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Grain Supply Update: Dec. 6
Grain Supply Update: Dec. 6, 1996
Turkey Dinners Forever?
Copyright Geri Guidetti, 1996
In a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled, "What the Starvation
Lobby Eschews..." author Julian L. Simon of the Cato Institute contends
that currently available technology will allow us to feed an
ever-growing human population with "...ever-better nutrition, for
centuries." He concludes his defense of this contention with the
declaration:
"Yet the starvation scares will probably continue, for that’s what
headlines are good for. Still, we can give thanks on Thanksgiving,
secure in the knowledge that there’ll be turkey dinners forever."
Turkey dinners forever? Really? For whom? And on what does Mr. Simon
base such a comforting assurance? Let’s take a closer look. In the
same article, this author of a new book, "The Ultimate Resource 2",
published by Princeton University Press, makes the following assertions:
· The world’s entire population can be housed on one-eighth-acre
plots in Texas. Each family can feed itself on a mere one-fifth of its
allotted
space, raising its food using hydroponics and artificial light.
· This currently available technology makes it possible to grow enough
food to feed one person on a mere 75 square feet. A family of 4, then,
could be completely fed by a growing space the size of an average
bedroom,
he says—18 by 18 feet. For a family twice this size, one need only
"...add a
deck to the room and double the production."
· "Recent decades have seen an unmistakable increase in world food
production per person.....Progress in food production has not been
steady, of course, due in part to tragedies of politics and war. Yet
there has been no
period so bad that it would support a conclusion of long-term
retrogression."
· "Shown these data, people sometimes ask: ‘Where are the numbers—the
numbers the worried folks base their forecasts on?’ The answer is that
there simply are no other data....Standard, reliable data that would
show a worsening trend in recent decades just do not exist."
· Citing height increases from the late 18th century to the present as
indicators of continuing progress on the food supply front, Simon
notes, "....in just the past half-century the average height of Japanese
males increased from perhaps 4 feet 7 inches to 5 feet 5 inches."
A source of data Simon used to support his view was an "authoritative"
1974 review by economist D. Gale Johnson which concluded that there had
been a gradual improvement in per capita food consumption for the past
two centuries. He quotes,
a 1975 compendium addressing food worries in the early ‘70s in which he
describes agricultural economists speaking in "one voice": ‘The
historical record lends support to the more optimistic view.’ ( 1975?
The decline in world grain carryover stocks didn’t begin until 1987.)
On the same page, directly under the article by Mr. Simon was another
written by David Rothbard and Craig Rucker. Rucker is the executive
director of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a
"Washington-based public-interest organization", according to the Wall
Street Journal. Taking its lead from the headline gracing Simon’s
article, Rothbard’s and Rucker’s is entitled, "....While Biting the
Hand that Feeds Us". In it they criticize the findings of this month’s
World Food Summit convened by the United Nations in Rome:
"But in the Malthusian spirit of previous U.N. get-togethers ...the
answer coming out of Rome is not a push to grow more food but rather an
effort to reduce the number of people who need to consume it. Why is
this? Because modern farming methods have become taboo in most Green
circles. Green voices claim that modern agriculture is not only
poisoning the land and the people and beasts that live on it, but also
causing a devastating loss of fertile soil."
They then take an impotent stab at Rachel Carson’s 1962 eye-opener,
Silent Spring, with no mention, of course, of the resulting comeback of
Bald Eagles and other DDT-devastated species since the ban of that one
chemical family. They quote Al Gore’s "Earth in the Balance", and cite
Greenpeace and Natural Resources Defense Council concerns about
pesticides. All of these, he suggests, "...makes for some beautiful
rhetoric. The only problem is, none of it is true."
They close their article with a discussion of "the Greens’" complaints
that modern agriculture will demand too much land to feed the Earth’s
growing population. That complaint, and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit’s
warning of massive erosion of fertile soil, is dismissed with the
assurance that conservation tillage can cut soil erosion by 65% and
no-till farming (chemical herbicides, not plows, kill all weeds) by 98%.
Their conclusion?
"This all means that while topsoil eroded in the early half of this
century at a rate of some 30 to 40 tons per acre per year, current
no-till and low-till methods have slowed erosion to one ton or less per
acre per year. Since topsoil is often replenished at the rate of two to
four tons per acre per year, modern agriculture can in fact be
sustainable after all....coupled with new technologies such as food
irradiation and the seemingly unlimited prospects of biotechnology,
could feed more than 10 times the number of people currently alive with
not very much more land than is now in use. But if environmental
activists acknowledged that fact, what could they do next?"
We have discussed a lot of the data concerning global food supplies in
these reports over the past year. The modern world has never seen
lower food stockpiles while global population is increasing at a rate of
1.7 million people per week. Topsoil that was once an estimated twelve
feet deep in the American heartland is now reduced to eight inches or
less in some states. Aquifers that support modern agriculture around
the world are being depleted at an alarming rate. Battle lines between
cities and farms for water are being drawn and water wars fought in the
Nation’s courts. (Do you want water to drink, shower and shave, or do
you want to give it to the farmer to raise your food?) Responsibility
for the production of most of the food the world’s people eat is in the
hands of fewer and fewer producers—dependence on them and sophisticated,
oil-dependent delivery systems has never been greater.
Turkey dinners forever? Maybe in Mr. Simon’s house, but not for most of
this country’s and the world’s peoples. Feed 10 times the Earth’s
population on not much more land than is used now? Such a contention
demonstrates either profound ignorance or denial of even the CURRENT
human population’s impact on global ecosystems and its effects on our
continuing ability to raise food. Given the declining food supply
available for each person alive today, we cannot afford the luxury of
either ignorance or denial...
Geri Guidetti, The Ark Institute
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