NO GLOBAL STARVATION, II
By William Urban
As noted last week, there are no global food shortages except in areas of war, insurrections and prolonged droughts or floods. Even China, where artificial famines caused by government programs once killed millions, the nation feeds itself. Today’s Communist rulers have generally recognized that individual farmers are more productive than state enterprises or communes, but for decades it was more important that the state take most of the harvest to support industrial development; in those years life was hard. The American equivalent of this is to protect the snail darter.
We have long known that modifying our agricultural methods has both good and bad aspects. Insecticides raise production significantly. Last summer I lost all but one plum — picked early— of what promised to be a bumper crop because I did not want to spray for the Japanese beetles. I have a neighbor who raises bees, and I thought that was a good reason to take a chance on the bugs; I also miss the fireflies that were once so plentiful. Not spraying may still have been the right choice, because bees are almost an endangered species.
The downside to insecticides is that they are effective only until the bugs evolve to resist the poisons; and fertilizers are expensive and easily overused. Changes in field management have consequences — abandoning deep plowing for minimum till allows harmful insects to survive winter freezes, but there is less erosion and all the problems that come from having the best soil washed into the rivers and eventually into the sea. Deforestation produces erosion, which is often made worse by raising goats on the denuded lands, because goats eat everything that could hold what soil remains. I’ve read that the first step toward restoring arid lands in Italy and North Africa is to eat the goats.
One promising means of breaking this cycle is genetic engineering. If, for example, scientists can modify corn so that its roots produce nitrogen as soy beans do, farmers could reduce the use of fertilizer. If corn stalks could be made less tasty to pests, farmers could use less insecticide. However, there are two major obstacles to overcome. Both are in public perception.
First, the public has been taught by decades of horror films to mistrust scientists, so that today the term Frankenfood is understood by almost everyone to represent the danger that modified genes would get loose, changing the genetic composition of other plants and even animals. There are good reasons for taking this seriously. The overuse of antibiotics may have speeded the evolution of dangerous bacteria that threaten everyone’s health. Also, the unwise disposition of hormones (as in flushing birth control pills down the toilet) may have contributed to the increasingly early sexual maturation of females and even the global epidemic of obesity. Note the use of “may” here. It could be diet, it could be our use of electric lights to stay up late, or it could be not having enough hard physical work. We don’t know enough except to say that something is going on. In short, are the returns worth the risks?
The public reaction to such scares is, alas, often as irrational as the belief in UFOs or global warming flooding us tomorrow. Not too many years ago the fear was that nuclear power station accidents would change our DNA, creating monsters where it did not kill everyone outright. It was wise to stop above-ground testing of nuclear weapons, but the concern evolved into a fear of irradiating food. No serious scientist believes that irradiating meat does anything beyond killing bacteria, but the public is afraid of anything to do with radiation except taking an occasional x-ray. Hence, we do almost no irradiation of food products despite the potential health benefits.
Sustainable agriculture is the flip side of commercial agriculture in that it produces too little food to sustain farmers .The Sustainability movement is strong and amazingly diverse. It is a close cousin of Environmentalism, Eat Locally, Recycling, and Community Gardens. But it is nothing new, and not altogether bad. It appeared in America before the Civil War, often in the form of religious groups (most prominently, the Latter Day Saints and the Amish), secular groups (Oneida, New Harmony, and Walden), and utopian socialists (the Fourier settlement in Nauvoo). Sixty years ago there was the Catholic Renaissance and its more secular cousin, the Rural Living Movement, both of which emphasized breaking with the modern world in favor of simple living.
Vegetarianism has a long history, based partly on a desire to have more a healthy diet, partly on distaste for killing animals, partly on political fashion that included a rejection of contemporary society. Vegan eating habits are more recent in the West, but were common among small sects in India. Humans have long associated hunting and the raising of animals with meat with masculinity and the military virtues of courage, strength and persistence, so vegetarians should be pacifists. Awkwardly, Hitler was a vegetarian. Nevertheless, progressives were eager to find some way to move toward the future society of cooperation and sharing. Bees, not wolves and deer, were the proper models for human beings.
It was also important that family farms were part of a competitive capitalist culture that had all the wrong values. So co-ops became popular in the Sixties and still remain so in the form of “fair trade” products such as coffee; feminists often praise third-world women’s cooperatives. Natural gas was the cure-all for our energy problems until it turned out we had lots of it. Now the push is for natural energy — wind and solar, but not the long-established use of water.to make electricity. Alternatively, farmers — now wearing the white hats — can make ethanol from corn and other bio-fuels from a variety of we thought were useless plants.
Ethanol brings us right back to food. It allows us to import less oil, and it is somewhat cleaner than gasoline. Western Illinois and Iowa benefit, but tortillas become more expensive in Mexico. Prices go up for all food products with ingredients coming from corn.
This shouldn’t make us uncomfortable. It is not like we are taking food out of poor people’s mouths.
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Review Atlas (Feb 13, 2014), 4.
