Scarcity or Abundance: It's Our Choice

"High-yield agriculture has saved a billion people from starvation and as much as 20 million square miles of wildlands from low-yield farming."

America's Future
By F.R. Duplantier
Sept. 28, 1998

"The attacks on modern farming started with [wild claims about] pesticides," recalls Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, "but today the attacks have spread far beyond that. Eco-activists now attack almost everything in modern agriculture," he charges: "chemical fertilizers, hybrid seeds, diesel engines, 'big' farms, and antibiotics in feeds."

Shouldn't the facts speak for themselves? Indeed they should, and do. The problem, Avery explains in a recent issue of the Hudson Institute's Global Food Quarterly, is that the facts are drowned out by an ideology. "Environmental activists," he explains, "want drastic action to suppress population growth. Their best ploy used to be making predictions of massive famine. But farmers have tripled their yields and look fully capable of feeding the world's projected peak population of 8.5 billion." As long as farmers keep producing more food, there won't be any famine, and without famine the environmentalists can't achieve their totalitarian dreams.

"Humanity now faces a huge, stark, and simple choice on the environment," Avery avers. "We must either choose 'shared scarcity,' or we must commit ourselves urgently and fully to producing high-tech abundance. 'Shared scarcity' would mean taking steps like banning newspapers (to save trees), and having billions of people switch to vegetarian diets," he explains. "We can't produce enough meat to feed tomorrow's 8.5 billion affluent people from today's farmland using today's technology," Avery continues. "And we will need ten times as much wood to house and educate them as we use today. In the next twenty years, the people of the world must either become vegetarian and self-sacrificing -- or else embrace biotechnology, factory farms, and tree plantations."

Fortunately, we do have that choice. Avery argues that we can and should "produce more food and trees per acre on the land we already farm. That's where biotechnology and factory farming come in. Genetic engineers," he cites as one example, "have recently found a way to [significantly improve] crop yields on good tropical soils. This is an outstanding discovery, for it means there will be less pressure to clear rain forests. . . .

"Plant breeders who work rice and tomatoes are dramatically increasing yields," Avery continues. "There's been similar progress in raising cattle and hogs." Genetic researchers have discovered ways to facilitate the conversion of the feed animals eat "into the meat we eat. The 10 percent efficiency gain," he reports, "is saving millions of tons of feed each year."

Avery considers factory farms "a humane, effective alternative to clearing another ten million square miles of forest for hog and chicken pasture." He points out that tree plantations "could provide the expected tenfold increase in wood demand by using only an additional 5 percent of our current wild forests." We can reject the benefits of technology and usher in a grim era of hopelessness, or we can move forward with faith into a future filled with promise and plenty. Increasing scarcity or increasing abundance? The choice is ours.