WASHINGTON -- Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club,
has endorsed high-yield agriculture, including bio-engineered crops,
because high farm yields will help save wildlife habitat and
wild species. Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues
has researched and advocated this agricultural production technique
to help preserve the world's environment. 
In a Dec. 21, 1998, letter to
the editor of Philanthropy magazine, Pope wrote:"I strongly endorse
[Dennis Avery's] call for a renewed commitment to governmental and
philanthropic funding of agricultural research, including research
into conventionally bred or bio-engineered new varieties of crops.
A massive increase in such research is, as Avery argues,
absolutely critical. Only then can the promise of high-tech breeding
be combined with the social and environmental needs of the world."Pope was responding to a
Philanthropy article by Dennis Avery, director of the Center for
Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute, titled:
"Feeding Our Faces: Can Private Philanthropy Save the Planet Again?"Avery's article notes that
the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations financed the first
plant-breeding stations for the Third World, and launched the
Green Revolution of the 1960s. This not only saved more than one
billion people from starvation, but the countries which have
maintained the highest yield gains have also lowered their birth
rates most rapidly. Avery cited projections that the world population
is likely to peak at 8-8.5 billion people, about 2035. Avery's article warned, however,
that the world's farm demand will probably triple from today, because
many more people are rapidly gaining the affluence to demand more
resource-costly commodities such as meat, milk, fruits and cotton.
There is no global trend toward vegetarian diets; instead, we are in
the midst of the biggest surge in meat and milk demand the world has
ever seen. The world's increasingly
affluent population may also keep an additional two billion cats
and dogs as companion animals, for which they will also demand
high quality diets. Pope agreed with Avery
that the world must sharply increase the yields on the world's
existing farmlands, or risk losing millions of square miles of
wildlands and hundreds of thousands of wildlife species to
low-yield crops and livestock. Pope's letter concluded:"We have, unfortunately,
passed the point in human history where we can adopt any single
fix for our problems; we will need to combine social changes such
as women's education with family planning to bring down
fertility; publicly accountable and oriented research into better
plant varieties with a reduction of excessive reliance on chemical
inputs to increase food production in an environmentally sustainable
way, and creative strategies to change farming practices in ways
that will accommodate biological diversity alongside food and fiber
production." Avery welcomed Pope's
support for more public investment in sustainable high-yield
agriculture. The Center for Global Food
Issues, which serves as Hudson Institute's agricultural and environmental
policy research group, offers a comprehensive perspective on future
world food needs, hunger prevention, agricultural technology,
environmental sustainability and natural resource conservation. Dennis Avery is the author of
Saving
the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph
of High-Yield Farming (use this link to view
description of this book and/or order it from amazon.com).
Comment from reader
of Dennis Avery's
Saving
the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph
of High-Yield Farming: A reader from Wyoming, March 26, 1999
Finally someone really gets what farming is all about. Avery's explaination of the green crusade being promoted by "purists" who never made a living off the land is entirely correct. Much of this as he says is based on a religious reverence for land that is not based on experience and an indifference to science. As I have heard before,"Full bellys mean empty heads."