John Ikerd University of Missouri
The following was prepared in response to a request by
Marjorie Bender of the Carolina Food Stewardship Association
for an assessment of Dennis Avery's views concerning
Sustainable Agriculture. Since Dennis Avery's views have
been widely shared on the sustainable agriculture e-mail
network, I will share my views with others on the network as
well.
I have not read Dennis Avery's new book which tells how we
can make the planet safe for people and wildlife in the
twenty- first century through "high-yield" farming. I have
read the press releases promoting the book which sound
pretty much like the things Mr. Avery has been saying around
the country for the past couple of years. I was on a panel
with Mr. Avery in Louisville, KY in 1993 at the follow-up to
the Rio Earth Summit and have read a briefing paper and
several articles in the Hudson Institute newsletters related
to this topic.
First, Mr. Avery treats "organic farming" and "sustainable
agriculture" as synonymous terms. He refers to
"sustainable" as a euphemism for "organic." He states,
without any credible supporting evidence: "the best yields
on field crops grown using organic methods are roughly half
those of mainstream high-yield farms." He considers organic
farmers who attain yields equal-to- or-higher than their
high-input neighbors to aberrations rather than examples of
what can be achieved even with today's knowledge of organic
farming methods. He further assumes that current organic
methods represents the ultimate productivity possible with
this approach to farming. He seems to have a blind faith in
the ability of high-input farming methods to expand
production, almost without limit, but will not concede that
organic farming could ever be any more productive than it is
today. In Avery's world, nature appears to be something to
be controlled and conquered by mankind rather than something
to be understood and nurtured for our mutual benefit.
Avery dismisses all definitions of sustainable agriculture
that do not conform to his assumption that sustainable
farming means "low-yield" farming. Nearly all of the many
credible definitions of sustainable agriculture include
statements such as: "a sustainable agriculture must be
productive, must provide for the food and fiber needs of
society, must meet the needs of the current generation, must
be economically viable and socially just, or must be capable
of maintaining its productivity and value to human society."
All of the many widely used definitions of sustainable
agriculture include such preconditions for sustainability.
Avery chooses to ignore all such statements. He infers that
sustainable agriculture advocates would consider starvation
of half the human population to be acceptable strategy for
sustainability. Thus, he side-steps the important question
of whether we can build an agriculture that is truly
sustainable by building instead a "low-yield" farming "straw
man" which he then sets out to easily knock down.
The puzzling thing is not why Avery chooses to fight his
"straw man" rather than the real advocates of
sustainability. Many people build and confront a "straw
man" to avoid confronting a more challenging reality. The
puzzling thing is why so many people, including some
obviously informed and intelligent people, seem so willing
to accept Avery's "straw man" as the real thing. Could it
be that they too are afraid to confront reality? Meeting
the challenge of sustainability may require a whole new and
different paradigm for food and fiber production.
Joel Barker, in his book PARADIGMS, claims "when a paradigm
shifts, everyone goes back to zero." Perhaps those with
great intellectual investments in the "old" paradigm of
Avery's "high- yield" farming are no less reluctant to "go
back to zero" than are those with large financial
investments in the "high-yield," industrial approaches to
agriculture. We can't blame Avery for telling these people
what they want to hear. He works for the Hudson Institute,
a conservative "think-tank." That's his job. We can't
criticize people for listing. We should all listen to a
wide range or opinions and ideas, even when they differ
greatly from our own. But, can we so easily excuse
intelligent people for blindly believing, simply because
doubting might force them to "go back to zero" and start
thinking all over again?
Avery makes several additional assumptions which are
critical to his case for "high-yield" agriculture as a
necessity for feeding people and protecting wildlife. It
Avery's world, in appears, specialization is "good,"
diversification as "old fashion," and integration is
"impossible." He would have us believe there is no
alternative to setting aside space for agriculture and
forestry, separate from spaces for wildlife, and presumably
separate still from spaces for people to live. There is no
apparent realization that people might learn to live and
work in harmony with nature; we might farm or harvest
timber, and live in harmony with wildlife all in the "same"
spaces. The necessity of separating people from agriculture
and agriculture from wildlife may be a condition for Avery's
"high-yield" farming methods. But, living as part of
nature, not separate from nature, is a primary goal of most
who are working seriously toward agricultural
sustainability.
Finally, Avery implicitly assumes, as do many others, that
population, consumption, and production are the result of
separate and largely independent decisions of human
societies. He projects human population trends, consumption
trends, and production trends as if there were no
relationships among the three. In fact there is abundant
evidence that such trends are highly interrelated if not
inseparable. When people give no conscious consideration to
future generations, history suggests they will exploit their
resource base through increased per capita consumption or
increased population, depending on which option is available
to increase their immediate gratification. There is no
conceivable way the earth can support indefinitely as many
people as humanity might choose to procreate at any level of
consumption to which they might aspire.
The successful pursuit of a "high-yield" agriculture might
allow humanity to ignore any responsibility for conserving
our resource base, protecting our environment, and building
a more responsible society for another 50 years. If so, we
quite likely will be faced with twice as many people, a
seriously depleted natural resource base, and an exploding
population which holds a continuing blind faith in the
feasibility of limitless expansion of consumption and
population.
No one can possibly know with any degree of certainty how
many people the earth can sustain or what level of
consumption is sustainable. Maybe we already have too many
people or already consume too much per person. Or maybe the
earth can sustain twice as many people, or more, at still
higher levels of consumption. We simply don't know for
sure.
The one thing we do know is that population and consumption
cannot expand indefinitely. The current period of
agricultural surplus gives us a window of opportunity to
develop new and better ways to farm. We may be able to
build an agriculture capable of sustaining the currently
projected human populations without depleting our natural
resources, polluting our environment, or marginalizing the
value of people who farm and live in rural areas. If we
continue to allow the goal increasing production to dominate
our research and development efforts, we will never know how
much we could have produced without degrading either our
land or our people. If we wait 50 years to get serious
about sustainability, it just might be too late. Starving
people, historically, have destroyed their resource base and
in so doing have destroyed themselves. Apparently, such is
the nature of being human.
Ultimately, we must recognize the inseparability of the
agricultural economy, the natural environment, and human
society. Sustainability requires, that at some point in
time, we bring production and consumption into a
sustainable, dynamic balance. Avery's "high-yield"
agriculture, at best, can do no more than delay the
inevitable day when we must find acceptable ways to balance
production, population, and consumption. At that time, the
earth may be capable of sustaining far fewer people than it
could sustain with today's resource base.
The fundamental question of sustainability is as much about
people as it is about ecology or economics. Will we
exercise our uniquely-human capability for self discipline
and invest in a sustainable future of humanity? Or will be
continue to contrive scenarios of self-delusion which
forecast a future of abundance and thus justify our
continued greed?