BETTING ON THE FARM

14 | September 1996 Illinois Issues

Review by Harold Henderson
Illustration by William Crook Jr.

The Last Harvest: The Genetic Gamble That Threatens to Destroy American Agriculture by Paul Raeburn, 1995, Simon & Schuster.

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the [near future] the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."

These words were false when Paul Ehrlich wrote them in The Population Bomb in 1968. If possible, they're even more false today.

Food is now cheaper worldwide than it was 30 years ago; there is more food, and more food per person; and the one serious famine in that time (Ethiopia in the 1980s) was due to Communist mismanagement, not population pressure. Since 1900, the world average life expectancy at birth has risen from 30 to 64 years.

Demographer Nicholas Eberstadt summarizes the evidence in his contribution to the book The True State of the Planet: "The global population boom has coincided with an explosion of health, and productivity, around the world. On average, the human population today lives longer, eats better, produces more, and consumes more than at any other time in the past."

This good news does not deter other advocates from echoing Ehrlich's strangely popular claim that everything is about to change for the worse.

Recently, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute and Associated Press reporter Paul Raeburn have each published arguments that food disaster lurks around the corner. Despite the doomsayers' poor record at predicting the future — and their even poorer record at acknowledging their failure — we should pay attention to their work. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

This time around, the potential villain is prosperity itself, not just "overpopulation." In The Last Harvest: The Genetic Gamble That Threatens to Destroy American Agriculture, Paul Raeburn explains that modern agriculture depends too much on too few plant varieties; that its spread is crowding out local farmer-bred "landraces" and their wild kin needed to improve current commercial breeds; and that governments and seed companies are not doing enough to save the varieties thus endangered.

Raeburn has a good point. A field, or a county, or a state planted in a single variety of corn is obviously more vulnerable to a new disease or pest than one with 20 or 50 varieties. And once that favored variety is attacked, our chances of breeding a resistant variety are better the more genetic resources are available.

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This is a strong special case of the general argument that we should save as many endangered species as possible, because they may prove useful some day. But Raeburn cannot stop himself from pouring ever more bathwater on the baby. Having found a problem, he revels in its catastrophic possibilities instead of looking for solutions.

A preview of Raeburn's promised crop disaster happened in 1970. A fungus from the Philippine Islands spread through the Southeast, destroying 15 percent of the U.S. corn crop and costing farmers $1 billion. Only dry September weather in the rest of the Corn Belt kept it from spreading farther.

In 1971, weather again held the fungus in check, and by the 1972 growing season breeders had been able to develop blight-resistant strains.

"The key lesson of 1970," warned the National Academy of Sciences afterwards, "is that genetic uniformity is the basis of vulnerability to epidemics." In 1972, just six varieties of corn were being used to grow 71 percent of the U.S. corn crop. By 1980, those six varieties comprised only 43 percent of the crop — an apparent gain in diversity and safety on which Raeburn does not comment.

Likewise, Raeburn puts the most negative possible spin on a study of 138 commercial varieties of hybrid corn by Pioneer seed company geneticist Stephen Smith. Smith's report appeared in the 1980s, and Raeburn says it "confirmed the worst suspicions." Raeburn summarizes: "Fifty-six percent of them [i.e., 77 of the 138 varieties] were genetically distinct from one another. But the remainder — nearly half of the varieties Smith examined — fell into only seven genetic groups. Within each group, the different varieties were nearly identical. U.S. corn crops were heavily dependent on only four inbred lines, Smith found. Farmers who try to reduce their risks by planting different varieties may be planting essentially the same thing, under different names. They have no way of knowing."

"Worst suspicions"? I don't think so. If you look beneath Raeburn's slanted presentation, Smith found that 138 commercial corn varieties fall into 84 different genetic groups! Farmers don't have enough label information (because seed companies want to keep pedigrees secret), but if they did they could easily hedge their bets or switch varieties as needed.

Maybe the seed companies should form a cooperative labeling committee? But such a recommendation wouldn't sell books, nor would it help remake American agriculture into the urban journalist's idyll of small farms growing local varieties for local markets.

Corn is by no means the only crop that has drifted toward a dangerous genetic uniformity. Only six varieties of potatoes, for instance, are grown in the United States — and Raeburn reports that the variety favored for McDonald's french fries, the Russet Burbank, has recently been suffering from a new strain of the fungus that caused the 19th-century Irish potato famine. In one Wisconsin warehouse, a 20-foot-high pile of spuds harvested in September 1994 reportedly dropped five feet in a matter of days, as the blight turned the tubers into "a putrid, black mushy syrup."

But American potato farmers proved unexpectedly resilient: "Because of bountiful harvests in other states, the national potato crop was up 7 percent over that of the previous year. The problems in New York, Wisconsin, Maine and a few other states were easy to ignore."

Are we bad citizens to leave the potato blight off our worry budget?

It's tough on the farmers, of course, but McDonald's could always switch to one of the other five varieties while potato breeders scramble to produce a resistant Russet. Or McDonald's could promote onion rings for a while instead.

This illustrates a weakness in Raeburn's apocalyptic vision: The disaster he fears would affect only one crop. There are others — quite a few others, actually. Environmental writers Robert and Christine Prescott-Allen have found that "human diets rely heavily on 103 species of plants, not the seven to 30 species suggested in previous studies." Raeburn presents this as bad news — another 73 to 96 species whose wild varieties must be conserved — but surely it's good news, too. The broader the species base we eat from, the less severe the result of an epidemic in any one.

"The world's last harvest may be decades or even centuries away. Or it may never occur," writes Raeburn with a rhetoric unlikely to reassure.

"Agriculture is probably not going to collapse this year or next or the year after that. But with the precarious conditions associated with genetic uniformity, it could. It is a gamble as unpredictable as the wheels of a slot machine."

Change your ways or suffer the apocalypse! What must we do to be saved?

Quite a lot, it turns out. "Biological diversity within a species ... is what interests plant breeders. Corn is not going to become extinct, but thousands of varieties of corn and its wild relatives are at risk. The genes needed to combat the next corn epidemic might be found in only a handful of those thousands of varieties. Even within a single variety there are genetic differences between one individual plant or seed and the next."

Evidently, our best chance to avoid a crop doomsday would be to save every single plant that is related to the 103 species we eat. But that is obviously impossible. So how many should we save? Habitat preservation and seed banking insure us against an unlikely but large disaster. It is insurance we need — but how much of it should we buy? More than we have? OK, but how much?

Nowhere does Raeburn evince any interest in (or awareness of) this question. It's not an easy question, nor can it be resolved "scientifically" — insurance is a matter of judgment.

Each of us faces the same imponderable in real life: I can buy enough life insurance to make my family rich when I die, or I can provide for them now — but not both. It is not helpful to berate myself for not having bought the maximum. Nor is it helpful to imply that we must spend whatever it takes to preserve every single plant variety, without weighing this problem against others and against available resources.

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We can't have everything, and often we have to give up one good thing for another. Asking the insurance question highlights this fact, and distinguishes the realist from the sentimentalist. Raeburn may work for a hard-boiled news organization, and he did put a lot of reporting into The Last Harvest, but his book is as sentimental in concept as any bodice-ripper.

The 1990s is a time in which eco-fundamentalists can deliver frantic and ill-reasoned sermons and still remain in the pulpit.

Prosperity in China is the bad news for Lester Brown. The Chinese, he writes in a World Watch magazine article (later expanded into the book, Who Will Feed China? Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet) are eating better, living in larger houses, building more factories and drinking more beer. (They now consume almost as much pork per capita as Americans do.) Brown believes this is a disaster in the making — not because it confounds past environmentalist predictions, but because all these things demand more land or more water or both, and China doesn't have any more. And when a country of 1.2 billion seeks to buy grain on the world market, "its food scarcity will become the world's scarcity ... driving world grain prices far above familiar levels."

All this would be more believable if Brown had not taken the 1974 OPEC oil embargo for the end of fossil fuels. (Oil supplies now stand at record highs.) But still, Brown's writing is laced with authoritative-sounding facts and figures about the world's largest country. Surely he must be on to something?

Not likely. As Vaclav Smil, author of China's Environmental Crisis, explains in The New York Review of Books, Brown neglects to mention the many ways China has to improve its food production. Its crop yields are overstated (and thus have more room to rise) because it has at least 25 percent more land in cultivation than it officially acknowledges. Its use of irrigation water is only 35 percent efficient. Its pigs and chickens take two or three times as long to reach slaughter weight as do those in the United States. It wastes about 30 percent of the food it does harvest.

Brown and Raeburn both assume that farmers (in China and the United States) cannot expect much help from plant breeders or other agro-technology. On this point they're wrong two ways. Writing in The True State of the Planet, Dennis Avery (a former State Department agricultural analyst now with the Hudson Institute) lists improvements newly available. Among them are a rice variety with a 25 percent higher yield potential and a tilapia that grows 60 percent faster than existing fish-farm stock. Other improvements lie on the horizon, claims Avery, such as genetically engineering a natural pesticide into corn to combat the corn borer.

But let's suppose Brown is right about China and that Avery is mistaken about every item on his list. If so, when China comes to market, world grain prices will indeed rise. What happens when the price of anything goes up? In the short run, some people use less, or economize elsewhere, or (in this case) eat lower on the food chain. In the slightly longer run, farmers and tinkerers everywhere see a chance to make money, if only they can find a way to produce more, or turn up a good substitute. In time one or more of them succeeds, and everyone is better off.

Capitalism has long harnessed human ingenuity in this way. The process is normal and not mysterious (unless you feel it is wicked to get rich by selling what people want). It's what made petroleum worth digging for in the 1850s, when whale-oil prices went over $137 a barrel (far higher than oil is today). It's why this "finite" planet continues to be able to support more people at a higher level. In fact, the more entrepreneurs there are, the sooner one of them is likely to hit on a workable solution — provided that (1) we have saved a prudently wide selection of genetic material for them to work on (Raeburn's point), and (2) we have left a prudently wide scope of action for them in the market.

Ironically, Lester Brown's latest prediction could come true, and he still wouldn't get the disaster he's been foreseeing for so long.

Back in the 1970s, I used to attend Sunday school and church with people who believed that the Second Coming was at hand. It cut no ice with them that the end of the world had often been predicted in the past. (They denied it, but it seemed to me that this belief added a certain zest to their lives.)

Most educated people in the Christian tradition today have trouble believing in a literal Second Coming. But they seem just as addicted to apocalypse as my former fellow worshippers. Human beings have increased the earth's "carrying capacity" many times over — beginning with the invention of arrowheads and agriculture. But these otherwise well-educated people insist that humans are like deer fenced on a farm, able only to eat and breed until the browse runs out and we all starve.

Is that too harsh on today's opinion-makers? I wish. The Population Bomb was a best-seller. Its unrepentant author remains a respected media source. The "nature" section in every bookstore overflows with proclamations of eco-apocalypse by credulous journalists (not to mention a credulous vice president). The good books on this subject — Michael Pollan's Second Nature, Gregg Easterbrook's magisterial A Moment on the Earth, Stephen Budiansky's Nature's Keepers — are not so easy to find.

Eventually I quit going to that church. It was too painful to spend every Sunday arguing with otherwise fine people whose cockeyed world view was impermeable to reason. It's not so easy to quit attending the 1990s, a time in which eco-fundamentalists like Brown and Raeburn can deliver one frantic, ill-reasoned sermon after another, and still remain in the pulpit.

Harold Henderson is a writer for the Chicago Reader. He has written previously on the environment for Illinois Issues.

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