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  • From: paul@oneseedling.com
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?
  • Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 09:04:44 -0500

People don't tend to change the things they do until forced to either by
economic or political situations. Paul the Skeptic

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 1, 2010, at 4:27 PM, "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net> wrote:

> We know all that Paul and so what? What Borlaug did was make agriculture
> "the conversion of oil into food through the means of land" Since there was
> plenty of cheap oil that worked well but there was a price to pay...
>
> Since the start of the green revolution the world has lost an awful lot of
> soil and the nutrition in crops has dropped dramatically leading to a
> plentiful but diseased population. I have been hosting wwoofers here for a
> few years and am amazed at how weak, uncoordinated and generally incapable
> of doing work young people have become. That too should be written on
> Borlaug's slate imo.
>
> So what good has the green revolution brought us? Qualitatively a huge
> disaster but there are now almost 7 billion of us, way above what this
> planet can carry for long. Do we need another miracle to keep on getting
> more plentiful? The sixth extinction is churning away as we write and don't
> forget that the higher we climb the deeper we are going to fall.
>
> john
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
> To: <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Sent: Sunday, August 01, 2010 4:56 AM
> Subject: [Livingontheland] Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?
>
>
>
> Peak Food: Can Another Green Revolution Save Us?
> http://www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau310710.htm
> By Nicholas C. Arguimbau 31 July, 2010
>
> Norman Borlaug, widely seen as the father of the "Green Revolution," was a
> true savior. Many have considered him misguided or worse, but it is hard
> for a compassionate person to argue with what he accomplished: saving "more
> human lives than any other person in history."2 It seems to be a
> professional disease among saviors, though, that only part of their message
> is heeded. The Green Revolution, like so many technical fixes, would only
> be, as he said when he picked up his Nobel Prize, "ephemeral" if we didn't
> deal with underlying social and economic problems, in this case, population
> and poverty.
>
> Borlaug grew up in a remote corner of rural Iowa - a place with twelve-
> grade one-room schools from which most youngsters dropped out by the eighth
> grade, a place with one car, no telephones, no electricity, but the Iowa
> Corn Song ,3 proudly sung like the Star-Spangled Banner at the start of
> every school day:
>
> There was no future, other than growing corn, but "Norm Boy's" grandfather
> had another vision, and inculcated the boy with a determination to obtain a
> higher education. He arrived at the University of Minnesota at age 20, "as
> a student athlete [whose] ability to do university work was questioned" 4
> but left years later clutching a Ph.D in plant pathology,.
>
> Assigned during World War II to Dupont, where he helped to develop DDT as
> part of the war effort, Borlaug was offered the sky, but given the choice
> between Dupont and sub-subsistence science for sub-subsistence Mexican
> farmers, he chose the. latter, working. with the Rockefeller Foundation, in
> a project to stave off a looming food crisis in overpopulated Mexico.5
>
> The project goal was to breed strains of wheat that could withstand adverse
> climates, survive wheat's fungal diseases, and produce prodigiously on
> dwarf plants, then convince tradition-bound farmers to adopt forthwith the
> new hybrids and the technology that accompanied them.. It was a race
> against time, and an extraordinarily demanding task in the pre-DNA era.
> Borlaug set up field
>
> -1-
>
> operations in two locations with disparate climates and growing seasons so
> he could have plants accustomed to multiple climates, and could grow two
> generations of seedlings each year.
>
> Borlaug shortly achieved his goal, and Mexico's food crisis was over in a
> decade. On to Asia, where the same thing was happening: overpopulation,
> courtesy of modern medicine.. India was home to some of the poorest people
> in the world. Famine was widely forecast for the mid-seventies. It was the
> era of Ehrlich's Population Bomb. Stanford professor Ehrlich was an icon
> for the rising environmental movement, but overnight, stubborn farm boy
> Borlaug appeared to prove him wrong. In a few short years, the Green
> Revolution turned a land of undernourished millions into the second largest
> wheat producer in the world. Borlaug became the hero of millions of
> peasants, and also of those who spoke for unlimited growth, and in the next
> twenty years The Population Bomb disappeared from the environmentalist
> lexicon, leaving the population boom unquestioned.
>
> The Green Revolution, which was to go on producing wonder strains for other
> crops and other countries, had three central parts. The other two were
> irrigation and chemical fertilizer. These changed agriculture
> fundamentally, from a primarily solar-energy craft dependent upon local
> weather and soil conditions, to a fossil-fuel technology designed to force
> the land to produce mightily regardless of its natural limitations.
> Borlaug, summarizing in his Nobel lecture, warned that the new hybrids had
> not resulted in major yield improvements without both irrigation and "a
> strong responsiveness and high efficiency in the use of heavy doses of
> fertilizers."6 Plentiful water, plentiful chemical fertilizer - that's the
> secret to how in the last half century India - and California - turned arid
> lands almost instantly into wildly productive garden baskets. It may not be
> a sustainable solution, but at the time, the world needed a quick fix.
>
> In his Nobel lecture, Borlaug talked proudly about how the new practices
> had given near-starving subsistence farmers surpluses they could sell, the
> money to buy oil-driven water pumps and tractors, and the influence to
> insist upon doors opening to the broader world. If you'll permit me a broad
> brush, the Green Revolution had doubled and tripled grain production for
> multi-millions who had been on the brink of starvation, but turned locally
> self-sustaining agriculture into hydroponics. And it turned subsistence
> farmers, dependent on the whims of the soil, sun and rain, into small-time
> contractors dependent on the whims of the discount rate, the commodities
> markets and the petrochemical industry.
>
> It weakened their umbilical cord to Mother Earth, and eased a process in
> which millions would find themselves drawn to seek their fortunes in the
> cities, providing cheap labor to run the Indochinese economic machine. But
> those were events far in the future when Borlaug performed his magic, and
> it's hard to quibble when several hundred million people are about to die
> of starvation..
>
> The agricultural end of food production uses staggering amounts of water.
> As an illustration, here's the author's recipe for a quarter-pound
> cheeseburger:
>
> Ingredient /Water used in production
>
> Lettuce (1/4 cup)..............................0.8 gal
> Bun (2 bread slices equiv) .......................... 22.0 gal
> Tomato (1 oz paste equiv) ......................... 6.1 gal
> Cheese (1 oz.)............................................. 58.3 gal
> Ground beef (4 oz) ......................................641.2 gal
>
> TOTAL....................................... 728.4 gal
>
> 8-oz. Glass of milk........................... 50.0 gal 7
>
> The reason water consumption for meat and dairy products is so much higher
> than for vegetables and grain, is that, very approximately, it takes two
> pounds of grain to produce a pound of chicken, five pounds to produce a
> pound of pork, and ten pounds to produce a pound of beef.
>
> The Green Revolution doubled the world's irrigated acreage from 346 million
> acres to 690 million acres, and increased by a factor of nearly five its
> consumption of chemical fertilizer .8 Where does all the irrigation water
> come from? Wells, largely; as the World Bank has pointed out, groundwater
> comprises 97% of the world's accessible freshwater reserves.9
>
> Wells are a classic case of Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" 10 -
> if the aquifer is shared by multiple individuals or multiple villages and
> there are no rules on how much anyone can use, then the users are
> individually, although not collectively, better off if they use as much as
> they want until the wells all run dry. So unless everyone follows the
> Golden Rule or there is an elaborate legal "groundwater management plan,"
> controlling how much everyone gets, the wells DO run dry. The first thing
> you need to begin fair and sustainable allocation of groundwater supplies
> is records of pumping from wells. They don't exist. And farmers everywhere,
> from the one-acre plots of North China to the 1000-acre ranches of
> California, rebel against interference with their freedom. Even if there
> were the will and the way to adopt rational groundwater management programs
> around the world, the task would take many decades to accomplish - unless
> another farm-boy-savior-scientist comes down from the sky, to whom the
> farmers and bureaucrats can relate.
>
> So where does that leave us? The United States is in a relatively good
> position because only one fifth of its grain production comes from
> irrigated land, but the figure is three fifths in India and four fifths in
> China.11 The world-wide picture is bleak:
>
> * The annual overdraft from the U.S. Ogallala Aquifer, producing cattle and
> grain in quantity, is said to be about equal to total yearly flow of the
> Colorado River.12 It was declared by the USDA over a decade ago to be "near
> depletion," with Texas having already lost 1.4 million acres of irrigated
> land and the irrigated land supported by the aquifer expected to be reduced
> 50% by2030, an acreage accounting for roughly 10% of US grain production.
>
> * In China, the world's greatest grain producer,13 pumping from a fossil
> aquifer in the North China Plain is relied upon to produce half the
> nation's wheat and a third of its corn, approximately 40 million tons per
> year or 10% of the nation's grain production; 14.
>
> * Northern India is also overdrawing its groundwater supplies to maintain
> grain production. Although the overdraft is apparently much less severe
> than in China or the United States, nonetheless, if the current level of
> unsustainable groundwater overdraft continues, government experts have
> concluded that "India could face severe water shortages."15
>
> * Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, reports that fifteen
> nations containing half the world's population, rely on groundwater
> overdraft for irrigation.16
>
> These practices cannot go on for long, and in this writer's opinion, water
> development and conservation are unlikely to come to the rescue. large
> surface reservoirs and desalinization are unlikely to save the day, because
> these projects do not ordinarily pay for themselves and for the foreseeable
> future governments are unlikely to be in a position to subsidize
> multi-billion-dollar investments in concrete and steel to feed the poor. As
> for water use efficiency, it might theoretically permit savings of anywhere
> from 10-40%, but implementation and enforcement have all the hurdles of
> groundwater management plans, plus the additional hurdle that tens of
> millions of farmers were taught decades ago that plentiful water was
> essential to high yields. Changes may occur, but they will most likely be
> incremental and slow. So dropping grain production appears
> inevitable in the US and China, and likely in much of the rest of the
> world, in the absence of major increases in acreage and/or yield per acre.
>
> As for increased acreage, there is general agreement that the acreages have
> been at best essentially "flat" for decades17 and in any event it is hard
> to envision major investments being made in land development to feed the
> undernourished and virtually destitute bottom seventh of our population
> when the same land could be used, if at all, to produce beef or biofuels
> for the top seventh.
>
> Yields? They are still increasing at approximately 1% per year, not enough
> to keep up with population increase; in fact, world per capita grain
> production peaked in 1986.18 Steady 1% per year yield increases cannot, of
> course, solve the problem of exhaustion of fossil aquifers, likely to occur
> close to the same time as exhaustion of the oil supply. There are disputes
> as to whether or how long genetic tinkering can continue to improve yields.
> Eventually we have to hit the maximum efficiency at which photosynthesis
> can occur, but there are radically different educated views as to how close
> we are.19
>
> In Lester Brown's view, "Unless population growth can be slowed quickly,
> there may not be a humane solution to the emerging world water shortage."20
> The statistics appear to show that he should have said population growth
> must be "reversed quickly," rather than merely "slowed quickly."
>
> So when the aquifers run dry, a return to the days when agriculture was
> limited to natural precipitation, is inevitable. This means, on top of the
> present inability of yield increases to keep up with population increases,
> a relatively abrupt loss of at least 10% of production.
>
> What about the fertilizer? That comes from mining operations, too. That is
> literally true of phosphorus, although it wasn't before we came along.
> There are more phosphorus-rich bones walking the face of the earth than
> ever before in geological history; humanity is hoofing it around with 5
> billion kg or 11 billion pounds of phosphorus ,21 which comes from mines,22
> - NONE of it recycled. This has happened only since half of us moved to the
> cities, taking our personal wastes with us; petrochemical fertilizers
> replaced natural ones; and community sewers were invented. Mama Nature
> can't afford this kind of progress for long.
>
> In fact, the world phosphorus reserves are expected to be depleted within
> 25 to 70 years, depending upon where you are. Humanity will apparently go
> extinct for lack of phosphorus within a century unless we resume
> recycling,.23 This writer is unaware of any government plans anywhere, to
> do so.
>
> And phosphorus isn't the perceived serious problem. Nitrogen is. We have a
> reasonable amount of nitrogen in the air for the present, but the nitrogen
> has to be processed into ammonium nitrate or something comparable with a
> high energy input, and the starting material is natural gas, 5 % of which
> globally is used for production of nitrogen fertilizers.24 There are
> presently no alternatives. Natural gas accounts for 90% of the cost of
> nitrogen fertilizer, so the cost of the latter is pretty much proportional
> to the cost of the former.25 When the petroleum supply starts to go,
> fertilizer prices will spiral upward.
>
> Of course nitrogen fertilizer can also be produced by nitrogen-fixing
> legumes, but that necessitates alternating between nitrogen-fixers and
> market crops. In his Nobel lecture Borlaug spoke of a dream of
> nitrogen-fixing grains being introduced in 1990 that would free peasant
> farmers from the need to purchase chemical fertilizers, but then, he said,
> he would wake up, disillusioned. It was only a dream. 35 years and 3
> billion more people later, he would have to tell the New York Times, "This
> is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people. Without chemical
> fertilizer, forget it. The game is over."26
>
> So at present, grain yield is not keeping up with the population, and
> things will get worse as fertilizer and water become expensive and scarce.
> Will a large part of the population die when they are curtailed? Not
> necessarily, because of how we allocate the use of the grain we produce.
>
> To see the whole picture, we need to understand a little about the grain
> market, which is the dominant food market.. There are at this time three
> competing demands for the commodity: food (i.e. direct consumption by
> people), fodder, and fuel. Before fuel became part of the mix, the division
> between food and fodder was 60:40, with the "fodder" component capable if
> used as food, of providing the caloric needs of 3.5 billion people.27 But
> we are squandering the 40% "cushion."
>
> The mix in 2008 was said by Worldwatch Institute to be 47% food, 35%
> fodder, 18% fuel. The 18% figure may not be a 2010 reality, but no one
> claims less than 9%, and use of grain fo




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