Weekly Views From The Secretary

Doomsayers

May 19, 2006

The news media seems to love doomsayers, based on the amount of coverage given to catastrophic forecasts like overpopulation, starvation and bird flu.

Just recently I saw a headline that read, "Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point". Sources in the story claimed, "In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced."

In the first place, if that sentence were actually true it would mean the world had enough grain stockpiled to meet the consumption level. In the second place, people don't eat all the grain consumed. The consumption reported by USDA in its May 2006 report on world grain includes many uses of grain in addition to grain used for food.

The story concluded by laying the finger of blame on us with this quote from Darrin Qualman, research director for Canada's National Farmers Union, "North America's industrial-style agricultural system is a really bad idea and maybe the worst on the planet."

Qualman claims we can't increase production significantly, that there is little land left for expansion and new technology will increase production by only about 5 percent.

Let us assume for a moment that those alleged facts are true (which they are not), and then consider other doomsayers who claim half the world is about to be wiped out by a new mutant bird flu that does not yet exist.

What is the result? For sure one of them is wrong. More likely both of these doomsday predictions are wrong.

Population predictions have never been right over extended time. Remember the 1968 book by Paul Ehrlich entitled The Population Bomb? Our college professors sometimes scared students of that decade into believing that uncontrolled reproduction by people would destroy the world as we knew it.

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," Ehrlich predicted.

Well, guess what! He was wrong. We made big gains against starvation and world hunger in the last quarter of the century, and we did so despite the hundreds of government programs designed to stifle or reduce production.

American farming does not cause starvation in Africa. A recent news item from South Africa said three men who stole wheat worth $320 million received sentences of only one year in jail. That explains why some people are always starving despite our efforts to help them.

Bird flu is real. All human flu viruses are thought to come to us from birds. Almost certainly the next one will also.

Every prediction which assumes things will not change will eventually be wrong, because change is the only certainty.