![]() ![]() Africa was responsible for 50% of the world’s deforestation between 19, compared to Asia’s meager 4% contribution. Sustenance agriculture - Third World farmers typically farm an acre or less - caused up to 45% of deforestation between 20. Antiquated farming methods are the number one factor destroying forests. Borlaug, in addition to being credited for saving a billion lives by introducing fertilizers, pesticides, and seed genetics to Latin America and Asia (he won a Nobel peace prize for it,) spared millions of hectares of forests from being razed for farmland.Īt November’s UN World Summit on Food Security, economists estimated that the world must double current food output by 2050 to feed a population of 9-billion, many increasingly demanding Western-quality diets.įor developing countries, using farming methods circa 1860, never mind 1960, this means more than doubling farmland. With advances in agriculture, farmers instead doubled output in 30 years, using 25-million fewer acres. We would have had to move into rolling mountainous country and chop down our forests,” he once told Reason Magazine. “We would have moved into marginal grazing areas and plowed up things that wouldn’t be productive in the long run. ![]() Only, there wasn’t 460 million more acres of good-quality land, so it would have been millions more yet, of poorer quality land. Had it stuck with 1960 methods of farming, it would have needed 460 million more acres than in 1960, of fertile land. The late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that modernized farming, ending frequent famines, in India and Asia, illustrated it this way: in 1990, America produced 596 million tons of crops. ![]() “It’s simple arithmetic: the more food you grow per acre, the less natural world you have to clear to do it.” “Intensive agricultural production is the key,” says Patrick Moore, co-founder and former Canadian president of Greenpeace, now chairman of Vancouver-based communications firm Greenspirit Strategies. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. ![]()
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