opinion
When you see a new book from some eastern egghead think-tank and the title begins with “Saving the Planet,” you usually have a fair idea of what to expect. If it isn’t a call for feeding anti-flatuent pills to cattle, it’s probably some equally offbeat proposal to make humans go through contortions in the name of environmental correctness.
But there’s a new book out that blows apart that prejudice. The title is guaranteed to make people of all views do a doubletake: Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic.
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The subtitle is equally blunt: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming.
Written by Dennis Avery and published by the Hudson Institute, the book makes a convincing argument that the world badly needs high-yield farming – complete with pesticides, fertilizers, large machines and biotechnology – not just for food, but to preserve the environment.
Without high-yield farming, he argues, the world would lose somewhere between 10 million and 30 million square miles of wildlife habitat. Either that, or a lot of people would starve because organic farming could never hope to feed the world’s growing population from the current amount of agricultural land.
What about the effects on human health? Avery urges a global view that includes all factors: “The methods used to achieve high yields in farming and forestry are already far safer for the environment and for people than the so-called ‘green’ alternatives. There are major risks involved in organic farming. For humans, the organic-farming risks include higher cancer rates from unseen natural toxins in untreated grains and oilseeds. They also include higher prices for fruits and vegetables, discouraging the fruit and vegetable consumption that can cut cancer rates in half.”
Instead of appreciating this common-sense perspective, however, policymakers have been swept up in fear campaigns against specific chemicals.
Avery describes how millions of malaria cases are caused in developing nations every year because of grossly exaggerated stories about the toxicity of DDT, and how the apple chemical Alar became the focus of another scare campaign even though a human would have to eat 28,000 pounds of apples each day for 10 years to get the same levels of Alar fed to rats.
Those types of statistics aren’t new, although they are often ignored.
Perhaps Avery’s most valuable contribution is integrating them into a global view, with the clear message that modern farming techniques are essential if sensible environmentalists are to meet their goals. That’s a message that deserves repeating.
