Revolution

The major advance that brought along the increase in productivity of food in the past sixty years was the (so-called) Green Revolution.

Take my mother's poultry experiment as the example: Chickens were expensive in the good old days because they were fed with rice and veges and allowed to walk around. Now, chicks are mostly kept in the barn and fed with a fortified mixture of corn and cereal. Many of them would never see the sun and their biological clock is modified to have an 8 or 12-hour diurnal rhythm - so that they could lay egg two or three times each day.

The same applies - more so actually - to crops. With the extensive use of synthetic fertilizers, global cereal production tripled between 1950 and 2000, but the amount of land used was increased by only 10 percent. In comparison, using traditional techniques such as crop rotation, compost and manure to supply the soil with nitrogen and other minerals would have required a tripling of the area under cultivation.

You see where we are getting at ? Look, organic farming is better for the environment is self-conflicting because organic farming produces lower yields and therefore requires more land under cultivation to produce the same amount of food. To put it simply, the more intensively you farm, the more room you have left for rain forest.

You think this argument crazy ? I shall not object. But the line of thinking is not new - it was first proposed by Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, exactly for his contribution through increasing global food supply.

Go read Trewavas A. Urban myths of organic farming. Nature 2001; 410: 409.