-Caveat Lector-
"Why Greens Should Love Pesticides"
by Dennis Avery,
from the Wall Street Journal
Gerber recently announced that henceforth its baby
foods will be free from genetically modified crops -- and
will be organically grown to boot. Then the
Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was
banning a major pesticide, methyl parathion, that has
been used in fruit and vegetable production for decades.
Upscale homemakers across the land are no doubt
rejoicing over the additional "food safety" for their
families. Unfortunately, the real-world results are
likely to be more cancer and less wildlife habitat.
When I joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture in
1959, the world feared a billion Third World people would
die in famines. Then came the Green Revolution, and
Norman Borlaug was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for
giving most of humanity its first real food security.
Now we're ready to turn our backs on both food security
and wildland conservation -- to eliminate food risks we
can't even find.
Thanks to the Green Revolution, the only famines in
recent decades have been those caused by governmental
policies such as Mao Tse-tung's "Great Leap Forward" in
China and civil wars in Africa. Increased food security
is a major reason why the world's population is now
projected to stabilize at 8.5 billion in 2035, instead of
spiraling upward. We've fed the Third World so well that
young couples now believe their children will live to
maturity, and they stop after two or three babies instead
of six or 16.
The second-biggest achievement of the Green
Revolution is saving wildlands with higher yields. We're
currently feeding more than twice as many people as lived
in 1950, and doing it from essentially the same 37% of
the planet's land area that we farmed in 1950.
Higher crop yields have saved more than 15 million
square miles of wildlife habitat from being plowed for
low-yield traditional farming. That's equal to the total
land area of the U.S., Europe and South America. We got
those higher yields with hybrid seeds, irrigation,
chemical fertilizer -- and pesticides.
The first impact of a global mandate for organic
farming would be the plow-down of five million to 10
million square miles of wildlife habitat, much of it in
the densely populated tropics, which have perhaps 100
times as many wild species per square mile as the U.S. or
Europe. Not only do organic crops suffer more pest
losses but organic farmers refuse to fertilize with
nitrogen taken from the air. They would have to plow
down the equivalent of the whole U.S. land area for
green-manure crops like clover.
There is no vegetarian trend to ease the world's
impending agricultural burden. Instead, higher incomes
are driving the biggest surge of meat and milk
consumption the Third World has ever seen. To save the
current wildlands despite the larger, more affluent
population in the next century, we will have to triple
the yields on the land we're already farming. We will
probably have to triple the use of pesticides as well
(particularly of herbicides, which help cut soil erosion
with no-plow, low-erosion farming systems.) We will also
need more biotech breakthroughs like the new high-
yielding crops for acidic tropic soils recently pioneered
in Mexico.
Do pesticide residues cause cancer? We've added 30
years to our lifespans in the 20th century, eight of them
since we started spraying pesticides widely. Cancer
experts say our real cancer risks are smoking, too much
fat, too few fruits and vegetables -- and the genetic
cancer tendencies inherited from our own families. After
billions of dollars spent trying, not one pesticide-
residue cancer victim has been found.
Methyl parathion is unquestionably a deadly chemical
-- if you walk into the cloud of gas just sprayed on a
field of crops. But it effectively kills the bugs that
love to eat growing fruits and vegetables; and plentiful
fruits and vegetables prevent cancer. The quarter of our
population that eats the most produce has half the cancer
risk of the quarter that eats the least. And it makes no
difference whether these fruits and vegetables were grown
using pesticides.
President Clinton just awarded the National Science
Medal to Bruce Ames of the University of California,
Berkeley. Mr. Ames says we get 10,000 times more cancer
risk from the natural chemicals in our fruits and
vegetables than from pesticide residues. In neither case
is there enough dosage to cause cancer.
For decades, methyl parathion and the other
organophospates were rated "safe for use" with a safety
factor 100 times the "no effect" levels in the rat tests.
In 1996, however, the Food Quality Protection Act allowed
the EPA to plug in a 1,000-fold safety factor. This,
despite no evidence that any consumers had been hurt by
pesticides.
Will we now be safer? Jacqueline Hamilton of the
Natural Resources Defense Council, says, "We don't have
to point to bodies lying on the ground with their tongues
hanging out. There is significant evidence that much
lower levels of these chemicals, at critical levels of
development, can cause lifelong deficits, potentially."
There you have it, folks, modern environmentalism is
protecting you -- potentially.
We know for certain that we can save millions of
square miles of wildlands by using pesticides,
fertilizers, biotechnology and the other tools of our
expanding scientific knowledge for high-yield agriculture
and forestry.
Humanity in the 21st century can banish hunger, end
nutritional deficits in its children -- and save
virtually all of the remaining wildlands in the process.
But there are only two ways to do it: Either murder four
billion people, or use chemicals and biotechnology to
triple the yields on the land we're already farming.
* * *
Dennis Avery is director of the Center for Global
Food Issues of the Hudson Institute and the author of
"Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic: The
Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming" (Hudson
Institute, 1995).
======================================================
CENTER-RIGHT is edited by Eugene Volokh, who teaches
constitutional law, copyright law, and a seminar on
firearms regulation at UCLA Law School
(http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh), and organized
with the help of Terry Wynn and the Federalist Society
(http://www.fed-soc.org/).
Check out (and link to) our Web site,
http://www.center-right.org/
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/09/08/timfeasci02001.html?999
-
September 8 1999 SCIENCE BRIEFING
An exclusive poll suggests scientists are losing to pressure
groups in the
battle for public support. Anjana Ahuja reports
Progress, or crimes against nature?
Sunday sees the start of Britain's biggest science festival,
the annual
meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science BAAS).
Held at Sheffield University, it should be a celebration of
scientific
achievement with lectures and demonstrations designed for a
public that is
becoming ever more curious about technological advances.
But can scientists afford to be triumphalist? The furore
over genetically
modified organisms (GMOs), especially when they began
creeping quietly on to
supermarket shelves, was a public relations disaster and
engendered a deep
suspicion of science and its practitioners. So it is no
wonder that a MORI
poll commissioned by Novartis, a leading company in the
testing of GM crops,
shows widespread opposition to such technology. Among 991
respondents, 62
per cent opposed the genetic modification of plants for
crops. The results
will be debated at a seminar to round off the BAAS meeting.
Opposition was even more widespread to the cloning of
animals (74 per cent)
and to the genetic modification of animals for medical
research (71 per
cent). However, when people were presented with the
hypothesis that without
these practices, a cure for Alzheimer's would not be
possible, 15 per cent
changed their minds on the genetic modification of crops. To
Bill Fullagar,
the president of Novartis UK, this shows a worrying
breakdown of
communication between scientists and the public.
"The results are unsurprising," Fullagar says. "Very little
about the
potential benefits of scientific research has been discussed
in the press.
Instead, with GM crops, for example, we are riding on a tide
of emotion and
fear But once you relate technology to the benefits, then in
intelligent
people you get a shift of opinion.
"If you say you are testing GM crops, people think only of
the risk. But if
you say 'I'm trying to produce a plant that has a minor
genetic variation
and can be grown using fewer pesticides so there is less
contamination of
ground-water', they get interested.
"To look at your local supermarket, you would think there
was no problem
with food supply. But in two or three decades there will be
eight billion
people on this planet instead of six billion. How are we
going to feed them?
I doubt if spraying pesticides is the answer. A very real
answer is GM
foods, and we have to argue that case through." Novartis,
along with giants
such as Monsanto, has a vested interest in highlighting the
benevolent side
of research, as Fullagar acknowledges: "We survive or
disappear according to
our ability to bring useful products to market. But the
public has not been
given a fair chance to make its mind up on these issues. So
far it has been
a dialogue of the deaf, with everybody shouting and nobody
listening. If
people don't want our science, all well and good. But let
them be informed."
One unexpected finding of the poll is that, offered the
prospect of
nutritionally improved food that tastes and costs the same
as food today,
only 45 per cent of people would welcome it. Yet millions,
perhaps billions,
of pounds are spent each year on developing "nutraceuticals"
- foods with
supposed added health benefits. This, Fullagar says, could
be because of a
backlash against people being told what to eat, or against
food being
tampered with, which would tally with the burgeoning demand
for organic
food.
The poll also exposes what Fullagar labels "risk aversion" -
governments,
politicians and regulatory authorities being scared away
from funding or
approving controversial studies because of the threat of a
public outcry.
"Personally speaking, I think aversion to risk is a serious
threat to
science," he says. "People want zero risk but that means
society stagnates
instead of progressing. What happens if you don't get
permission for
scientific studies here? You go to North America, where they
do give
permission. So scientists leave and this translates into a
loss of wealth."
The view that people cannot deal with risk is rubbished by
the Rev Dr
Michael Reiss, a bioethicist at Cambridge University and a
part-time priest,
who will take part in the seminar next week. "Most people
handle risk
extremely well," he asserts. "They are good at weighing up
the benefits
against the risks. For example, they are not scared off
using mobile phones
by Panorama programmes because their lives are made so much
easier by having
mobile phones." Reiss supports studies into GM crops but is
sceptical about
much animal testing, and is totally against testing on
primates because of
the debate about their similarity to human beings. "I found
the survey
results extremely encouraging," he says. "Here is a group of
sensible people
who are listening to the debates, who are sceptical of
things such as animal
testing unless the benefits are substantial. For example,
people were
divided on the issue of xenotransplantation [transplanting
animal organs
into human beings]. Here is a technique that could save
thousands of lives
but there is a danger that we could get viruses being
transferred from pigs
to people. After HIV and BSE, people are right to see this
as a real worry."
However, Reiss does feel that campaigning organisations such
as Greenpeace
and Friends of the Earth (he is a member of the latter) have
shouted too
loudly in the debate. "GM crops are the greenest thing to
hit agriculture,"
he says, "yet pressure groups have decided that they are
wrong, full stop.
"To vandalise GM crops is nothing more than unnecessary
destruction."
WEBSITE: details of the seminar and festival can be found at
www.britassoc.org.uk/festival
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