Intensive vs. Organic Farms
"Intensive agricultural production is the key," says Patrick Moore, co-founder and former Canadian president of Greenpeace, now chairman of Vancouver-based communications firm Greenspirit Strategies. "It's simple arithmetic: The more food you grow per acre, the less natural world you have to clear to do it."
The late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that modernized farming, ending frequent famines, in India and Asia, illustrated it this way: in 1990, America produced 596 million tons of crops. Had it stuck with 1960 methods of farming, it would have needed 460 million more acres than in 1960, of fertile land. Only, there wasn't 460 million more acres of good-quality land, so it would have been millions more yet, of poorer quality land.
"We would have moved into marginal grazing areas and plowed up things that wouldn't be productive in the long run. We would have had to move into rolling mountainous country and chop down our forests," he once told Reason Magazine.
With advances in agriculture, farmers instead doubled output in 30 years, using 25 million fewer acres. Mr. Borlaug, in addition to being credited for saving a billion lives by introducing fertilizers, pesticides, and seed genetics to Latin America and Asia (he won a Nobel peace prize for it,) spared millions of hectares of forests from being razed for farmland.
At November's UN World Summit on Food Security, economists estimated that world must double current food output by 2050 to feed a population of 9 billion, many increasingly demanding Western-quality diets. For developing countries, using farming methods circa 1860, never mind 1960, this means more than doubling farmland.
Fish Farms
While Western environmentalists lionize unrefined, organic farms, one of the best ways to protect our environment is by spreading 21st century farming technology and corporate agricultural products. Food production that truly sustains the planet is the very stuff that the eco-priests decry: fish farms, genetically modified foods, and farms relying more, not less, on corporate-made chemicals.
Pound for pound, acre for acre, fish farms output more food, with fewer inputs and emissions, than land farms, without ravaging oceans or clearing land. "What most people don't realize is that fish are so much more efficient at converting into food," says Mr. Moore: their cold blood and not having to fight gravity makes seafood emit less than half the greenhouse gases of equivalent amounts of land-based meat.
Just as man evolved from hunter-gatherer to domesticating livestock, it only makes sense to evolve our seafood cultivation, says Sebastian Belle, president of the Maine Aquaculture Association. Sea conservation groups say bottom-trawling is devastating millions of miles of aquatic ecosystems. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates over 70% of fish species are either maximally exploited or depleted.
While wild fishing declines, aquaculture is flourishing; accounting now for 42% of seafood production, it is expected to exceed 50% in the next decade, according to the Worldwatch Institute.
But environmental groups are arguably the biggest political obstacles to its expansion, pressuring governments and consumers to resist it by claiming that fish farms are unhealthy or contaminate wild species. No such risks have ever been substantiated, Mr. Moore notes. What's astonishing, he says, is that organizations claiming to care about ocean life are, essentially, pushing to keep us straining sea life, hunting fish, like buffalo, to near extinction, rather than sustainably growing our own.
Does Africa Need Genetically Modified Crops?
Corn, or maize, is the most common crop on the planet. The ability to artificially tinker with its genetics "make it easier to breed new varieties of corn that produce higher yields or are more tolerant to extreme heat, drought, or other conditions," explained the centre's director, Richard Wilson.
Monsanto is already engineering drought-tolerant breeds. Corn tailor-made for the most challenging growing conditions could bring bumper crops to perennially undernourished African regions. Only, as things stand, it won't: Genetically modified (GM) crops are not legal most everywhere in Africa.
If there is anywhere desperate for better crops, it is Africa, where grain yields per acre, according to the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, are one-fifth that of those in Europe and the United States.
As Western harvests improve, Africa's are shrinking: the World Resources Institute reported in 2006 that, per capita, African farms produced 19% less in 2005 than in 1970. Where the typical farmer devotes at least 90% of her small plot of land to simply feeding her family, the growth in Africa's population, expected to nearly double by 2050 to 1.7 billion, will, without modern, high-yield agriculture techniques, mean vast wilderness lost to crude farms.
Until the mid-1990s, some African governments were preparing to introduce the same genetically modified, pest-resistant, high-yield crops Americans and Canadians were adopting, when, again, environmental NGOs interfered, campaigning against what they branded Frankenfoods.
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