SASKATOON – Dennis Avery isn’t the kind of person most environmentalists would invite to dinner.
“They are truly awful,” said the American researcher about one environmental group. “They lie, cheat and steal.”
And Avery called promoters of sustainable agriculture a “big joke,” accused organic farming of being “a threat to the public health” and ridiculed low-input farming for being “either organic farming gone wrong … or it’s mainstream farming without courage.”
But Avery, who paused for interviews during a recent lecture tour through Canada, had more soothing words for farmers who use large amounts of chemicals.
Read Also
Saskatchewan RM declines feedlot application, cites bylaws
Already facing some community pushback, a proposed 2,000-head cattle feedlot south of Swift Current, Sask., has been rejected for a municipal permit, partly over zoning concerns about the minimum distance from a residence.
“Our environmental credentials are the best in the world,” said Avery, who owns 100 acres of Virginia pasture and heads the Centre for Global Food Issues in the U.S. “Our guys are saving 10 million square miles of wildlife habitat. What’s Greenpeace done?”
Get the most from the land
While Avery would likely be a welcomed guest at farm dinner tables, most western Canadian producers are more likely to find out about his ideas from Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastics, a book debunking arguments against intensive agriculture.
In the book, which Avery called a “farmer’s defence manual,” he attacks environmentalists and supplies readers with easy arguments to disarm environmental critics.
Avery said he believes almost all public health worries about pesticides are unjustified and are products of hysteria whipped up by cynical environmental lobby groups more concerned with raising funds than with helping the environment.
He said it is only high-yielding agriculture, that uses lots of fertilizers and pesticides, that will not only feed the world’s ballooning population, but will also save wildlife and slow environmental decay.
Farmers have been wasting their time trying to win support by pointing out how they are feeding millions of people who would otherwise starve, he said.
“You are trying to sell hunger to the best-fed people in the history of the planet. This does not sell, it has not sold, and as long as farmers keep talking about hunger, it isn’t going to sell.”
Far more powerful is the argument that it is only through chemical-dependent farming that the world’s endangered species will be saved.
Avery argues the high-yield agriculture of North America produces so much food that millions of acres of third world marginal lands that would be plowed by starving peasants can be left to nature.
And with the world’s population estimated to expand to 10 billion people by 2050, agricultural production will have to triple, Avery said. The only way to do this is to promote and increase high-yield agriculture in countries blessed with excellent cropland, such as the United States, Canada and Argentina.
No land left for wildlife
If this isn’t done, every possible acre in third world countries will be cultivated and endangered animal species will be driven to extinction.
“The Third World has already proven it will hunt down the wildlife, destroy the forests if it feels hungry,” said Avery.
The only reason there is no general worldwide famine now is diligent work of farmers to fill the human need for nutrition.
“It is absolutely true that they have prevented massive famine in the world, and they thought they were going to get credit for it,” said Avery ruefully.
Instead, farmers have been accused of poisoning the earth with pesticides, destroying the environment and promoting the world population boom by making so much food available.
One of the worst results of this, he said, has been how farmers have accepted their guilt.
“They’re sitting there in their isolation worrying that the environmentalists are right,” said Avery.
The author said his integrity is not damaged by the fact that he receives money from a think tank likely funded in part by pesticide manufacturers (he said he doesn’t know all funding sources). Nor is his opinion bought by the agricultural groups and pesticide manufacturers who pay him to speak.
“You can’t resolve this,” said Avery. “You have to go to the next level of analytical power.”
