Go Back to top of Chapter 5--Meeting Essential Human Needs: Energy

Table of Contents

V -- Meeting Human Needs, Con't.

Food

      Besides water, food is the single most important resource for humanity. Our very existence depends on it. Food is renewable, but it is a scarce in many regions of the world. That does not mean, however, that the world is running out of food. The Population Bomb, written in 1967 by Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, predicted massive starvation in the 1970s and 1980s because of overpopulation. However, that starvation never happened because of what is known as the Green Revolution — the application of genetic improvement, fertilization and pesticides more than doubled the yield of many food crops.

Since the Green Revolution in the early 1960s, the world’s cereal (grain) production has increased by 138 percent: from 877 million metric tons per year to 2086 million tons in 2001!²⁴ (See graphs) Yield increased by 171 per­cent, from 1.31 to 3.11 metric tons per hectare. During the same time period, total prod­uction for the U.S. nearly doubled above its already high levels, from 164 metric tons/per hectare in 1961 to 325 in 2001.  While total cereal production was much less in the U.S. than the world, yield was much higher, rising from 2.52 to 5.86 metric tons per hectare, an increase of 134 percent. Similar gains were experienced in the European Union.

      Developing nations have had the greatest gain in total production as they ap­plied agriculture tech­nology developed in the West, prim­ar­ily from the U.S. Many develop­ing nations have reaped the benefits of the Green Revol­u­tion without the high research costs of doing so. Although their absolute yields per hect­are have not increased as much as the U.S. (many nat­ions still lag behind in apply­ing the technology), the rough­ly 170 percent gain in yield has resulted in a 140 percent gain in total production.

      During the same 40 year period, the land area upon which the world grew these ever-larger cereal crops increased only slightly by 3.5 percent to 671 million hect­ares. Conversely, the area on which the U.S. grew its cereals actually declined by 15 percent, from 65 to 55.3 million hectares. Increased self-suffic­iency in developing nations, plus unfavorable international trade agreements work against many U.S. farmers, thereby limiting export opportunities, which is both bad and good. Because the U.S. is producing more food than it can consume or export, its much higher yield has allowed marginal land to be take out of prod­uction. Much of this land has been returned to wildlife habitat. In other words, the Green Revolution has permitted marginal land to revert back to forests, savannah, and grasslands, which greatly helps restore habitat to species that might otherwise become endangered.

      Contrary to popular perceptions, the U.S. free market­place has made it possible for many developing nations to feed themselves. The U.S. has also shown how greater yields can help biodiversity, and therefore sustain­ability, by converting marginal farm­land back to a more natural condition. Additionally, while the U.S. is criticized for having only five percent of the world’s population yet consuming 25 percent of the world’s oil production, this same 5 percent produces 15 percent of the world’s food. This is down from 19 percent 30 years ago, before the U.S. helped give the world the tech­nology for the Green Revolution.

    Many environmental organizations claim that the benefits from the Green Revolution are fading, and in some cases actually declining.²⁵ These claims are false and misleading. 

      While per capita grain production has leveled off globally, it has done so for a number of reasons unrelated to the ability to grow more food.  U.S. and EU markets are near saturation. They are growing all the food their own citizens can eat and exports are declining as developing nations are producing more of their own food. Additionally, the early 1990s were bad for global grain production because the controlled societies of the Soviet Union collapsed, causing a drop in their production of almost 40 percent – from supplying almost 17 percent of the worlds grain to less than 10 percent.²⁶

      At the same time the EU restructured its Common Agricultural Policy to reduce subsidies that cause overproduction, resulting in a 5% decline in total production as the number of hectares farmed declined by 15 percent. While global per capita cereal production has declined slightly, per capita production has continued to increase for developing nations. “Thus,” as Lomborg states, “only showing the global decline merely masks the fact that ever more people in the developing world get more and more food.”²⁷ The U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization specifically states that the decline in global cereal production per capita is “no cause for general alarm.”²⁸

      Although the leveling off of food production per capita is easily explained, environmentalist skeptics still predict food supply is inadequate for the earth’s growing human population. Again, however, this is a gross distortion of the facts. Although hunger and starvation still occur in various parts of the world, these problems are no longer linked to insufficient food production. More than enough food has been produced for decades to feed the entire world. However, wars, corrupt governments, poor transportation systems, lack of private property rights, or policies of deliberately starving political opponents prevent food from being delivered to places where it is needed. In other cases, food is available but people do not have the money to pay for it.

      In summary, studies from FAO, USDA and others all show that there is no imminent agricultural crisis or scarcity of food. Everything points to cheaper, more plentiful food, especially if we continue to increase biotechnology developments. All in all, never has the future for mankind and the earth’s environment been brighter. The key to unlocking this bright future is, as always, individual freedom, property rights, the curtailing of corruption, and free markets. The command and control governance presently being planned for the world with Agenda 21 and the very misleading term, sustainable development, invites abuse and corruption and is unlikely to attain these benefits. In fact, it is highly probable that such governance will cause a deterioration in the condition of mankind. The choice is ours.

Principles

      Overall the energy outlook for the U.S. and the world is very bright. While there is only a 40 year supply of oil, 60 year supply of natural gas and a 230 year supply of coal from known reserves that are economically available today, new supplies of oil are being found all the time. Food supplies have been rapidly increasing since the 1960s, especially in the developing world where it is needed the most. There is no food crisis.

Economically available known supplies of oil and gas keep increasing faster than oil is being used. In 1939 and again in 1951 there was only a 13 year supply of oil. Today, it is 40 years.

With current technology the supply of oil and natural gas could be increased 50 percent if oil prices increased to $30 per barrel. The more easily extracted oil and gas would be economically available with only a small increase in oil price.

With more efficient technology or at oil prices above $40 per barrel, a 5,000 year supply of shale oil starts to become available. It is probable that once this source becomes commercial, gains in efficiency will be made to bring the price down.

There is a 230 year supply of economically available coal. Coal could be an economically cheap source of electricity for a long time to come.

At current rates of use nuclear power, there is enough U-235 to last for 100 years, thought this source of power is about twice as expensive as fossil fuel due to excessive regulations and political delays. Problems with safety and waste (long-term storage) have been technologically overcome. The biggest problem is public perception and pressure group politics.

The use of U-238 in breeder reactors provides a 14,000 year supply, but carries a high risk of the generated plutonium being used in nuclear bombs. As yet there is no satisfactory way to control the increasing amounts of plutonium created in the U-235/U-238 process to prevent it from being used in nuclear weapons.

Renewable energy supplies have too many insurmountable problems to be much more than a niche supplier of energy for the foreseeable future. All forms of this energy are expensive, but rapidly becoming cheaper. Their use may never amount to a significant source of energy without major breakthroughs in technology that reduce their costs, reliability problems, and environmental impacts on land and wildlife. Serious, unavoidable limitations exist for hydro, biomass, geothermal, wind and solar power that will confine their use to areas where the source of energy is uniquely high.

Creativity and initiative must be encouraged to exploit the world’s energy supplies. To do this, freedom and a free market system must be encouraged, not discouraged by command and control governance. Command and control governance results in top-heavy bureaucracy that stifles creativity and initiative in a quagmire of bureaucratic red tape. Sustainable development, as envisioned by the international community in Agenda 21, is attempting to implement this very type of governance. Rather than helping humanity and the environment, it is far more likely to repress people and harm the environment, and is simply not sustainable.

World cereal (grain) production and yield have more than doubled since the start of the Green Revolution in the early 1960s. This rapidly increasing food production revealed that forecasts of global starvation were scare tactics with no basis in science.

The developing nations have benefited greatly from technology transfer from the West and are gradually become food self-sufficient. By borrowing Western technology, they have avoided the very expensive research and development of this ongoing technological development.

Although the U.S. uses 25 percent of the world’s oil production and has only 5 percent of the world’s population, it produces 15 percent of world’s food production and much of the “green” technology that feeds the world today. Without the freedom, property rights and free markets found in the U.S., the innovation and initiative would not have existed to create the Green Revolution that has prevented global starvation.

Yield per acre for the developing nations is still less than half of what is common in the Western developed nations. There is still plenty of opportunity to produce more food in the developing nations.

The biggest obstacles to greater yields in the developing nations are poverty, war, corruption, restrictive societies that stifle creativity and initiative, and an absence of private property rights and legal institutions that enable and encourage entrepreneurship. Yet Agenda 21 proposes a controlled society, exactly the opposite of what is needed.

The future is bright, but freedom, private property rights and free enterprise are the only mechanisms that will guarantee that future.

Policy Recommendations

1.        In the United States, turn the power to enforce regulations from the federal agencies to the states. Bureaucratic abuses and quagmires become more prevalent the further they are removed from the people. Regulations are necessary, but regulators need to be accountable to the people they regulate.

2.       An international environmental regulatory body should NOT be established. For the reason above.

3.       In addition to facilitating investments by international oil and agriculture companies, laws should focus more on encouraging risk-taking on the part of smaller entrepreneurs. International treaties and federal laws must be designed to help both large and small businesses secure property rights for collateral and production, as well as expand in the area of research and development.

4.       National and international laws and treaties must recognize broad property rights. Farmers around the world, including the United States, must be granted strong property rights to provide political stability to farmers so that their high-risk investment will not be jeopardized by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

Notes and Citations