By Thomas R. DeGregori
Posted: Monday, April 22, 2002
ARTICLES
Publication Date: April 22, 2002
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The arrival of Earth Day brought a discussion of how to feed the poor. Feeding the hungry has been added to the Earth Day agenda, but the anti-technology rhetoric of past Earth Days, when the poor were forgotten, cannot easily be reconciled with this newly discovered concern.
Since the first Earth Day, the planet has added close to 2 billion people, bringing the population to 6 billion, and those people are longer-lived, better fed, and in better health than ever before. With the population expected to grow by another 3 billion in the next half century (before leveling off or even declining), we should take a look at some of the changes of the past two centuries for guidance in combining environmental and anti-starvation goals.
In 1800, the world's population had not yet reached 1 billion; by 1900, the population was about 1.7 billion. Bringing new lands under cultivation helped boost the population, but equally important were (a) discoveries in organic chemistry that showed that crops could be fertilized with inorganic minerals and (b) the beginning of mechanization, including the use of refrigerated railroad cars and steam ships for moving beef and mutton to more densely populated areas. Since 1900, world population has increased more than three and a half times, while the population of the United States has quadrupled, yet we are producing vastly greater quantities of food on less land than we were cultivating in 1910. World population has more than doubled since 1960, yet per capita caloric consumption has gone up even faster. Daily per capita caloric intake in developing countries has increased from about 1,900 calories per day in 1960 to about 2,700 today. All this has been achieved even though the land under cultivation in the world has only increased from 1.4 billion hectares in 1960 to 1.5 billion hectares today. The percentage (as opposed to raw numbers) of the world population in hunger and poverty has fallen from 50% in 1950 to 30% in 1970 to (a still-unacceptable but much improved) 19% today.
One author, Vaclav Smil, has called the Haber-Bosch synthesis of nitrogen fertilizer the greatest invention of the twentieth century. We simply could not have fed even half the world's current population without it. Clearly, the increases in yield from the "Green Revolution" technologies were necessary to feed the Earth's growing population. Can one imagine the ecological devastation that would have resulted without yield increases if the world's population had to be fed by bringing forest and wildlife preserves, plus scrub, mountainsides, and other marginal lands under cultivation? The forecasts of mass famine made in the 1960s and since — including ones made by Earth Day organizers — would have come true if not for yield increases brought about by precisely the modern agronomy that Earth Day organizers have consistently opposed.
Early in the twentieth century, long before the introduction of modern chemical pesticides, the originators of "organic" agriculture were opposed to the use of minerals and synthetic fertilizers (as opposed to manure) in crop production. Back then, pesticides in use included various arsenic, copper, and sulfur compounds, many of which are still approved for use in "organic" agriculture. It has become an article of faith among many environmentalists and academic postmodernists that the "Green Revolution" was a "failure," though they offer no explanation of how we would feed today's world population without it.
The anti-technology rhetoric continues, with people who have been spectacularly wrong in the past now rising up in opposition to biotechnology in agriculture. Their vehemence has even led to various forms of ecoterrorism against genetically-modified or transgenic crops. Unfortunately, most of the opponents of transgenic crops are without any knowledge or experience in agriculture and therefore cannot offer any realistic plan for increasing food production while protecting the environment
Of all the causes in which I have been involved, no other issue has seen such a clear example of scientists and others with knowledge and experience lining up on one side of the issue while their opponents somehow garner the vast majority of publicity. The opponents of science are needlessly frightening people about technology that has been deemed by the National Academy of Sciences and others to be the safest, most predictable form of plant breeding yet devised.
Those who have done nothing to help feed people — and have opposed everything that does help feed people — have become ever more strident in their opposition to the technologies we need to build a better future. If activists who destroy agricultural fields or burn down research laboratories have a better way than transgenics for keeping protected lands out of cultivation while increasing agricultural yields, please let those of us involved in agriculture in developing countries know. Also, let us know if there is a better way of providing more food for those in hunger and those still to come. We are waiting!
Thomas R. DeGregori, Ph.D., is a Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, is a member of the board of directors of ACSH, and has done development work in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. His book The Environment, Natural Resources, and Modern Technology has just been published by Iowa State Press: A Blackwell Scientific Publishing Company. |
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Thomas DeGregori is the author of Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety, and the Environment
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Responses:
May 1, 2002
Professor DeGregori's analogy, equating protests against the World Trade Organization to neo-Luddism and resistance to all change and technology, is not valid. He simply wants to charge further down the path of economic globalization without considering the consequences, based entirely on the vague supposition that there have been "hundreds of millions of people who have been able to rise out of poverty" as a result of the current form of globalization. It is true that in the ten-year span between 1990 and 2000 125 million more people across the globe were able to leave what the World Bank defines as poverty, but during that span 150 million people in China alone performed that feat, leaving the net total for the rest of the world to be 25 million more people slipping into poverty. I doubt a protectionist, communist government such as the one in China lifted people out of poverty by having their "economies opened to change," as the professor states. In fact, it is more likely that the improvements in China have come about from directed internal change and a slow and cautious approach to globalization.
Meanwhile, I don't understand where he gets his premise that "Wealthy advocacy groups have created a new form of neo-colonialist imperialism, hijacking the political agendas of many oppressed peoples and misusing the suffering of those people to oppose globalization and change." Why is this? So that the people of Greenpeace and other organizations can live high on the hog off of people's donations? What is the basis for such a slanderous accusation? It seems to me that the real money to be made off of globalization comes from investment in international corporations, not through the manipulation and abuse of people's ideologies. After all, it is these companies that will enjoy cheaper labor and more favorable local political situations than they can find in North America and Western Europe, thus providing less expensive product with still higher profit margins. They also expand into markets that don't have the same amount of competition or consumer protection as exist here and in the rest of what is called "the first world." Is this not the entire concept behind globalization in the first place?
Capitalism is driven by these things, and under the professor's theory, people in these "new markets" will find themselves receiving the trickle-down effect of having our rather advanced and cutthroat version of capitalism simply unleashed unfettered upon them. This is not what is happening, though, and the people protesting the WTO are not doing so in order to get rich off of other people's misery but in fact are protesting the people who are. Indeed, neo-colonialist imperialism is occurring, but it is being perpetuated by the likes of McDonald's, not Greenpeace.
Capitalism in its pure form is driven by the interest of the individual. Two hundred years of it in this country have shown us that an opposing force is necessary to balance the interests of capitalism with the interests of all and to guard against abuses by individuals like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gates, and Lay. Protestors of the WTO are attempting to serve as or act in the absence of such a force. This is not a resistance to change but a resistance to the way change is occurring. In the same way that supply-side economics widened the gap between the rich and poor under Reagan, globalization in its current form is only making things worse, and there is nothing in place right now to stop it.
—abowers
May 6, 2002
DeGregori replies:
Bowers (I'll assume from the e-mail address that the letter-writer is named Bowers and will arbitrarily assume the writer to be female) considers the fact that "hundreds of millions of people...have been able to rise out of poverty" to be a "vague supposition" without any apparent cause and of little importance to the foes of globalization and technology. Bowers does not have an alternative explanation nor does she offer a program for continuing to feed and care for a growing population.
In my piece, I was looking at the long-term trends since World War II: absolute numbers or people and relative proportion of the population in poverty, immunization and infant mortality, and per capita food production and consumption. I also looked at the extraordinary achievements in health in the form of reduction or elimination of diseases, DALYs (Disability Adjusted Life Years), and life expectancies. Bowers chose to look only at absolute numbers in poverty for the period from 1990 to 2000 presumably because she could not even remotely make her case for any other time period or any of the other measures. On this ground alone, I could rest my case, but I need not do so. According to Bowers, "it is true that in the ten-year span between 1990 and 2000 125 million more people across the globe were able to leave what the World Bank defines as poverty, but during that span 150 million people in China alone performed that feat, leaving the net total for the rest of the world to be 25 million more people slipping into poverty."
This is an argument that Peter Rosset of Food First makes, and I am not sure why we should not count Chinese people rising out of poverty. Calling China "protectionist" is rather sly, but it won't rescue the argument. Name me a government that isn't protectionist in some form or other. The fact is that beginning with the post-Maoist reforms of 1978-1979, China has been steadily opening its economy, and as a result per capita income has more than tripled and roughly a quarter of a billion people have risen out of absolute poverty. Results have been almost as spectacular in India as in China over the same period with a similar acceleration in the decline in poverty. China is continuing down the path of opening its economy, as shown by its successful negotiations to join WTO and by the fact that it receives about $40 billion in foreign direct investment each year.
Bowers' "doubt" about the benefit of "openness" for China is clearly not shared by those responsible for making the decisions and whose policies, after all, have wrought the change. Surely Bowers would not claim that China would be economically better off today if it had not started down the path to globalization? Further, a net increase of 25 million for those in poverty would be very bad, but in a time period when one billion people were added to world population, it would still reflect a substantial decline in the percentage of the world's population living in poverty. Given that many of today's critics of globalization were yesterday's prophets of global doom and catastrophe from population growth, just the fact that prosperity has kept up with population growth has to be considered an achievement.
Bowers uses the standard ploy of making a case against an argument that was not made. She claims that I want "to charge further down the path of economic globalization without considering the consequences." Not only do I not want to "charge down the path of globalization," I do not know of anyone who does. Contrary to the critics in the streets, the path to globalization through such mechanisms as WTO involves long, tedious, sometimes tortuous negotiations to evolve workable rules of the game. As a matter of fact, when I received Bowers' e-mailed epistle, I was in Asia on my way to London. This year, I will be in Asia and Africa at least three times each and many times in London, as I have been in recent years, advising governments on negotiating strategies for trade talks and working on issues such as finding a proper pace for trade liberalization, balancing the benefits of openness with the desire to give local enterprises time to adapt.
When I wrote of the "role for the genuine radical to call attention to the victims of change," I was thinking of myself and of others with whom I work. I am highly critical of many aspects of the current global economy and of the rules governing WTO, but I also see the benefits, so I work with poor countries to make the rules fairer. Unfortunately, to the anti-globalizers, you are either totally with them or totally against them, and there can be no shades of difference or nuances that are acceptable. To most of us, globalization is a work-in-progress that has already produced a stream of recognizable benefits and holds promise for even greater benefits in the future.
It is strange that Bowers considers my criticism of Greenpeace to be "slanderous," since it is standard procedure for Greenpeace to trash all those who disagree with them. In addition to the evidence that I present below, let me add that my several decades of work, research, and writing in developing countries has provided me with direct experience and close personal relationships in these areas. What follows is some of the evidence for my claim. It is from current and forthcoming writing of mine. Unfortunately, much of the data is not my own. On my webpage — www.uh.edu/~trdegreg — I am posting excerpts on this issue from my books with complete citation, should Bowers or other readers wish to pursue this matter further.
Though Greenpeace portray themselves as Davids battling Goliaths, the reality is quite different. According to a 1998 study, by 1993 there were 28,000 international NGOs with 20,000 NGO networks, employing 19 million people with an income of $1.1 billion. Since many of these are purely lobbying organizations, their discretionary funding for their campaigns is comparable to the funding of those they oppose.
Whatever their anti-establishment slogans may be, many of these NGOs receive government funding that would otherwise have gone for economic development. Currently, one quarter of the development budget of Norway goes to NGOs, while the United Kingdom spends close to 16% of its development budget through NGOs and receives complaints when they attempt to shift some of these resources to developing country organizations. Funding projects directly through the governments of developing nations is now a threat to some NGOs in rich countries. Long accustomed to presuming to speak on behalf of those in need — In the words of Clair Short, the UK Development Secretary — it is now the case that "the days have gone" when even a very worthy organization like Oxfam "can speak on behalf of the poor."
Which of the vociferous NGOs had anything to do with bringing about the improving conditions in the world shown in the statistics that I cited? How many people are better able to feed themselves because of Greenpeace or Food First? How many children's lives have been saved through immunization because of Friends of the Earth? It is easy for presumptive radicals in the United States and other developing countries to protest the building of a dam, but they do not have to provide water to poor farmers for irrigation or electricity for hospitals or for school children to be able to study at night. It is easier to produce slogans on the streets and good PR than it is to produce results in the field.
When respected organizations like CIMMYT (Spanish acronym for the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat) analyzed their accessions and could not verify NGO claims of "contamination" of native Mexican landraces of maize, they and CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) were essentially accused of cowardice for being "silent" on this critical issue. It was CIMMYT which created the wheat HYV (High Yielding Variety) and it was CGIAR members such as IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) that created the other HYVs (or disease-resistant varieties) such as the ones in rice that have allowed the earth's 6 billion people to feed themselves far better than 3 billion were able to just four decades ago. I find it ironic if not downright immoral that those who have successfully worked to help feed the poor are regularly trashed by those who have done nothing or close to nothing to help them except hold news conferences.
Some of the NGOs leading the protest and claiming the moral high ground, have annual budgets in excess of US $100 million and have yet to do anything to help the poor or anyone else feed themselves. Other NGOs carry names with "food" or "rural" in them but have done little to help development. NGOs that demand accountability and transparency from others singularly lack it themselves. It would be interesting to see how much income was received and what expenditures were made and how many if any of these groups were able to help the poor grow more food or send more children to school. Those of us involved in development have not only had to account for every penny that we spend, we have had to demonstrate that the expenditure was cost-effective — yet we find ourselves criticized by those who have not had such constraints.
To the extent that some NGOs are able to obtain funding from aid agencies (Scandinavian aid agencies have been particularly generous to them) that might have otherwise used the money for development, one might argue that their net impact has been negative, even apart from their opposition to technology. For government funding to NGOs in 1993/1994, "the OECD estimate of US$5.7 billion is certainly an underestimate by as much as US$3 billion according to one World Bank estimate" (Hulme and Edwards 1997, 6). In a considerable understatement, the authors conclude that "channeling funds to NGOs is big business." This particularly ironic for groups that like to refer to themselves as embodiments of "civil society."
Bowers' closing diatribe had absolutely nothing to do with anything that I said. Except for a generic comment, I will refrain from responding to it, though others may wish to do so. In the strange metaphysics of Bowers et al, self-interest and gain, called profit, is inherently evil when pursued by corporations. But somehow, the inherent and incorruptible purity of groups such as Greenpeace makes the pursuit of gain noble. The same assumption of purity applies to interlocking directorates that link advocacy groups with private sector firms, including a few multi-billion dollar enterprises selling products ("organic" coffee or food) that stand to profit from this advocacy (Hulme, David and Michael Edwards, editors. NGOs, States, and Donors: Too Close for Comfort? New York: St. Martin's Press, in association with Save the Children, 1997).
For a superb analysis of the way that organizations with legitimate grievances in developing countries have to frame their message in terms acceptable to developed-country NGOs' ideology in order to obtain media attention, I refer you to the following articles by Clifford Bob:
"Beyond Transparency: Visibility and Fit in the Internationalization of Internal Conflict," in Bernard Finel and Kristin M. Lord, eds., Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency, New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2000.
"Marketing Rebellion: Insurgent Groups, International Media, and NGO Support," International Politics 38(3):311-334, September, 2001.
"Merchants of Morality," Foreign Policy 36-45, March/April, 2002.
—Thomas R. DeGregori
Department of Economics
University of Houston
June 12, 2002
After having read the article, I must agree with Dr. DeGregori that the world is better fed and has less poverty than the past.
My concern, however, is about something else: the assumption we should raise all humanity from poverty into a Western-style, Americanized type of wealth. Our culture is not aiming at the mere survival of humanity but at adopting consumer-driven, mass-marketed affluence as the "norm." I believe that unless there is a major shift in our perception of what poverty is, what a sustainable human culture is, then we will eventually have the "population bomb" described by the founders of Earth Day. Instead it will be an "economic bomb."
The world is operating as a pyramid scheme. You put in a little, and as others put in, you get a lot. Eventually, we will run out of resources, leaving all of us in poverty and starvation, perhaps jeopardizing the entire species. When any ecosystem overpopulated with one species overuses the resources for that species, extinction results.
My fear, is that in humanity's mad rush to affluence, we will pass a point of no return, where we will not be able to sustain ourselves because science will not be able to keep up with consumption. Basically, we will eventually run out of resources, and at that point — barring terraforming the moon, or travel to other planets — we will run out of options.
We must temper our individualized needs to match the ability for all humanity to share equally because if we don't, eventually the "haves" and the "have nots" will be at arms. We are setting our world culture up for an economic backlash the likes of which no one has seen.
We must find an alternative. Sustainable human culture is what Earth Day should be about, not just hunger.
—Robert Firestone Atlanta, GA
