Brian.Carnell.Com

Reading a recent newsletter at the Zero Population Growth web site, I realized this site is solidly part of the “brownlash.” For those unaware, “brownlash” is the term used by Paul and Anne Ehrlich to describe “a body of anti-science — a twisting of the findings of empirical science — to bolster a predetermined worldview and to support a political agenda.”

I know, I know — it sounds like a description of Ehrlich’s books, but Peter H. Kostmayer, Executive Director of ZPG, thinks Ehrlich has a point and as an example of the “brownlash” cites Michael Sanera and Jane Shaw’s book Facts Not Fear: A Parents Guide to Teaching Children about the Environment. For those like me who haven’t read Sanera and Shaw’s book, Kostmayer describes the chapter on population “particularly distressing” and provides the following quote from page 67 of the book as an example:

With this background, you can readily answer questions that your children may ask about food and population. For example:

Are there too many people? No. The Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’ is enormous. Human ingenuity is more than equal to the challenge of meeting the demands of a growing population.

Does population growth cause starvation? No. Food production has increased faster than world population, and this trend is likely to continue.

Is the claim that “food production has increased faster than world population” a distortion of scientific truth for political gain? In their book The World Food Outlook Donald O. Mitchell, Merlinda D. Ingco and Ronald C. Duncan provide the following chart illustrating the growth of world cereals production and population based on data from the United Nations and the United States Department of Agriculture.

World cereals consumption and population growth, 1960 to 1990 (per cent increases)

	1960-1970	1970-80	1980-90
Industrial economies
Total cereals consumption	30.8	17.1	9.5
Population	11.0	8.4	6.1
Developing economies
Total cereals consumption	42.9	46.6	26.8
Population	27.7	25.0	23.3

Mitchell, et al, along with numerous other experts on world agriculture argue world food production will continue to outpace population growth and food prices will continue to fall.

So somebody remind me — who here is twisting science to further political agendas?

In the eyes of the environmentalists the fossil fuel economy is enemy number one. But what are they going to replace fossil fuels with for generating energy? According to a recent Cato Institute report, at the moment every proposed alternative energy source has both economic and environmental drawbacks which have yet to be overcome.

The best part of Robert L. Bradley’s Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not “Green” is the saga of wind power. Once heralded as cheap and supremely clean (what could be more clean than using wind?), the technology turns out to have unexpected drawbacks that are drawing criticism from environmentalists.

Aside from the large amounts of noise they generate and the relatively high cost of energy generated, windmills turn out to be extraordinarily effective killers of birds. As Bradley writes, “Wind blades have killed thousands of birds in the United States and abroad in the last decade, including endangered species, which is a federal offense subject to criminal prosecution.” Shades of the Exxon Valdez!

Both the Sierra Club and National Audobon Society have complained about the bird killing effects of windmills and the National Audobon Society has called for a moratorium on new wind farms unless and until the problem can be solved.

Hydropower, once considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels, has also been shelved because of environmentalists concerns about the effect of dam projects on the environment. Solar energy is still extremely inefficient and generates enormous heavy metal waste products.

Looks like we’re stuck with fossil fuels unless you’re prepared for pre-industrial nirvana.

A recently published book claims much of the environmentalist rhetoric about running out of food is fundamentally flawed. The World Food Outlook is the product of two economists with the World Bank, Donald O. Mitchell and Merlinda D. Ingco, and Ronald C. Duncan of the National Centre for Development Studies at the Australian National University.

The book jackets summarizes the main points of the book this way:

The fact is that the world food situation has improved dramatically for most of the world’s consumers. Output of cereals, the world’s main food source, has increased 2.7 per cent per annum since 1950, while population has grown by about 1.9 per cent per annum. Cereal yields have increased at 2.25 per cent per annum. Not all people in the world today have adequate diets and there is no doubting the desperate circumstances of some peoples, but diets for most of the world’s consumers have improved dramatically and per capita calorie consumption in developing countries has increased by some 27 per cent since the 1960s. It should continue to improve, and food will be cheaper than it is today.

The trio also estimate that to feed future population, agricultural growth needs to achieve at least 1.4 percent annual growth (current growth is about 1.7 percent), and a growth rate of 2 percent annually would allow up to 11 percent of the world’s crop land to be returned to other uses while still maintaining adequate food security.

Occasionally I receive email telling me my position on agriculture is completely bonkers. There’s simply no way, the naysayers write, to increase crop yields in the Third World. Those people must know something the Food and Agricultural Organization doesn’t.

The FAO is currently sponsoring several food security projects throughout the world, and recently wrote up a short release about its project in Eritrea.

From 1961 to 1991 Eritrea hosted a civil war which, as the FAO puts it, “almost destroyed the country.” Working with about 140 farmers, an FAO project managed to show farmers how to use hybrid seeds, moderate amounts of fertilizer and good crop management skills to double their yields.

Eritrea is still a long way from food self-sufficiency, producing only about 40 percent of the food it actually consumes, but the solution is not to throw up our hands and say “Impossible!” but instead to do as the FAO is doing and show people in places like Eritrea how they can bring their crop yields closer to the rest of the world’s.

China’s new ruler, Jiang Zemin, may finally be placing that nation on the road of no return toward political liberalization and freedom. A Sept. 22 story in Time magazine detailed Zemin’s plans to radically alter the political and economic landscape of the world’s largest Communist nation.

Over the next few years, China will sell off all but a thousand or so of 125,000 state-owned industries. Zemin has recently also allowed a greater degree of press freedom than under his predecessor, Deng Xiaoping.

China, beset first by Mao Zedong’s program of accelerating Chinese population growth and then the draconian one child policy, may find it hard to pull back from freedom once economic power is decentralized. Although the Chinese have shown themselves more masterful at alternating reforms with repression than the leaders of the Soviet Union were, such a fundamental change may spell the death of one of the world’s most tyrannical states.

With increasing political and economic freedom, China will be far better equipped to deal with its environmental and population issues.