultural extension services he founded, saved a billion human lives.

Tragically, Borlaug’s triumph has been tarnished by complaints from the environmental movement that should have applauded him. The Greens complained the high-yield seeds benefited big farms more than small ones. Studies show both benefited, but the biggest gains went to billions of consumers worldwide through lower-cost food abundance. And to the wildlife that wasn’t displaced by their habitat being destroyed for cropland.  

The Greens complained the new seeds needed too much fertilizer. But high-yield wheat takes no more fertilizer per ton of food than low-yield wheat—high yields just grow the grain on far less land

Borlaug told writer Gregg Easterbrook that “most Western environmentalists have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. . . .  If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals. . .”

I suspect much of the environmental movement blames Norman Borlaug for preventing the massive famines that would have solved the “population problem” quickly in the 1960s—with starvation.  But the starving would have raped the wildlife habitat before they allowed their children to die. Today, we’ve solved the population problem with affluence.

Not surprisingly, Borlaug spent the last decades of his richly productive life working to bring the Green Revolution to Africa. He hadn’t yet succeeded when death claimed him. Fortunately, however, the challenge of a second Green Revolution has now been picked up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with enormous support from the Warren Buffet family.

Hopefully, they will be able to lead the completion of Dr. Borlaug’s work: feeding the hungry and saving the planet’s wildlife with science. It’s the only food-success strategy humanity has ever found. 

Sources:

Gregg Easterbrook, “Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity,” The Atlantic Monthly, Jan., 1997.

Badgley et al, 2007, “Organic Agriculture and World Food Supply,” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, Vol. 22, pp 86-108.

Kramer et al, 2002, “Combining fertilizer and organic inputs in alternative cropping systems,” Agricultural Ecosystems and Environment 91, 233-243; Ladd and Amato, 1956, “The fate of nitrogen from legume and fertilizer sources in soils, “ Soil Biology and Biochemistry 18, 417-425; Harris et al., 1994, “Fate of legume and fertilizer N in  long-term cropping,” Agronomy Journal 86, 910-915.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

As a farm kid, I learned early that the cute little piglets of the spring would become our pork chops in the fall. I learned that when mother told me to “get her a chicken,” it was to be delivered deceased and de-feathered. That didn’t weaken my parents’ concern that our animals all be treated well while they were in our care. .

Today’s big confinement livestock industries have a major problem in convincing distant consumers that they treat their animals with full consideration. On the other hand, the activists who make “gotcha” videotapes may not be the best people to oversee livestock production 

The anti-meat activists tell us their goal is to end animal “exploitation.” That apparently would mean no meat production, no household pets, no circuses, no dog shows, no rodeos nor any hunting. There’s a strong temptation for activists to misrepresent the farmers and their standards of animal care, in order to get restrictive legislation.

One of President Obama’s “Czars”—a Harvard lawyer named Cass Sunstein—says livestock and poultry should have the right to sue their owners in the courts. A wondrous boon to lawyers that would quickly force us all into vegan diets—and poorer health, especially for kids..

California voters in a recent election banned cages for laying hens as of 2015. But banning layer cages results in more cannibalism among the birds, and far more bacterial contamination of the eggs.

Equally awkward, California egg producers will probably be forced out of business because the cost of keeping laying hens without cages has proven about 20 percent higher. It seems certain that California will thus be forced to import cage-produced eggs from adjoining states. They cannot be barred because of the Interstate Commerce clause in the Constitution. California will simply lose thousands of egg-production jobs, huge amounts of fuel will be used  to transport the eggs, and they will be less fresh.

What to do?  

Ohio is exploring a middle option. They want the public to have confidence that the farmers are treating their livestock humanely, but they don’t want to put farm supervision in the hands of extremists.     

Their solution is a proposed amendment to Ohio’s constitution creating an Ohio Livestock Care Standards Board. The 13 members would include:

• The Ohio Director of Agriculture
• A family farmer appointed by the Speaker of the Ohio House;
• A family farmer appointed by the President of the Ohio Senate;
• A “family farm representative”;
• A food safety expert;
• Two members representing statewide farm organizations;
• A veterinarian licensed in Ohio;
• The Ohio State Veterinarian;
• The dean of agriculture at an Ohio college or university;
• Two consumer representatives; and
• One representative of a county humane society.

The board is directed to maintain food safety, encourage locally-grown food, and protect Ohio farms and families—with best-management practices for animal care and well-being, disease prevention, food safety and affordability. This board would not, of course, end the activist complaints. But it would also not end meat production, dairying, pet ownership or hunting.

The Humane Society of the U.S. (not the organization that runs local animal shelters) doesn’t like the idea. It says the “industry-dominated board” is poor public policy.

Political compromises, however, always leave most of us with less than we’d like—but perhaps with more than we deserve.

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

It seems a well-intended, way to spend the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger. But is it the best way to make a difference? The World Agroforestry Centre has just discovered that the earth has billions more trees then we knew about—so how much good will it do for the Americans to finance the planting of a few million more?   

The Agroforestry Center used detailed satellite imagery to survey a billion hectares of the farmlands around the world—about half the cropland total. To their surprise, they found that about half the farmland surveyed contained at least 10 percent tree cover. Since a hectare is about the size of two football fields, the “end zones of a billion football fields” are sustaining many billions of trees.

This tree-rich farmland is fabulous news for the planet: the trees not only prevent soil erosion and fertilize the fields with extra nitrogen, but their harvests offer the farmers fruits, nuts, fodder for livestock, timber, fuel wood, medicines and such cash crops as coffee, rubber, nuts, gums and resins.

However, trees don’t do nearly as much to combat global warming as most of us think. Trees planted north of Florida won’t cool the earth. Above the Canadian border they absorb enough extra heat to warm the planet. Ditto for trees planted south of the Amazon rain forest. Tropical trees supposedly cool the earth by about 0.7 degree C. But the trees in the Amazon are already cooling that region, which in any case is the most-forested part of the earth. Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are tree-rich too.

The tree-denuded parts of the earth are North Africa and West Asia and those are also the driest, toughest places to grow trees. In Libya, Morocco, Turkey or Iraq, the trees must be carefully tended and protected by their owners or their harvests will be stolen—or the trees themselves stolen for charcoal or firewood.

Fortunately, says World Agroforestry Center, trees have so many benefits that the farmers continue to plant and protect them. The message from the satellites is that they’re doing far more of this than we’ve realized.

Will farmers plant still more trees into the future? As long as the householders must walk miles a day gathering firewood, they’ll have an incentive to plant more trees if they have private land on which to plant them. Kenya has been nearly denuded of trees on public land for charcoal. Tree cutting at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro is a big reason why that mountain’s glacier is melting. Outside money might make a difference by reserving more land for trees, though the pressure for cropland in Kenya continues to grow as its population increases and farmer’s yields are constrained by the lack of modern farming methods.

One of the best ways to protect forests, however, comes when rural populations are able to burn kerosene instead of charcoal. Burning kerosene allows villagers to cook and heat their homes without cutting trees. It also has huge health benefits for the householders in terms of avoiding smoke inhalation and lung disease.

But the Western world is hell-bent on getting rid of fossil fuels. If we take away the billions of liters of kerosene the poor countries are burning now, where will the extra firewood come from? How long will the forests last? Will the trees lost to banning kerosene overcome all re-planting efforts?

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

The organic movement is still trying to swindle the world into believing the world can get enough nitrogen from animal waste and green manure crops to produce our food.   In 1978, two experts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded the U.S. had only 33 percent of the manure needed to support food production then. The rest of the world had far less pasture and manure per capita than the U.S. The world population was then 4.3 billion. Today, of course, human numbers are at 6.3 billion, on their way to 8 billion

Obviously, the world has only a small fraction of the organic manure needed to support food for today and into the future. We use all the manure we have. Commercial hog and poultry farms added tremendously to our ability to collect and use animal waste efficiently, no matter how ugly Greenpeace makes them sound. But we also add about 90 million tons per year of industrial nitrogen:  natural nitrogen, taken from the air around us which is 78 percent N. About 60 percent of humanity is surviving and thriving today on that aerial nitrogen.

Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba claims an all-organic U.S. alone would need the manure from another billion cows. That would force the clearing of 4–6 billion acres of U. S. forest to make room for their pasture.

The organic movement, however, continues to claim that farmers don’t need fertilizer.

The UN led a recent big-tent effort to lay out a 50-year blueprint for global farming. Originally, universities, agribusiness, consumers, governments and eco-activists were all involved.

At the end of five-years, however, the activists had outlasted everybody else. The report director, Robert Watson, assured us that farm chemicals had “harmed the soil structure,” though he gave no evidence. He even claimed today’s food was “less healthy” than food 60 years ago. Never mind that today’s people are living longer and healthier lives while eating it and no nutritional differences have ever been identified. Watson’s previous job was also anti-science—leading the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In 2007, the University of Michigan issued a report saying that “organic farming can feed the world.” Unfortunately, their data contained a massive, fundamental error on nitrogen. Geologist Catherine Badgley cited a single study claiming green manure crops had put 150 kg of organic nitrogen into the soil, and two-thirds of that had been delivered to the grain crop. But the Michigan report is wildly inconsistent with a century of farming and agricultural research. The nutritive value of nitrogen fertilizer is rated at only about 33 percent and a whole raft of studies have confirmed that the less-efficient green manure system gets only about 20 percent of its N to the grain seeds.

Getting only 20 percent of the organic nitrogen into the seed heads, instead of 66 percent as the Michigan report claimed, would mean massive waves of organic hunger, nutrition-related disease, wars, and global agony.

Why push organic farming past what it can realistically do?

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

The irony?  Britain does not yet allow any biotech foods to be grown commercially within its borders. Not even to develop a genetically modified potato that is resistant to the new strain of potato blight that is ravaging British potato fields.

If the eco-activists hadn’t pledged to rip out test plantings, the world would already have blight-resistant potatoes—a huge step forward in Third World food security. Potatoes produce more food per acre than any other crop, and they are increasingly important in such crowded places as China, India, and the African highlands. So far, however, there remains the threat of replaying the terrible Irish potato famine of the 1840s, not only in Britain, but in all potato dependant areas.

The biggest piece of the new British funding will support development of drought-tolerant corn for Africa, following up the recent success of drought-tolerant biotech wheat in Australia. Such corn would be the biggest possible step forward for drought-prone small African farmers, ranking even ahead of the witchweed-resistant corn varieties recently produced by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico.

Another chunk of funding will support Syngenta’s international work in developing genetically modified “Golden Rice,” which will prevent childhood blindness due to severe shortages of Vitamin A in rice-dependent cultures. This deficiency is the world’s leading preventable source of childhood blindness, and involves millions of deaths.

The eco- activists, of course, are raging mad over the British aid pledge. They continue to claim that biotech crops don’t produce any higher food yields to prevent hunger, or help poor farmers earn higher incomes—but that’s a lie.

Biotech has already racked up massive yield gains from pest-resistant cotton in China and India, freeing up hundreds of millions of additional acres for food crops. This dwarfs anything the eco-activists have done to make the world more sustainable.

The drought-tolerant wheat recently test-planted in Australia yields 20 percent more grain during droughts, with no yield penalty during years of good rains. This, too, will mean greater food security for wheat-dependent cultures in India, Turkey, and other countries.

Biotech crops have also eliminated spraying of millions of pounds of pesticides that the eco-activists themselves have long claimed (without foundation) were producing severe health risks for humans.

The activists’ case for opposing these crop production advances:  Genetically modified crops “are probably unsafe for human consumption,” claims activist Brian John, though no peer-reviewed studies confirm the claim.  In more than a decade of growing genetically modified food, no health problem has been traced to biotechnology.  Not a single case of food poisoning; not even a headache; just more food, produced more reliably, and at lower cost to society.

Could that be the real activist complaint about biotech? The environmental movement has hated the Green Revolution, and pilloried Dr. Norman Borlaug, the famed “man who saved a billion humans from starvation.” Could it be that the environmental movement still blames high-yield farming for supporting “too many people”? 

If that’s true, they should also remember that without the Green Revolution, the planet’s wildlife habitat would already have been largely destroyed to grow more low-yield crops. The challenge now is to feed the 8 billion humans expected at the peak—along with their pets—from the land we already farm.

We applaud Britain for its humanitarianism toward poor countries, even though allowing an anti-science backlash to flourish within its own boundaries. 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net