The U.N.’s latest study has told us to starve the poor

The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) published its confused and inconsistent recommendations for more sustainable agriculture on April 15. Repeated throughout the report is the message that, despite increases in food production, the benefits of modern agriculture “have come at an increasingly intolerable price, paid by small-scale farmers, workers, rural communities and the environment.”

But the average inflation-adjusted price of agricultural products, indexed to wages, fell by about 75 percent between 1950 and 1990, benefiting the poorest the most.

Yet the IAASTD portrays the intensification of agriculture during and since the Green Revolution in the mid-60s as a failure, claiming that “increases in intensive, export-orientated agriculture had serious social and environmental implications.”

In fact, it is the very governments that the IAASTD wants to “empower” that are responsible for such economic and environmental damage.

In spite of the current spike in food prices, mankind has done reasonably well combating hunger in recent decades. As the population boomed, food production consistently rose faster than demand, and the number of undernourished people has fallen steadily since the late 1960s, from 35 percent of the total population of the developing world to 17 percent.

Much of this progress came from the dramatic yield growth that the Green Revolution brought to Asia after the mid-1960s. High-yield seeds, fertilizers, other chemical inputs and irrigation systems meant that hundreds of millions of people were saved from starvation.

And we grow more food on less land. This has allowed us to conserve forests and wild habitats that would otherwise have been turned into fields. Economist Indur Goklany calculates that, if technology and agricultural yields had been frozen at their 1961 levels, we would need to farm more than twice the amount of land we do today to obtain the same amount of food.

It is disingenuous to claim that agricultural technology and free trade have only benefited corporations and ruling cliques. In many cases, small farmers gained the most from the Asian Green Revolution, adopting better seed varieties and techniques just as quickly as larger growers.

Poor farmers have benefited the most from agricultural technologies such as machinery and chemicals, which have reduced back-breaking manual labor. Small producers have become more competitive and food has become cheaper.

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