A Possible Eventual Option: Starve?

Are environmentalists standing in the way of feeding humanity through their opposition to biotechnology, farm chemicals, and nitrogen? Sobering words to ponder and delivered by billionaire Bill Gates--but with no question mark after them--in some straight talk to delegates attending the recent World Food Prize Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa. And while pontificating is so easy in these days of politicizing, Mr. Gates has backed his contention by committing more than $1 billon of his own money to improving crop yields in Africa and marginal farming regions.

Gates could have said with equal candor that these same environmentalists, by demanding organic-only farming, are risking the planet’s future. The world will need more than twice as much food by 2050 to feed a peak population of 8 billion affluent humans and their pets. Gates believes we should get that additional food we will need from higher yields on the 37 percent of the earth’s land we already farm--not by risking widespread famine, not to mention threatening massive numbers of wildlife species via clearing more land for lower-yielding organic crops.

The very heart of organic farming is a refusal to use industrial fertilizer. But without nitrogen fertilizer, and dependent only on manure, famine would be an inevitable and harsh, if not deadly, penalty to pay for some air-headed thinking.

We could cite other examples, such as the atrazine witch hunt being driven primarily by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a powerful eco-activist group that simply won’t take no for an answer or all the ramifications of the Cap and Trade bill now being pushed by the White House and Congress.

Suffice it to say we, all of us, need to be contacting our representatives to vote “no” on such legislation that has no proven or substantive basis for being validated or enacted.

References: “Environmental Views,” Dennis Avery, The Hudson Institute.