by Dennis T. Avery,

Director of Global Food Issues, Hudson Institute

before the Manitoba/North Dakota Zero Tillage Farmer's Association

Brandon, Manitoba, Jan. 25, 1995

I didn't come here today to tell you that no-till farming is efficient. You already knew that.

I didn't come to tell you that no-till cuts soil erosion. You knew that too.

I did come to tell you that the high-yield no-till farming you are helping to pioneer is the pattern for saving tomorrow's expanded human population from famine, and saving the wildlife of the Third World from being plowed down for food crops.

You are literally the solution to the world's most pressing problem: the apparent conflict between people and wildlife all over the planet.

You are a key part of the greatest environmental triumph ever achieved by mankind.

THE GLOBAL OVERVIEW

Back in February, I was invited to testify before the U.S. Senate on the world food outlook. That famous fearmonger, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, was the first witness. He told the panel that the world was headed for famine and chaos, with virtually all of the world's topsoil washed off the fields by erosion. (Brown has always been big on soil erosion.)

The hearing chairman, Sen. Bumpers of Arkansas, told Brown he was a genius. The good Senator declared that he himself didn't believe the world could sustainably feed more than 2 or 3 billion people. (We already feed 5.7 billion successfully, and more every day.)

When my turn came, I told the panel that I saw no reason for famine. The world's crop yields continue to rise, and we are winning our war against soil erosion. I also warned them that if we stopped pursuing high-yield agriculture and did get massive famine, it would not occur until after the people of the Third World had plowed down virtually all of the world's wildlife in their last, desperate efforts to keep themselves and their children alive.

"The Third World's people don't read Lester Brown's books," I said. ìThey don't know they're supposed to lie down and die quietly."

I was not prepared for the response I got from Senator Bumpers:

Mr. Avery, you make me regret that I called this hearing.

Senator Bumpers was visibly depressed by the fact that we weren't going to have famine. His comfortable worldview was turned upside down when I pointed out that we couldn't have a big famine without losing most of the wildlife. Apparently he'd seen a nice, big, mechanistic, guilt-free famine as the way to avoid having to compete with a lot of additional people on the planet.

And this man is the chairman of our Senate Agricultural Appropriations Committee! In charge of funding agricultural research for America and supporting much of the research for the Third World.

No wonder high-yield farmers aren't getting any respect. No wonder the agricultural research budgets are starved, and much of the funding is being diverted to low-yield research on so-called "sustainable" farming systems.

The public's attitude toward high-yield farming has changed radically since Norman Borlaug got that Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for breeding the Green Revolution wheat varieties. As the world's population has risen, people have begun to fear global overcrowding more than they fear famine for faraway people.

That's not quite rational, but I have come to believe it is quite real -- and enormously important for the future of high-yield farming. Norman Borlaug wouldn't get his Nobel peace prize if the committee were voting today.

I submit that the public relations genius of our famous faminemongers, Lester Brown and Paul Ehrlich, has been to sanctify people's psychological fear of overcrowding. They have linked increased population with natural resource losses. They encourage people to indulge their fear of overcrowding by saying they want to protect wildlife and natural resources -- so let's not have more food to encourage more people.

How do you justify high-yield agriculture (and farm chemicals) to people who want to stop world population growth? What if the public is actually hoping for a nice, massive guilt-free famine to come along and halt population expansion? In the name of saving wildlife and wildlife species!

I think I have the answer. It is disarmingly simple. It reverberates powerfully, as I have discovered this fall with articles in Newsweek, Time, the Christian Science Monitor and Garbage, a major environmental magazine.

I have simply pointed out that the only way to save the world's wildlife habitat -- and thus to save the wildlife -- is by turning high-yield agriculture into higher-yield agriculture.

Otherwise, the world's wildlife will be crowded out by people and low-yield farming. The Third World cannot hire enough game wardens to protect the wildlife if the people surrounding it are truly hungry. We need 100k no farther than Africa today, where elephants and gorillas are losing their homes as African tribes deal with lower death rates by extending low-yield traditional farming.

The people of China today are not even environmentally sensitive enough to become vegetarian as they become affluent. In each of the last three years, China's meat consumption has risen by 3 million tons. The world is being swept today by the strongest surge of economic growth in its history, which is carrying billions of people into high-quality diets with lots of meat, milk and eggs.

Higher-yielding seeds, farm chemicals and new farming systems are critically important to achieving the higher yields which will be needed to protect the world's wildlife as we feed more people better diets.

PRESERVING WILDLIFE HABITAT

Agriculture is the key to world land use, and thus to world wildlife habitat. Cities currently occupy only about 1.4 percent of the earth's land area. By 2050, they will still occupy less than 4 percent of the earth's land area, according to Roger Sedjo of Resources for the Future. The World Bank projects that 90 percent of the additional people will live in cities where their land use is minimized. 1

Agriculture directly occupies one-third of world land surface. Because of its high yields, modern agriculture also permits another third of the world's land surface to be left in forests, the key habitat for most of our wild species.

By my estimate, high-yield farming is apparently already saving roughly 10 million square miles of wildlife habitat from being plowed down for food production.

Since high-yield farming is so critically important to preserving our natural resources, it is comforting to know that our new chemically-based farming systems are also the most sustainable farming systems ever devised.

Nor do farm chemicals pose significant risk to either wildlife populations or to people.

The risk to wildlife is not zero -- but it is small and getting smaller. We still need to produce pesticides that are still safer for both wildlife and applicators (especially in Asian rice cultures) and this is slowly being achieved.

The critical point, however, is that the risk to wildlife from modern pesticides and fertilizers is tiny compared to the risk of habitat loss if the world tried to feed its rising population from traditional or organic farming Systems.

There is no question that the world's human population is still rising, though at a rapidly declining rate. We will probably have to produce food for 9 to 10 billion people when the population peaks about 2040.

In addition, part of the price for restabilizing world population is to make virtually everyone affluent. Affluent people have small families. However, affluent people also demand to eat well, which further increases the challenge to agriculture.

Thus the food challenge of the 21st century is to triple the effective output of the land and water in farming -- while further reducing any negative environmental impacts from food production.

In such a world, with more people and also with the urgent desire to preserve natural resources, there is little room for low-yield farming.

The environmental movement wants us to prove zero risk to wildlife -- or ban pesticides. We dare not do that -- because the risk to wildlife would be too great. A granular carbofuran compound (Furadan 15G) was recently taken off the American market, because of several thousand bird deaths over a period of years. The deaths occurred when the granules were not completely incorporated in the soil, and birds mistook them for seeds. But how many billions of birds -- let alone other wild organisms --would lose their habitat if we had to double the land area plowed down for crops?

The world is currently cropping about 5.8 million square miles of land -- the land area of South America. 3 Crop yields from the 1950s indicate that the world might already be plowing 15-16 million square miles for crops if we were not using high-yield methods supported by chemicals. That would equal the land area of the whole Western Hemisphere.

(This is not a precise estimate, since it is impossible to know just how sharply yields would drop over time without pest protection, as insects and diseases proliferated. Nor can we predict exactly the sustainable yields from the steeper, more fragile soils which would have to be brought into production.)

It is certainly possible that if the world population did reach 10 billion, low-yield farming might need 30 million square miles of crops to feed them -- or more. That would mean plowing the equivalent of South America, North America, Europe and much of Asia for food.

In contrast, high yield agriculture has been raising world crop yields by 2 percent annually for the past 30 years. It is currently raising food production in the Third World at more than 4 percent -- which is twice the population growth rate in the developing countries. Nor is there any indication of a slackening in productivity growth.

If the world continues to fund research in high yield agriculture--especially with biotechnology -- we should be able to feed the 21st century human population with no more cropland than is plowed today!

We are also using pesticides today that have only narrow toxicity, degrade quickly, need only ounces per hectare and are thoroughly tested to ensure minimum risk to wildlife and the environment.

We increasingly deliver these safer pesticides in dry, granular forms and water-soluble packets to prevent spillage. Or we deliver them in reusable bulk containers that lock onto the spray equipment without spillage -- and then go back to the factory without leaving a plastic jug to be thrown in a landfill.

We are displacing low-yielding landrace crop varieties in the world's fields. But we are not losing those genetic resources. Rather than turn the world into a starving gene museum, a worldwide network is not only preserving those seeds, but will make them far more available to future crop researchers than they would be in a remote Asian village.

BROADENING ENVIRONMENTAL COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS

The environmental movement is right in saying that we must broaden the risk-benefit analysis we use in evaluating agricultural systems.

To the best of our ability, we must include the environmental impacts of high-yield farming systems in our cost-benefit analysis. We must factor in soil erosion, wildlife impacts, water quality and availability, soil tilth -- and the human health impacts of farm chemical use.

But that means including the true environmental benefits of high-yield farming systems in the equation.

We must include in those benefits not just the number of spiders and weeds that survive in an acre of monoculture crops. but also the billions of organisms thriving in the two acres that didn't have to be plowed because we tripled the yield on the best and safest acre!

In much of the world, we have already tripled the yields, and more.

We must also credit to high-yield farming the millions of acres of high-risk land taken out of crops and cut back into grass and forest because we tripled the yields on the best and safest acres.

In the United States, we have taken millions of acres of steep and fragile soils out of crops in places like New England, West Virginia and the Ozark Hills. Sweden has shifted more than 5 million hectares of land back into forest since 1968, because it has not needed those acres for crop product ion.

Chile has been able to support a population growing at 1.7 percent annually, feed that population an improving diet and expand its exports of high-value winter fruits and vegetables with no increase in cropland. It has been able to achieve this because of rising crop yields.

Next door in Ecuador, yields have not been rising. Population growth has remained far higher, at 2.6 percent. ~ As a result, Ecuador has the worst record in Latin America of cutting forests; it is expanding its cropland by 2 percent annually. 9

High-yield farming Ls a hunger triumph. Without high-yield farming, we would indeed have faced famine for billions of people. But in the secure affluence of today's First World countries, fighting hunger isn't enough. More and more people are demanding that we preserve the quality of life, and sustain natural resources for future generations.

High-yield farming today must justify itself on environmental grounds.

Remarkably, however, high-yield farming has made bigger contributions to environmental sustainability and wildlife preservation than Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Sierra Club put together!

RADICALLY CUTTING SOIL EROSION

The true long-term threat to human existence is soil erosion. Doubling the yields on the best and safest farmland cuts soil erosion by more than half. And now herbicides and conservation tillage are letting us cut those low rates of soil erosion by 65 to 98 percent. It should now be possible to build topsoil and soil tilth on much of the world's best farmland -- while carrying on intensive high-yield farming.

For 10,000 years, man has accepted soil erosion as the long-term price for having a dependable food supply in the short run.

In the U.S. alone, the Conservation 'Technology Information Center reports roughly 100 million acres using conservation tillage systems. The systems are continuing their rapid spread through such widely-differing agricultures as Western Europe, Brazil, Australia and Kenya.

We are doing this with chemicals. Herbicides are the first alternative mankind has ever developed to "bare-earth" farming. These herbicide-based farming systems are the most sustainable farming Systems ever devised. They save more soil, even as they encourage more earthworms, more soil microbes and more soil tilth than plowing. Nor do the herbicides present any significant threat to wildlife or people from runoff or residues.

(Atrazine, the most widely-used "suspicious" herbicide in the world has just had its safety rating raised seven-fold by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.)

In addition, high-yield farmers are in the midst of developing "no-leach" farming. Tractors and applicator trucks for farm chemicals now can be guided by global positioning satellites and radar within inches of their true positions across the field, while microprocessors vary the application rates of chemicals and seed seven times a second based on intensive soil sampling, soil hydrology, slope, plant population and nearness to waterways. It is now practical to manage our farms by the square yard, rather than in chunks of 10 or 100 hectares.

High-yield farming must now claim environmental credit for both the acres not plowed. and for the soil erosion not suffered.

The world's severe soil erosion today is in primitive countries trying to support rising populations by extending low-yield farming onto fragile lands.

STABILIZING POPULATION SOONER

Poor people in poor countries have large families, and are hard on the environment.

The environmental activists would like us to picture the Third World as peopled with rubber tappers who coexist benignly with the wildlife.

However, the reality is that there are only a few thousand rubber tappers on the whole planet. There are only a few indigenous people still living in their primitive cultures.

Most of the Third World's billions of people are already in the most ecologically damaging part of the economic growth process. They are extending low-yield agriculture into the forests. They are turning trees into charcoal. They are burning millions of tons of coal, and smelting huge quantities of iron. Nor will they cheerfully go back to living in mud huts and accepting high infant mortality.

Rich people, on the other hand, have small families, treat their sewage and invest in cleaner energy. Sand becomes a critical natural resource -- for the silicone chips and glass-fiber cables in computers and telecommunication systems.

Even in the poorest countries, the ones that have raised their crop yields most rapidly have also brought their birth rates down the most. India, Indonesia and Zimbabwe, with the best plant breeding programs, have cut their births per woman far more rapidly than Ethiopia and Ecuador.

The key to the world's long-term environmental future is pulling the people of the Third World into the environmentally friendly silicone age as rapidly as possible. That process almost always starts with high-yield farming.

RAPIDLY RISING FARM RESOURCE DEMANDS

Fortunately, the poor countries of the world today are achieving the broadest and most rapid economic growth ever seen on the planet:

1. Thanks primarily to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the low-income countries of the world have been boosting their manufacturing output by nearly 10 percent per year throughout the 1980s. The GATT guarantees market access for their manufactures in profitable First World markets.

2. This economic growth pattern is now being further strengthened by the end of the Communism. Capitalism that works is now displacing central planning that didn't -- and encouraging sounder economic policies all over the globe.

3. The end of the Cold War adds to the growth trend by cutting everybody's defense costs. (Even small Third World countries were worried about Communist-funded guerrilla movements.)

4. The early GATT "tigers" (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) are now serving as engines of growth in their own right, through their growing imports and foreign investments. Thus the growth pattern ripples more and more strongly.

The Third World's industrial growth rate, as a result, has been roughly five times its population growth. Per capita GNP for the whole Third World has been gaining by 3.9 percent per year.

ORGANIC FARMING: A THREAT TO PEOPLE AND WILDLIFE?

Organic farming cannot support either the people or the wildlife already on the planet. Organic production has no effective strategy for feeding the larger human population in prospect without destroying huge tracts of wildlife habitat.

The first problem is that organic farming offers half or less of ~ ~e yield from the good mainstream farms supported by chemicals.

Not only do organic farms get less yield from each crop, but they must use more land for green manure crops and livestock pasture. Organic farming deliberately puts more burden on the natural resources.

Worse than that, the world lacks the organic nitrogen to implement organic farming on a broad scale. The U.S. has less than 30 percent of the organic nitrogen to support current farm output. The rest of the world has far less organic nitrogen per acre of farmland than America -- probably less than 20 percent of the nitrogen needed to sustain current world food output organically.

Nor have we convinced a single country or culture to accept vegetarian diets. People are not content with the low-quality protein from vegetable sources. In every country where incomes are rising, demand is rising rapidly for cooking oil, pork, fed lamb, eggs, poultry, peanut butter and the other resource-costly foods that provide higher quality protein.

High-yield agriculture is all that has prevented radical reductions in world wildlife habitat -- already -- in the midst of the rising populations and incomes.

Because of high yields, we are currently feeding literally twice as many people as the world supported in 1955 -- on almost the same cropland base used in 1955. In 1955, the world was cropping 1.352 billion hectares. Today, the total is only 1.444 billion-- a mere 6 percent increase. Virtually all of that increase has come in Africa, which is not yet broadly using high-yield farming.

NEW GAINS FROM BIOTECHNOLOGY

If we pursue biotechnology, we can even forget fears about "running out of research."

Biotech will radically increase the speed of plant and animal breeding. It will let us rifle-shot gene selection instead of crossing organisms with thousands of genes apiece. It will grow more rice in Asia and more corn in America, by putting pest resistance into the plants, adding new values to the grain and perhaps even raising the rate of photosynthesis.

Biotech will let us use far more of the world's genes, through wide crosses and inter-species crosses. We're already on the way to the world's first rust-free wheat, because of a wide-biotech cross with a wild cousin of the wheat plant. Thus biotech also makes wild genes more valuable. and encourages their preservation.

Biotech will even help us CREATE valuable biodiversity, such as resurrecting the American chestnut tree. The loss of the chestnuts were a major blow to the wildlife of the Eastern seaboard.

We can also use the biotechnology pioneered for farming to create the first truly high-yielding forest plantations. with yields 15 to 20 times as high as natural forests. Cloning and tissue culture are already boosting tree crop yields as much as six-fold. We'll produce the forest products for 10 billion people from 5 percent of the forest area -- arid have more wild forest than today.

Yet some environmental zealots want us to reject biotechnology --one of the most powerful knowledge advances in human history!

NOR DO FARM CHEMICALS THREATEN PEOPLE

Eco-activists claim that farm chemicals are dangerous to people and the environment. They are wrong, but we're letting the myth build.

Farm chemicals do not cause cancer in humans, they prevent cancer. They suppress molds and toxins in our food which could otherwise trigger cancer. Pesticides also ensure ample supplies of affordable fruits and vegetables -- and eat mg five fruits and vegetables per day cuts cancer risks in half. ~8

Pesticide residues are one ten-thousandth as dangerous to humans as the natural chemicals found in our food. (We've now done the rat tests on some of the natural compounds as well as on the man-made chemicals.)

What about nitrogen in our rural wells? Ninety percent of American wells today average 5-7 parts per million of nitrate. 20 The only nitrate-related health threat is the famous "blue-baby syndrome." But it takes more than 100 parts per million of nitrate to trigger "blue baby" -- unless bacterial contamination is also involved. America has had one "blue-baby" death in the last 30 years -- after a fertilizer spill.

-- The so-called "pesticide contamination" in our groundwater is typically in parts per billion for compounds that are safer than eating mustard or pickles. (The water contains far less pesticide than the trivial residues on our foods.)

We are still looking for the first victims of DDT. No human death has ever been laid to DDT, and a recent study linking breast cancer in women to DDT has been trumped by a much larger study, with women who had four and five times as much DDT in their tissues, which found no linkage with DDT. 23

So far as wildlife is concerned, Cornell University fed DDT, PCBs and mercury to chickens and Japanese quail. DDT produced no impact on the birds or their eggs. PCBs radically cut the hatching rate of the eggs. Mercury not only cut hatchability --but weakened the eggshells! Our eagles and ospreys were almost certainly saved by the cleanup of industrial effluents that occurred at the same time we were banning DDT.

I'm not trying to bring back DDT. I just want the public to understand the high degree of safety in today's farm chemicals. According to the rat tests (which overestimate human risk) the natural carcinogens in our food kill 38,000 people per year, compared to 40 for pesticide residues. In the real world, there is no evidence than anyone has ever died from pesticide residues-- or had their endocrine system damaged.

Moreover, our farm chemicals are continuing to become safer, not more dangerous. We are developing still-safer compounds, integrating them more effectively with other pest management strategies, delivering them in safer packages, and applying them with increasing precision.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL SIDE-EFFECTS OF FARM SUBSIDIES

The positive story on high-yield farming is NOT meant as a whitewash of the agricultural methods and policies which the First World has been using.

The U.S. has drained 12-15 million acres of wetlands since 1950, much of it to plant crops already in commercial surplus. 25

U.S. farmers have planted crops on millions of acres of droughty soils, because of high farm price supports.

Western Europe has radically over-intensified its farming, over-fertilized its surface waters and torn out thousands of miles of ancient hedgerows.

Asian farmers have radically over-used chemical sprays, to intensify their rice production behind tariff barriers.

There is a common thread in high-yield agriculture's sins against the environment: government subsidies. Even the infamous burning of the Amazon rain forest for cattle pasture was due directly to a Brazilian government subsidy (now withdrawn). 26

If high-yield farming is to survive, we must help the public distinguish between the merits of productivity and the side-effects of farm subsidies.

WILL WE LOSE HIGH-YIELD FARMING TO A MYTH?

For all of high-yield farming's virtues, we may be losing it.

Farmers in 20 countries are already losing the right to use fertilizers and pesticides. Environmental zealots are moving so effectively, and with so little opposition, that they may well make organic farming the only politically correct way to produce food in affluent countries.

In the electronic town meetings that increasingly govern our democratic political decisions all over the globe, it is less and less the science that governs policy. It is more and more the public perception which governs.

In the U.S., the Clinton Administration has already tabled its pesticide proposals. The proposals remove the "economic rationale," because people are more important than dollars. But it has been the economic rationale which has kept available many of the small-volume pesticides for the fruits and vegetables that prevent cancer. The Clinton proposals would also let the Environmental Protection Agency suspend pesticides "on suspicion," which unfortunately might lead EPA to ban chemicals because of public misperception with even a need to provide scientific evidence of risk.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEED FOR FREE FARM TRADE

There is one thing the planet needs as urgently as it needs safe, high-yield farming systems like no-till. It needs free trade in farm products.

The world's farming resources for the 21st century are poorly distributed. Asia will be none times as densely populated per acre of farmland as North America. And Asia has already developed virtually all of its cost-effective farming resources.

Yet a massive food gap is emerging in Asia. Today, 2.5 billion Asians are averaging 13 grams of animal protein per day. Americans eat 71 grams, and the Japanese are now up to 55 grams. By the year 2030, the world will have to supply 55 grams per day of meat, milk and eggs to 4 billion Asians. That is nearly a seven-fold increase in Asian demand for meat and feedstuffs.

Yet today, the best idea China has for increasing its farm output is a big dam on the Yangtse River that will dislocate 1 million people. Indonesia is clearing a million acres of tropical forest to grow low-yielding soybeans for chickenfeed. India has no more pasture, so it is supplying more milk by stealing more crop biomass from its fields.

The real prices for high-quality protein foods in Asia today are far higher than in Canada or the U.S. India's cooking oil prices have lately been three times the world market level, and its milk prices twice as high. Indonesia has had a 40 percent tariff on soybean meal. China is paying people to hand-pollinate hybrid rice rather than import grain.

Surely, the marriage made in economic and environmental heaven is the Asian food gap and the underused farmland in North America.

To get access, however, both America and Canada are going to have to forget price supports and marketing boards. We are going to have to go back to the GATT and get the kind of sweeping farm trade reform that was proposed in the. Uruguay Round -- and shot down by the French.

This time, however, the French commercial farmers will be on the side of reform, because they have since discovered that CAP reform is throwing them overboard. Their prices are being cut, their quotas lowered -- and the small farmers protected by direct payments.

The time is ripe for real farm trade liberalization, all over the world. No farmers anywhere have more comparative advantage to expand their production and their exports than the farmers of North America.

And now you have an environmental imperative for demanding free farm trade.

JUSTIFYING HIGH-YIELD FARMING AND FREE TRADE

Until now, mainstream agriculture has made no real attempt to defend itself from the eco-activists. We've been curled in the fetal position since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962.

Agriculture's instinctive response to environmental blame was to admit guilt and promise to "do better." We weren't sure of our own farming systems when Rachel Carson published her book.

Thirty years later, the only defence we've raised for high-yield agriculture is that it helps insure us against hunger. But First World consumers don't really believe their supermarkets will ever run out of food. And they seem to be deeply afraid that psychological overcrowding will subtract from the quality of their lives. They may be all too willing to let a famine situation occur by inaction.

The chemical industries have tried to prove a negative: that farm chemicals are not dangerous to people or wildlife. But there is not zero risk! And there is always someone with a new claim of danger.

Should-be importing countries have justified their farm subsidies and farm trade barriers on a phoney food-security argument. But no country's food production is as stable as the world's. And only one country (India) is truly stockpiling food for emergencies -- which is the only way to truly enhance food security.

High-yield agriculture must forget its defensive posture and launch an environmental counterattack. We must help the public understand that:

organic farming is a far greater threat to the planet's wildlife than our safe. environmentally-tested pesticides.

high yield farming is the only way to save most of our wildlife unless we are willing to destroy 3 billion living human beings and forcibly abort most of the babies now being born in the world.

organic farming is far more dangerous to public health than farm chemicals, because organic production means more molds and toxins and fewer healthful fruits and vegetables in our diets.

high yield farming. or "knowledge farming" -- is a humane. sustainable and real-world solution to having BOTH both people and wildlife on this planet.

Free trade and high-yield, no-till farming are the keys to saving the planet and its wildlife for future generations.

REFERENCES

1. World Bank, Development and Environment, World Development report 1992, p. 8. Washington, D.C.

2. FAO, Production Yearbooks, Vol. 9, Table 1, "Land Use" and Vol. 45, Table 1, "Land Use." Rome.

3 Richards (1990). The Earth As Transformed by Human Action; Cambridge University Press.

4. Seckler, David (1993). World Grain Consumption and Production: 1961-2030. Winrock Center for Economic Policy Studies Discussion Paper # 16. Washington, D.C.

5. FAO Production Yearbooks, FAO, Rome.

6 Plucknett, Donald (1993). Science and Agricultural Transformation. International Food Policy Research Institute Distinguished Lecture. Washington, D.C.

7. FAO. Production Yearbook, 1991, Table 1, and Production Yearbook 1969, Table 1, p.3. Rome.

8 World Bank. World Development Report 1993, p. 288. Washington, D.C.

9. Southgate (1991). Tropical Deforestation and Agricultural Development in Latin America. London Environmental Economic Centre.

10. National Association of Conservation Districts, Conservation Technology Information Center, W. Lafayette, IN. 11 World Bank (1992).

11. World Bank Development Report 1992, p. 55-57Washington, D.C.

12. World Bank, World Development Report 1993, p. 240. Washington,D.C.

13. World Bank. World Development Report 1993, p. 238. Washington, D.C.

14. National Research Council (1989). Alternative Agriculture, pp. 249-418. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. See also University of Illinois (1984). The Morrow Plots: A Century of Learning, College of Agriculture Bulletin 775.Champaign, IL.

15. U S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service (1978). Estimates of U.S. Livestock and Poultry Manure Production. Washington, D.C. Also Dr. Al Sutton, Animal Science Department, Purdue University, chairman of a task force for the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology to update the USDA/ARS report, personal communication, 1993.

16. FAO. Production Yearbooks, Vol. 9 (1955), Table 1, and Vol. 45, Table 1. Rome.

17. Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (1989). Mycotoxins: Economic and Health Risks, Report No. 116. Ames, Iowa.

18. Block, Patterson and Subar (1992). "Fruit, Vegetables and ~~ncer Prevention. Nutrition and Cancer 8, 1-29.

19. Gold, Sline, Stern, Manley and Ames (1992). Rodent Carcinogens: Setting Priorities, Science, Vol. 258 9 Oct. 92, 261-265. Also, Ames and Gold, "Comparing Synthetic to Natural Chemicals is Essential for Perspective in Risk Assessment," submitted to Risk Analysis, Oct., 1993. Also Scheuplein (1990). The Real Cancer Risks in Our Food in Global Food Progress (D. Avery, ed) pp. 155-163. Hudson Institute, Indianapolis, IN.

20 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1992). Another Look. National Survey of Pesticides in Drinking Water Wells, Phase 2 R~port. Washington, D.C.

21. Addiscott, Whitmore and Powlson (1991). Farming, Fertilizers the Nitrate Problem. CAB International, Wallingford, UK.

22. Ames, Magau and Swirsky, "Ranking Possible Carcinogen Hazards," Science, Vol. 236, April 17, 1987, pp. 236-271.

23 Kneger, Wolff, Hiatt, Rivera, Vogelman, and Orentreich, "Breast Cancer and Serum Organochlorines: A Prospective Study Among White, Black and Asian Women," Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 86, No. 8, April 20, 1994, pp. 589-599.

24 Scott et al., "Effects of PCBs, DDT and Mercury Compounds Upon Egg Production, Hatchability and Shell Quality in Chickens and Japanese Quail," Poultry Science, Vol. 54 (1975), pp. 175-199.

25. Kramer and Shabman (1986). "Incentive~ for Agricultural Development of U.S. Wetlands: A Case Study of the Bottomland Hardwoods of the Lower Mississippi River Valley," Agriculture and the Environment, pp 175-199. Resources for the Future, Washington, D.C.

26 Mahar (1989). Government Policies and Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon Region. World Bank, Washington, D.C.

Dennis T. Avery directs the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, a think-tank headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. During the 1980s, he was the senior agricultural analyst for the U.S. Department of State -- where he built an international reputation for accurately forecasting trends in the world food system. Avery has also served as a policy analyst for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the President's National Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber, and for World Perspectives, Inc.

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SAVING THE PLANET WITH PESTICIDES AND PIASTIC: THE ENVIRONMENTAL TRIUMPH OF HIGH-YIELD FARMING

By Dennis T. Avery

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The environmental movement is right; we must save the wildlife. But we can't save it without high-yield farming. Learn why! And how to use that knowledge to lead your industry to the greatest opportunity in farming history.

This is the message that has thrilled farm audiences across the country. It presents high-yield farming as the famine triumph you knew it was -- and the environmental necessity for the future.

Key chapter headings:

Wildlife and the Acres Not Plowed Preventing Cancer with Pesticides

Organic Farming Can't Save the Environment

The Environmental Need for Free Farm Trade

Drink Up, the Water's Fine

The Empty Threat of DDT

More than 200 pages, and more than 400 highly-credible, science-based footnotes.

The agriculturist's answer to the environmental challenge.

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