Do We Want Food, Forests or Wildlife?

Speech given at the Sidney Zoo Debate
June, 1997
By Dennis Avery

I appreciate the willingness of so many knowledgeable people to come here today and discuss how best to save the world's wildlife. We often ask the question, "How will the world feed nine or ten billion people?" The real question is, "How will we save the wildlife when nine or ten billion people are feeding themselves?"

Fortunately, the brakes were set on the population growth train in the 1960s, when better medical care and high-yielding seeds began to offer Third World parents real assurance that their first children would live. As a result, births per woman in the Third World have already come three-fourths of the way to population stability, essentially in one generation.

The cities of the world now take 1.5 percent of the globe's land area; if we reach a peak of nine billion people in 2050, they will live on approximately 3.5 percent of the land, treat their sewage, and invest in clean energy.

The threat to the environment then will come primarily if it takes too much land to produce the food and forest products for so many people. Thanks to the Green Revolution (the huge increase in agricultural productivity that began in the 1950s), we have not taken additional land for food production in the years since 1960, which is why we have been able to keep one-third of the world's land surface in forests.

In 2050, however, the world will have to produce nearly three times its current food
output, because there is no overall trend toward vegetarianism in world food consumption. All over the world, in fact, people are obtaining higher incomes and demanding increasing quantities of high-quality protein -- especially meat, milk, and eggs -- with significant impact on the environment:

• China has been increasing its meat consumption by 10 percent per year for the last five years.
  
  
• India is getting one-third of the fodder for its 400 million dairy animals by stripping leaves and branches from its forests.
  
  
• Indonesia has been clearing tropical forest lands to grow low-yielding soybeans for chicken feed.

It is no wonder that wildlife conservationists are urgently concerned.

As a representative of modern agriculture, I want to tell wildlife conservationists and the public that there is apparently a safe, sustainable, proven way out of this dilemma: high-yield conservation. Note the following:

• If we triple the yields again on the world's existing farmland, we will not need to take additional wild lands for food production.
  
  
• If we take 5 percent of the current wild forest area and plant it to cloned, tissue-cultured, fast-growing, high-yield trees, we can apparently produce all the needed forest products without anything more than management logging of the rest of the wild environment.
  
  
• If we triple agriculture's water efficiency by substituting sprinklers and plastic pipe for wasteful flood irrigation, there will be enough water to support the larger agriculture output, and we will be able to prevent the salinization of agricultural land.
  
  
• If we eliminate international trade barriers on farm and forest products, we can use the world's best and best-suited land, wherever it is located, to produce our farm and forest products.

Modern farming is saving wildlands and soil with hybrid seeds, irrigation, and better and safer pesticides. In the future, we hope to use still-safer systems featuring biotechnology, integrated pest and crop management, and even better animal health medicines. We hope to save more wildlands through precision farming, in which we use global satellites and microprocessors to farm yard-by-yard rather than in 160-acre blocks.

Today, at the Sydney Zoo, which celebrates wildlife and wild species, I call on the world's conservationists and farmers, its people and its governments, to unite in the final, critical campaign to beat both hunger and the threats to world wildlife -- through the only visible, proven strategy available. That strategy is high-yield conservation: high farm yields, high forest yields, high water efficiency, and free trade in farm and forest products.

We must resolve the dilemma between human opportunity and wildlife conservation in the only way possible -- by having both.

The high yield strategy will require additional public investments in research into high-yield, sustainable farming techniques. It will involve careful, effective regulation of farm inputs -- but with the full appreciation that those inputs are helping save millions of square miles of wildlife while reducing human cancer rates (by encouraging consumption of fruits and vegetables, a proven cancer-reduction factor). The high-yield strategy also means encouraging the creation of well-managed high-yield forests, and we will have to start developing them soon because it will take twenty to thirty years for them to grow. And that strategy urgently requires free trade in farm products, because it is the only mechanism that can enable us to use the world's best farmland to the fullest regardless of where it is located.

The wildlife conservation movement has already shown rare courage in standing up for wildlife before a hungry world. I hope that it can now show equal courage in backing high-yield conservation for an affluent world.