By Dr. Thomas R. DeGregori
Posted: Tuesday, October 1, 1996
ARTICLES
Publication Date: October 1, 1996
Romantic notions about the environment and technology are harmful, for their implementation can lower quality of life and worsen the problems implementation was meant to solve.
In recent years, the ideas espoused by some environmental and conservation groups have had adverse effects on agriculture, food supplies, and human health in developing countries. The difficulties these organizations create originate in their antiscience, antitechnology worldview. They deluge us with figures on soil loss, pesticide-related deaths, and alleged failed attempts at using pesticides to reduce infestation — but their figures are too often unverifiable.
"Do-Not-Disturb" Agriculture?
"Sustainability" has become a major buzzword for the nineties and may remain so into the next century. Few people would oppose sustainable techniques — ways of using a particular resource (e.g., agricultural) so that the resource is not depleted or irrevocably damaged. Virtually no one would approve unsustainable techniques — methods that endanger human survival, as by lowering food production.
Thus, while certain groups claim a monopoly on the concept of sustainability, the appropriate question is not whether sustaining resources is desirable, but which purported sustainable techniques work.
In agriculture the intellectual position on sustainability is too often romantic and antitechnological. "Back-to-nature" enthusiasts who favor so-called organic agriculture — farming supposedly without the use of manufactured fertilizers, growth stimulants, antibiotics, or pesticides — represent an extreme of this position. Organic food buffs have corrupted and greatly diluted the meaning of the word "organic," which in organic chemistry has meant "containing or consisting of carbon compounds" for more than a century. All artificial pesticides are organic.
But knowledge of etymology, chemistry, biology, soil science, or field-crop production has never been a prerequisite for "expertise" in organic agriculture. Those who would have humankind live in harmony with nature either don't realize or can't accept the ultimate unattainability of this vague goal.
Technology is simply the tangible application of knowledge. We humans survived by adapting "natural" environments to our needs. We are the only mammals that have populated the globe without speciating. Minus technology, we would be just like other primates: confined to tropical regions and subject to extinction due to environmental change. To survive, we must "disturb" the environment, conserve resources, and continually create them. All forms of agriculture are technological, and agriculture always interferes with ecology.
Resources are made, not "born." Land, ores, petroleum, etc. — the raw stuff of the planet (indeed, of the cosmos) — are not inherently resources; they do not inherently further human purposes. The state of being a resource is a relationship mediated by science and technology between humans and aspects of the environment. We determine what is useful and how to use it. Swamps become resources when, for example, we adapt them to farming. Ores are resources when our technology can extract metals from them.
Over the past two centuries technology has been creating resources more rapidly than we have been consuming them. By every measure of price and availability, resources have become more abundant. Scorned by the romantics, science and technology are our only means of developing sustainable techniques.
A Lot of Manure
Organic agriculture started off on the wrong foot. As applied to this mode of farming, the term "organic" originally meant "without the use of artificial (synthetic or inorganic) fertilizer." However, bacteria must decompose organic (plant or animal) material before plants can absorb its inorganic components. Plants absorb and use inorganic substances from animal manure and other organic matter exactly as they do the same inorganic substances that constitute artificial fertilizers.
There are two important differences between animal manure and artificial fertilizer. First, the nutrient composition of manures is variable and does not always meet the nutritional needs of particular crops. In contrast, artificial fertilizers are designed to supplement various soils for optimal plant growth. Second, although animal manure is generally considered better for soil structure, it may have a high content of salts, and it may harbor toxic chemicals, viruses, harmful bacteria, insects, worms, or other pests.
And farmers must use manure in relatively large amounts, since it always contains less nitrogen than artificial fertilizers that contain urea. So even if manure were the better fertilizer, the quantities of manure necessary to provide plants with enough nitrogen severely limit its usefulness in feeding the world's population: Transportation costs wouldbe prohibitive. And replacing artificial-fertilizer nitrogen — which now provides more than twice as much nitrogen for agriculture worldwide than manure provides — with the nitrogen in manure would require a three- to fourfold increase in world animal production and concomitant increases in feed production. Yet many proponents of organic agriculture would have us minimize or stop eating meat, indicting cattle-raising and meat consumption for every environmental and health problem imaginable.
The environmental costs of cultivating more land for feed, converting more land to pasture, and hauling several billion tons of manure would far exceed the environmental costs of manufacturing and transporting artificial fertilizer.
Pestered by Pesticides?
The trend in modern agriculture is to use pesticides of relatively low toxicity, at levels just high enough to be effective. The alleged harmfulness of many banned agricultural chemicals to human health or to the environment has been a subject of considerable scientific debate. Before the advent of modern chemical pesticides, farmers throughout the world used various toxic substances such as arsenic salts. In a developing country, carefully using even a toxic pesticide may be justifiable: In most humid tropical regions, cultivation without insecticides and fungicides is difficult or nearly impossible for many vegetables — increased production and consumption of which have improved human health and saved lives.
And certain molds (fungi) on vegetables and grains can be hazardous even when the infestation is not visible to the naked eye. Mold toxins, or mycotoxins, are often carcinogenic and much more harmful than any pesticide. Mycotoxins accumulate, but the residues of pesticides that were applied to the young, vulnerable plant decrease around harvest, usually to undetectability.
Residents of developed countries are protected against the worst fungal infestations; people in poorer countries are not. The carcinogenic potential of the aflatoxins secreted by the fungus Aspergillus flavus, which infects especially maize (corn) and peanuts, is 100 times greater in animals than the carcinogenic potential of PCBs (industrial chemicals). Aflatoxins have brought vast misery to humans throughout history and remain causes of misery and death in developing countries. The same is true for ergotic (fungal) alkaloids such as ergonovine and ergotamine, which are commonly found in infested rye. (Pharmaceutical science has turned both of these ergotoxins into resources — particularly, medicines for migraine.)
Furthermore, if an invasive microoganism spreads into plant tissue, the plant will make and release antimicrobial toxins, some of which may be more harmful to humans than the man-made chemicals that could have protected the plant.
DDT was banned in the United States not because it had harmed humans, but because of allegations that it was harmful to wildlife. Although some insects in some areas have developed resistance to DDT or similar chlorinated hydrocarbons, often these chemicals are the best, or at least an important, weapon against the mosquitoes that transmit malaria. Thus, the human cost of attempting to preserve populations of eagles and peregrine falcons could be an increase in the incidence of malaria. Most of the roughly one and one half million people who die each year of malaria are poor or destitute African children. In 1971, Life Sciences cited the National Academy of Sciences: "It is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable."
British scientist Norman Moore was the first person to postulate, in the 1950s, that the decline in the population of eagles was due to DDT use. (Whether DDT causes thinning of eagle eggshells is uncertain.) In a 1991 issue of New Scientist, Tom Wakeford described Dr. Moore as the initiator of research that "showed how pesticides damage wildlife." However, according to Wakeford, Moore "refuses to condemn all uses of pesticides, pointing out that they have increased food production and saved millions of people from insect-borne diseases." Wakeford also wrote: "If I were living in a hut in Africa, I would rather have a trace of DDT in my body than die of malaria."
Pesticide bans and disproportionate difficulties in obtaining approval for some pesticides often lead to an increase in pesticide use. Many of the "more acceptable," so-called natural pesticides — pesticides made from plants — are often used at much higher levels than artificial pesticides. Furthermore, domestic laws to prevent the importation of produce with residues of chemicals banned in the U.S. induce growers to use pesticides that are more toxic to farm workers and more expensive.
Integrated Pest Management
Proponents of organic agriculture have portrayed integrated pest management (IPM) as their intellectual property. They incorrectly interpret IPM as "agriculture without pesticides." I have participated in IPM projects in developing countries where IPM encompassed various, primarily biological, methods — for example, crop rotation and the use of predator insects. The design of IPM in these countries was not to exclude but to minimize pesticide use.
In my opinion IPM has been grossly oversold; but in trying to meet the nutritive needs of a growing world population, no method amenable to scientific analysis should be left unexplored. High-tech American farmers are doing some of the best work with IPM. With computers, expert "systems programs," about a hundred dollars' worth of measuring instruments (barometers, rain gauges, etc.), and bug counts, American farmers can obtain valuable advice on when to apply pesticides. As for fertilizers, farmers have long been taking soil samples to determine soil nutrient needs, but today's sophisticated measuring equipment enables fine-tuning of fertilizer application. "Precision farming" decreases the need for nearly all inputs.
There are many IPM programs in developing countries. Some of these programs are successful. But low-tech IPM is labor-intensive and therefore difficult for farmers to implement, particularly those who depend on income from off-farm employment.
The Bottom Line
In the 1970s, "small-is-beautiful," "back-to-nature" types told us that we could sustain resources only if they were "renewable." Two decades later, the "nonrenewable" resources we allegedly were exhausting are generally abundant and often available at historically low real prices — while the "renewable" biological resources, such as rain forests, are in danger.
Organic agriculture does not pass the first test of sustainability: It cannot sustain the existing population of the world. Actions that undercut agronomy — the science of field-crop production — are detriments to the poor and to the environment. Such actions lead to the bringing of marginal lands into cultivation.
The sustainability of agricultural techniques is an important, valid concern, but such concerns do not legitimize technological and sociocultural regression.
Dr. DeGregori is Professor of Economics at the University of Houston.
(From Priorities Vol. 8, No. 4, 1996)
