Earth Day

In honor of Earth Day, Ronald Bailey posed the question, "Why don't environmentalists celebrate modern farming on Earth Day?" It's a good question:

Since 1960 global crop yields have more than doubled, with the benefit that the area of land devoted to producing food has not increased very much. If farmers were still producing food at 1960 levels of productivity, agriculture would have had to expand from 38 percent of the earth's land to 82 percent to feed the world's current population. This enormous increase in yields is the result of applying more artificial fertilizers, breeding higher yielding crops, a wider use of pesticides and herbicides, and expanding irrigation. More recently, advances in modern biotechnology have also contributed to boosting yields. However, last week, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a new report, Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops, by its senior scientist Doug Gurian-Sherman that tries to make the case that modern crop biotechnology should be largely abandoned because it has failed to increase agricultural yields.

Read the whole thing. Genetically Modified (GM) crops could save millions of starving and malnutritioned people per year; however, the knee-jerk rejection of GM crops is prevalent in Europe and, unfortunately, is growing here in the US.

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European and North American governments and nonprofits exert great influence over agricultural engineering in the poorest regions of the world. In their slow and comfortable pursuit of perfect crops, they're essentially withholding the good crops from the people who need them today. Millions are suffering as a result. This bias against GM crops is based on nothing more than fear of the unknown, and it's emblematic of so many irrational superstitions that have stalled innovation throughout human history.

I'll let Penn & Teller explain more on the topic:



(ht: Instapundit)