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Journalism of Courage
It is only a modest exaggeration to say that as goes agriculture, so goes the planet. Of all the human activities that shape the environment, agriculture is the single most important, and it is well ahead of whatever comes second. Today about 38 per cent of the earth8217;s land area is cropland or pasture 8212; a total that has crept upward over the past few decades as global population has grown. The increase has been gradual, only about 0.3 per cent a year; but that still translates into an additional Greece or Nicaragua cultivated or grazed every year8230;
In the next half century the pressure will intensify. The United Nations, in its midrange projections, estimates that the earth8217;s human population will grow by more than 40 per cent, from 6.3 billion people today to 8.9 billion in 2050. Feeding all those people, and feeding their billion or so hungry pets a dog or a cat is one of the first things people want once they move beyond a subsistence lifestyle, and providing the increasingly protein-rich diets that an increasingly wealthy world will expect 8212; doing all of that will require food output to at least double, and possibly triple8230;
If properly developed, disseminated, and used. That tripartite qualification turns out to be important, and it brings the environmental community squarely, and at the moment rather jarringly, into the picture8230;
Still, I hereby hazard a prediction. In ten years or less, most American environmentalists European ones are more dogmatic will regard genetic modification as one of their most powerful tools. In only the past ten years or so, after all, environmentalists have reversed field and embraced market mechanisms 8212; tradable emissions permits and the like 8212; as useful in the fight against pollution. The environmental logic of biotechnology is, if anything, even more compelling.
Excerpted from an article by Jonathan Rauch in the October issue of 8216;The Atlantic Monthly8217;
