GM Crops Like Golden Rice Will Save Countless Children
Potentially lifesaving methods of food production still face severely misguided opposition.
Matt Ridley —
Any day now, the government of Bangladesh may become the first country to approve the growing of a variety of yellow rice by farmers known as Golden Rice. If so, this would be a momentous victory in a long and exhausting battle fought by scientists and humanitarians to tackle a huge human health problem—a group that’s faced a great deal of opposition by misguided critics of genetically modified foods.
Compare two plants. Golden Rice and Golden Promise barley are two varieties of crop. The barley was produced in the 1960s by bombarding seeds with gamma rays in a nuclear facility to scramble their genes at random with the aim of producing genetic mutations that might prove to be what geneticists used to call “hopeful monsters.” It is golden only in name, as a marketing gimmick, with sepia-tinged adverts helping to sell its appeal to organic growers and brewers. Despite the involvement of atomic radiation in its creation, it required no special regulatory approval or red tape before being released to be grown by farmers in Britain and elsewhere. It went almost straight from laboratory to field and proved popular and profitable.
Golden Rice, by contrast, was produced in the 1990s by carefully inserting just two naturally occurring genes known to be safe—from maize and from a common soil bacterium—into a rice plant, disturbing no other genes. It is quite literally golden: its yellow color indicates that it has beta carotene in it, the precursor of vitamin A. It was developed as a humanitarian, non-profit project in an attempt to prevent somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 people, many of them children, dying prematurely every year in poor countries because of vitamin A deficiency. (Vitamin A deficiency causes children to go blind and lose immune function.) Yet the rice has been ferociously opposed by opponents of GM foods and, partly as a result, has been tied up in red tape for 20 years, preventing it from being grown. One study in 2008 calculated that in India alone 1.38 million person-years of healthy life had been lost for every year the crop has been delayed.
Golden Rice was the brainchild of two scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, aimed at helping the 250 million children—predominantly in Asia—who subsist mainly on rice and suffer from vitamin A deficiency. Telling the parents of these children to grow vegetables (most don’t have land), or distributing vitamin capsules—the preferred alternative of some environmental activists—has not proved remotely practical.
Potrykus hit upon the idea of awakening the molecular machinery in the seed of a rice plant—it is active in the leaves—to make vitamin A while casting around for something he could do to help the world towards the end of his career. Within a few years, and with Beyer’s help, he had succeeded. With additional assistance from scientists at the agricultural company Syngenta, organized by Adrian Dubock, they eventually produced a version of Golden Rice that was sufficiently rich in beta carotene to supply all the vitamin A a person needs. (Dubock wrote about the development of Golden Rice here.) With some difficulty, they cleared the many intellectual property hurdles, getting firms to waive their patents so that the rice could be sold or given away. Potrykus and Beyer insisted that the technology be donated free to benefit children suffering from vitamin A deficiency and Syngenta gave up its right to commercialize the product even in rich countries.
Given the scale of human suffering Golden Rice could address, there may be no better example of a purely philanthropic project in the whole of human history. Yet some misguided environmental activists still oppose Golden Rice to this day.
Prominent among these is Greenpeace, the environmental lobby group which now has annual revenues of nearly $300m and a highly-paid chief executive overseeing a sophisticated fund-raising operation. Greenpeace lobbied to set very strict rules on the use of genetically-engineered crops which had the effect, whether intended or not, of making life difficult for Potrykus and Beyer. In January 2000, the same month that the development of Golden Rice was announced to the world in Science magazine, there was a meeting in Montreal of delegates from 170 countries working to come up with an international protocol on the regulation of biotechnology. This process had been started the year before in Cartagena, Colombia. Greenpeace was there, both protesting in the streets (“Life before profits!”) and working behind the scenes to draft rules for the delegates.
It was here in Montreal on 29th January 2000 that the “precautionary principle”—one of the lodestars of the environmental movement—was incorporated into an international treaty after days of intensive lobbying by Greenpeace. “We won almost all the points we were pushing for,” boasted a spokesman. The environmental group believed it to be a ‘victory’ that would save lives, but the effect was to hobble the development of Golden Rice for many years. As Potrykus said ruefully: “Once Greenpeace had fixed the regulations to be extremely precautionary, they didn’t have to do much more.”
Most people think the precautionary principle simply says “better safe than sorry” and helps to prevent disasters like the release of Thalidomide for pregnant women. In fact, it goes much further and is often a barrier to innovation. As applied in practice, especially in the European Union, it requires regulators to take into account all possible hazards of a new technology, however implausible, to discount all possible benefits, however plausible, and to ignore all the hazards of existing technologies that might be replaced by the innovation. As Ed Regis puts it in his new book Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood: “The principle focuses on theoretical or potential risks, those that are only possible or hypothetical, while ignoring the specific and actual harms that restrictions or prohibitions are likely to produce.” In this way, it creates obstacles to anything new.
Bizarrely, the Cartagena Protocol applied this principle to crops bred by the precise insertion of specific genes from other plants but not to the older technique of random genetic scrambling with gamma rays, like Golden Promise barley, even though the potential unknown risk of the latter is clearly greater. The effect on Golden Rice was twofold. First, the requirement for greater regulation tarnished all biotech crops as risky (if they’re safe, how come they have to go through so much regulation?). Second, it made the testing of different varieties impossibly expensive and time-consuming, killing a key part of the innovation process: the trial and error that is always necessary to turn a good idea into a practical product. Thomas Edison tried 6,000 different materials for the filament of a light bulb. Imagine if he had had to get separate regulatory approval for each one.
The European Union’s directive on the deliberate release of genetically modified crops includes the statement that “the precautionary principle has been taken into account in the drafting of this Directive and must be taken into account when implementing it.” This effectively killed off biotechnology on the continent, though Europe happily imports huge quantities of GM soybeans from the Americas today. Since 2005, Canada (which did not sign the Cartagena Protocol) has approved 70 different biotech crops, while the European Union has approved just one—and that took 13 years, by which time the crop was outdated.
To illustrate just how impenetrable the EU’s regulatory thicket is, take the biotech potato developed by the German company BASF in 2005. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) initially approved it, but the European Commission then blocked it, citing the precautionary principle. BASF took the Commission to the European Court of Justice, which ordered another evaluation from the EFSA. This confirmed that the crop was safe and the EU was instructed by the Court to approve its use, which it did. But Hungary’s government then intervened on behalf of green pressure groups, pointing out (Kafka-like) that the EU had based its approval on the first EFSA ruling instead of the second one, even though the two rulings were practically identical. In 2013, eight years after the first approval, the EU General Court upheld Hungary’s complaint. By then BASF had lost interest in banging its head against this precautionary wall, so it withdrew the application, packed up its entire research into biotechnology and moved it to the U.S., which has never signed the Cartagena Protocol. Syngenta did the same.
After a quarter of a century of growing biotech crops in North and South America, Asia and parts of Africa, the evidence is now clear: they have caused no human or animal illness, and have huge environmental benefit, such as greatly reduced pesticide use, less ploughing, lower greenhouse gas emissions, less land required to grow a given quantity of crop, lower costs and higher yields. This is the environmental bounty Europe has missed out on thanks to its over-zealous regulation of GM crops.
Greenpeace, having helped to create the red tape that held up Golden Rice, has campaigned against the crop more or less continuously for two decades. At first it argued that Golden Rice was useless because the very earliest prototype, which contained a daffodil gene, had too little beta carotene to be of any use. It then switched to arguing that a later version, with a maize gene, had too much beta carotene and could be toxic.
Despite these difficulties—including constant verbal attacks on themselves, and physical attacks on their field trials—Potrykus, Beyer, Dubock and their allies refused to give up. By 2012, it was clear from studies in China that the latest version of Golden Rice, grown in secure greenhouses, gave children sufficient beta carotene to make them healthy but could not harm them, and did so far more effectively than feeding them spinach. However, the research caused a fuss. The US-based, Chinese-born researcher followed precisely the approved protocols for the research, which did not describe Golden Rice as a GMO-crop. Nevertheless, the same university which had approved the protocols, then found that not describing Golden Rice as a GMO-crop was an ethical omission. Overall, and without any credible analysis, the university found insufficient evidence that the principle of ‘prior informed consent’ from the subjects of the research had been properly applied, handing the opponents of GM foods a huge propaganda victory at a crucial time. Yet by this date, billions of meals of biotech crops had been eaten all around the world, and three independent reviews of the Chinese research concluded that the trial had been safe and effective. Nevertheless, the reputational harm lingered.
The International Rice Research Institute developed numerous different Golden Rice strains back-crossed into commonly grown varieties, behind tough security barriers because of constant threats from activists encouraged by Greenpeace. Eventually, the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board chose one of the varieties for field testing. They would have liked to have chosen lots of different varieties, because in plant breeding it is always necessary to weed out sports that have for some reason acquired undesirable traits along the way. But the precautionary principle made this impossibly expensive and laborious since it required evaluation in advance of the potential risks of each separate variety. So they had to pick one.
Disastrously, that one variety turned out to have a genetic flaw that made it poor at yielding grain outside the greenhouse. Once again, the environmentalists crowed that the project was doomed.
But the anti-GMO activists didn’t always enjoy universal support within the broader environmentalist movement. One of the founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, became so infuriated by the organization’s opposition to Golden Rice that he launched a campaign called Allow Golden Rice Now! on the very day that left-wing activists vandalized a Golden Rice field trial. Moore’s group went on to organize protests at Greenpeace’s offices in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, Rome and London. In 2015, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the US Patents and Trademark Office rewarded Golden Rice with their Patents For Humanity Award. In 2017, a group of 134 Nobel-prize winners (now expanded to 150) called on Greenpeace and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Program to “cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general.” They concluded: “How many poor people in the world must die before we consider this a ‘crime against humanity’?”
In 2018, Mark Lynas, a prominent campaigner against biotechnology, switched sides and wrote a book in which he said: “We permanently stirred public hostility to GMO foods throughout pretty much the entire world, and—incredibly—held up the previously unstoppable march of a whole technology. There was only one problem with our stunningly successful worldwide campaign. It wasn’t true.”
By 2017, a new variety of Golden Rice, GR2E, had been tested in the field in the Philippines and shown to be robust, true-breeding, high-yielding and strong in its expression of beta carotene. The IRRI submitted an application to release it to farmers, in the form of eight hefty documents, one more than 800 pages long and detailing the many tests of the physical, nutritional, allergenic, and toxicity done on the plant to show that it could not conceivably be anything other than safe to grow and eat. Probably no crop has ever been so exhaustively evaluated. Thankfully, 2017 was the year the dam began to break. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US approved Golden Rice as a safe food, though none of them planned to grow it (vitamin A deficiency is rare in these countries). But this only stirred up more ferocious opposition among the usual anti-GMO suspects, who frantically lobbied the governments of India, Bangladesh and the Philippines not to approve the crop.
As Regis summarizes the sorry tale in his book:
The rice had to overcome numerous scientific challenges and extremely burdensome regulatory obstacles. It had to withstand years of constant abuse, opposition, factual distortions, disinformation, and ridicule by anti-GMO individuals and groups. It had to survive the destruction of field test specimens by cyclones, hurricanes, and paid vandals. It had to survive its one major scandal and one major mistake.
More than 13,000 supportive citizens (including Jeff Bezos) have now appealed to the governments of the world, the United Nations and Greenpeace to stop vilifying genetically-modified crops in general and Golden Rice in particular. Yet the United Nations remains in thrall to the opponents. Shockingly, UNICEF’s hefty recent report State of the World’s Children 2019: Children, food and nutrition does not even mention Golden Rice. The World Health Organization continues to ignore the product. In effect, a GMO superfood has been developed that could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children every year, it’s been proved to be both safe and effective, and yet the world’s leading global health organization has decided to turn a blind eye.
The story of Golden Rice is deeply, deeply shocking. This is not a story of incompetence and ignorance, but of an antediluvian hostility to science and technology. In the end, though, the evidence in favor of Golden Rice proved absolutely overwhelming.
Introducing the "Father of the Green Revolution," Norman Borlaug.
Alexander C. R. Hammond —
Today marks the inaugural launch of a new series of articles by HumanProgress.org named: The Heroes of Progress. This bi-weekly column will give a short overview of unsung heroes of progress who have made an extraordinary contribution to the wellbeing of humanity. The Hero could be anyone from a scientist who invented a vaccine that saved millions of people, to a politician whose policies lifted a nation from poverty to prosperity.
Today, on the 9th anniversary of his passing, our first Hero of Progress is Norman Borlaug, the man commonly dubbed the “Father of the Green Revolution.”
Norman Ernest Borlaug was an American agronomist and humanitarian born in Iowa in 1914. After receiving a PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1944, Borlaug moved to Mexico to work on agricultural development for the Rockefeller Foundation. Although Borlaug’s taskforce was initiated to teach Mexican farmers methods to increase food productivity, he quickly became obsessed with developing better (i.e., higher-yielding and pest-and-climate resistant) crops.
As Johan Norberg notes in his 2016 book Progress:
After thousands of crossing of wheat, Borlaug managed to come up with a high-yield hybrid that was parasite resistant and wasn’t sensitive to daylight hours, so it could be grown in varying climates. Importantly it was a dwarf variety, since tall wheat expended a lot of energy growing inedible stalks and collapsed when it grew too quickly. The new wheat was quickly introduced all over Mexico.
In fact, by 1963, 95 percent of Mexico’s wheat was Borlaug’s variety and Mexico’s wheat harvest grew six times larger than it had been when he first set foot in the country nineteen years earlier.
Norberg continues, “in 1963, Borlaug moved on to India and Pakistan, just as it found itself facing the threat of massive starvation. Immediately, he ordered thirty-five trucks of high-yield seeds to be driven from Mexico to Los Angeles, in order to ship them from there.” Unfortunately, Borlaug’s convoy faced problems from the start; it was held up by Mexican police, blocked at the US border due to a ban on seed imports, and was then stalled by race-riots that obstructed the LA harbor.
Eventually Borlaug’s shipment began its voyage to India, but it was far from plain sailing.
Before the seeds had reached the sub-continent, Indian state monopolies began lobbying against Borlaug’s shipment and then, once it was ashore, it was discovered that half the seeds had been killed due to over-fumigation at customs. If that wasn’t enough, Borlaug learnt that the Indian government was planning to refuse fertilizer imports as they “wanted to build up their domestic fertilizer industry.” Luckily that policy was abandoned once Borlaug famously shouted at India’s deputy Prime Minister.
Borlaug later noted, “I went to bed thinking the problem was at last solved and woke up to the news that war had broken out between India and Pakistan.” Amid the war, Borlaug and his team continued to work tirelessly planting seeds. Often the fields were within sight of artillery flashes.
Despite the late planting, yields in India rose by seventy percent in 1965. The proven success of his harvests coupled with the fear of wartime starvation, meant that Borlaug got the go-ahead from the Pakistani and Indian governments to roll out his program on a larger scale. The following harvest was even more bountiful and wartime famine was averted.
Both nations praised Borlaug immensely. The Pakistani Agriculture Minister took to the radio applauding the new crop varieties, while the Indian Agriculture Minister went as far as to plough his cricket pitch with Borlaug’s wheat. After a huge shipment of seed in 1968, the harvest in both countries boomed. It is recorded that there were not enough people, carts, trucks, or storage facilities to cope with the bountiful crop.
This extraordinary transformation of Asian agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s almost banished famine from the entire continent. By 1974, wheat harvests had tripled in India and, for the first time, the sub-continent became a net exporter of the crop. Norberg notes, “today they (India and Pakistan) produce seven times more wheat than they did in 1965. Despite a rapidly growing population, both countries are much better fed than they used to be.”
Borlaug’s wheat, and the dwarf rice varieties that followed, are credited for ushering in the Green Revolution. After the Indo-Pakistani war, Borlaug spent years working in China and later in life, Africa.
In 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishments. He is only one of seven to have received the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize. It is said that he was particularly satisfied when the people of Sonora, Mexico, where he did some of his first experiments, named a street after him.
Norman Borlaug’s work undeniably changed the world for the better, and in saving approximately one billion lives, he truly deserves to be our first Hero of Progress.
Heroes of Progress, Pt. 2: Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch
Introducing the inventors of the "Haber-Bosch process," Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch.
Alexander C. R. Hammond —
Today marks the second installment of a new series of articles by HumanProgress.org titled, The Heroes of Progress. This bi-weekly column gives a short overview of unsung heroes, who have made an extraordinary contribution to the wellbeing of humanity. You can find the 1st part of this series here.
Our second Heroes of Progress installment features two German Nobel Prize-winning scientists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. The two have created the “Haber-Bosch process,” which efficiently converts nitrogen from the air into ammonia (i.e., a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen). Ammonia is then used as a fertilizer to dramatically increase crop yields. The impact of Haber and Bosch’s work on global food production transformed the world forever.
Throughout the 19th century, farmers used guano (i.e., the accumulated excrement of seabirds and bats) as highly effective fertilizer due to its exceptionally high content of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium – nutrients that are essential for plant growth. But by the beginning of the 20th century, guano deposits started to run out, and the price of the fertilizer began to increase. If a solution to the depletion of guano hadn’t come soon, famine would have followed.
Enter, Fritz Haber. Born in 1868 in Breslau, Germany (now part of Poland), Haber began studying chemistry at the age of 18 at the University of Heidelberg. By 1894, Haber worked at the University of Karlsruhe, researching methods to synthesize nitrogen. Nitrogen is very common in the atmosphere, but the chemical element is difficult to extract from the air and turn into a liquid or solid form (a process known as “fixing” nitrogen).
After thousands of experiments over almost 15 years, Haber succeeded in producing ammonia on July 3rd, 1909. That proved that commercial production was possible. However, Haber’s breakthrough occurred in a small tube, 75 centimetres tall and 13 centimetres in diameter. At the start of the 20th century, large containers that could handle the pressures and temperatures required for industrial scale production of ammonia did not yet exist.
That is where Carl Bosch enters the story. Born in Cologne in 1874, Bosch studied metallurgy at the University of Charlottenburg in 1894, before transferring to the University of Leipzig to receive his doctorate in chemistry in 1898. Bosch met Haber in 1908 and after finding out about the latter’s breakthrough the following year, Bosch took on the challenge of developing suitable containers that could manage Haber’s process on the industrial level.
Within four years Bosch was producing ammonia in 8-meter-tall containers. The Haber-Bosch process was born. By 1913, Bosch had opened a factory that kick-started the fertilizer industry that we know today.
The discovery of the Haber-Bosch process meant that for the first time in human history it became possible to produce synthetic fertilizers that could be used on enough crops to sustain the Earth’s increasing population. It’s nearly impossible to say how many lives this breakthrough saved, but the expansion of the world’s population from 1.6 billion in 1900, to more than 7.3 billion today, “would not have been possible without the synthesis of ammonia,” claims the Czechian scientist Vaclav Smil.
After their revolutionary contribution to human progress, the two scientists worked to help Germany during World War I. Bosch focused on bomb making, while Haber became instrumental in developing chlorine gas. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Haber fled Germany to teach at Cambridge University, and he died shortly after in 1935. Meanwhile, in 1937, Bosch was appointed President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute – Germany’s highest scientific position. Being a staunch critic of Nazi policies, Bosch was soon removed from that position and died in 1940.
Today, more than 159 million tonnes of ammonia are produced annually, and while ammonia is also used for cleaning and as a refrigerant, 88 percent of ammonia is used for fertilizer. It is estimated that if average crop yields remained at their 1900 level, the crop harvest in the year 2000 would have required nearly four times more cultivated land than was actually cultivated. That equates to an area equal to almost half of all land on ice-free continents – rather than just the 15 percent that is needed today.
Without the combined efforts of Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, the world’s population would be much smaller than it is today. The two have truly changed the world for the better. Their lasting contribution to the wellbeing of humanity means that they rightly deserve to be our second Heroes of Progress.
PS: Carl Bosch is on the left of our cover picture and Fritz Haber is on the right of our cover picture
The Economic Madness of Malthusianism | Podcast Highlights
Chelsea Follett interviews economist Stephen Barrows about the intellectual history of population economics, the benefits of population growth, and what we can expect from a future of falling fertility.
Stephen Barrows, Chelsea Follett —
Read the full transcript or listen to the full podcast episode with Chelsea Follett and Stephen Barrowshere.
The world population recently reached 8 billion people, sparking considerable debate about the consequences of population growth size. These concerns, of course, aren’t new. Can you walk us through the history of concerns about overpopulation?
Those concerns are traceable back to Thomas Robert Malthus, who lived in the UK in the late 18th century. Malthus observed that the population grew at a geometric rate, while the resources of the Earth, particularly food, only grew at an arithmetic rate. As a result, he argued that there is a limit to population that is enforced by famine and plague.
But Malthus was shortsighted. He saw poverty and a lack of resources, but he didn’t see the other side of the ledger, which is what humans can do to overcome population pressures. However, his concerns never went away.
Could you walk through some of the reactions from economists to these Malthusian ideas? How were they received?
Not all economists are pro-population growth, but generally speaking, they see a different dimension to human activity than what you might find from environmentalists and other experts in different fields.
Individuals like Jean-Baptiste Say and Frederick Bastiat began to interact with Malthus’s work and acknowledged some truths behind what he was saying. For example, as you employ agricultural land for crop production, you use the most productive land first, and then as you expand agricultural production, you use the less fertile land, and yields decline. But at the same time, these economists emphasize that human ingenuity is not static. Individuals adapt to their circumstances and find new ways to make the Earth’s resources more productive. We adapt to our circumstances in ways that you don’t see elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
In the late 19th century, Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich Wieser bring up other factors. Böhm-Bawerk argued that the interest rate regulates prices through time and helps us accommodate some of the pressures from population growth. Similarly, Friedrich Wieser pointed out that in his own day, there was a significant increase in crop yields due to technology.
Economists like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard emphasize the division of labor. Individuals have unique talents; if they specialize in what they do best, it benefits the whole population and helps us overcome pressures on the Earth’s resources. Murray Rothbard also pointed out that the idea of overpopulation presupposes an optimum population. And so, the question becomes, “what is the optimum population? And is it fixed?” And the answer is no because the environment is changing all the time, along with individual knowledge and technology. So, the so-called optimum population is also constantly changing, meaning that over or underpopulation is just a theoretical concept, not a concrete reality.
So, economists have been pushing back on this idea in various ways. One of the more recent prominent examples is the bet between the late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Could you talk to our listeners about that?
Ehrlich was an entomologist who wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, which made all sorts of apocalyptic predictions about mass famine and so forth. At around the same time, Julian Simon was investigating population and initially agreed that population growth was detrimental to the Earth’s resources. However, after he examined the data, he saw that his concerns were misplaced and that, in fact, population growth is associated with economic improvement.
They began debating back and forth, and eventually, Julian Simon proposed a bet. They created a price index of five metals and watched it for ten years. Simon bet that the price index would fall, and Ehrlich said that it would rise. Paul Ehrlich lost the bet.
Why did he lose? What is the relationship between population and prosperity?
When people think of population growth, I think too often they think in terms of stomachs and not minds. Humans have needs; we need to consume to survive, and it’s true that the Earth is finite in terms of its concrete materials. But the human mind is infinite. There’s no limit to ideas and ingenuity; the human mind can get effectively infinite value out of fixed resources. Think about the smartphone and all the objects that we no longer produce because we all have them in our pockets.
In short, the mind trumps the stomach.
Today, birth rates are falling below the replacement rate in advanced economies. If all the countries in the world end up on that same trajectory, we could end up even with global sub-replacement fertility. What do you think about the potential effects of global falling birth rates and population decline?
There’s a great book called The Great Demographic Reversal, which points out that not only does population growth matter, but the shape of the global population matters, whether your population skews young or old. As the population ages, there are fewer workers producing and a large older demographic still consuming, which can cause prices to rise.
Some of the challenges of a shrinking population will be addressed through innovation. In Japan, for example, they use exoskeletons to help people work into very old age, even in manual labor jobs. However, as a general rule, low fertility rates lead to a relative lack of new ideas. You need people to solve problems, and as you have fewer people to tap from, you don’t have the kind of ingenuity and division of labor that you had before. Innovativeness also tends to decline as you get older. That’s just the natural cycle of humanity. So, hopefully, we won’t see global population decline. I don’t think we’ve ever seen gradual global population decline in history. We’ve seen shocks to population, plagues, et cetera, but we’ve never seen a steady decline across the globe, and nobody really knows what that entails.
What Do the Numbers Show about Global Deforestation?
The Environmental Kuznets Curve is real.
Joakim Book —
Trees are icons of nature and significant carbon sinks, so anyone interested in climate change is invested in the fate of forests.
In recent weeks, Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data has written severalarticles on deforestation. She had occasion to write on the subject because the quinquennial United Nations report Global Forest Resource Assessment (GFRA) was just released. It was filled with data and nuanced analysis on the State of the World’s Forests (another UN forestry report).
In one of Ritchie’s articles, she shows that the rate of deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Since then, the rate at which humans burn, chop, cut, and replace forests with farms and cities has fallen. And it’s not just modern industrial humans who used the natural world to excess – half of all forest loss took place before the year 1900. That point also illustrates how stunningly fast we shed trees in the 20th century. Roughly speaking, what took us ten thousand years to do before 1900, we managed to repeat in a mere hundred years. Deforestation, she notes, “is not a new problem.”
But it’s also not as bad as we think. The very same chart that illustrates the stunning extent of forest loss during settled human civilization also indicates that, relatively speaking, we have barely lost any forest coverage in the last twenty years.
Between 1990 and today, the Earth lost 177.5 million hectares of forests, an area about the size of Alaska. That’s a big area, but considering how large the Earth is and how mindbogglingly vast some of its forests are, it’s not that much (the GFRA estimates that the Earth’s total area classified as forests amounts to 4,060 million hectares or a bit below one-third of all habitable land).
More importantly, the rate of forest loss is tumbling: the decline in the 2010s was 40 percent below that of the 1990s. Plenty of us who are optimistic about nature and the state of human flourishing have predicted that the global deforestation rate will soon hit zero. In this GFRA report, we were almost right.
In the past decade, the yearly reduction in forest area was 0.12 percent – down from 0.19 percent in the 1990s and 0.35 percent in the 1980s. In other words, out of 100 hectares of forested area in 2010, 98.85 hectares still green the world today. Emphatically, we are not running out of forests.
What’s a bit worrying is that the deforestation rate itself has recently been dropping more slowly. Fortunately, the authors of the GFRA write that this slowdown is “due to a reduction in the rate of forest expansion,” not because humanity is ravenously clear-cutting the world’s forests. Indeed, we seem to have cut down fewer trees than in previous decades but have failed to replant (or let regrow) as many as we had before.
The silver lining to that observation is that regrowth and replanting is something that policymakers in the West and those of us who treasure the world’s forests can actually control, whereas persuading political leaders or poverty-stricken families of the Global South not to use the natural resources around them is a much more challenging and ethically dubious task.
Furthermore, while forest areas have declined, the remaining areas’ biomass has not. On the contrary, the biomass per unit of area increased by about 4 percent from 1990 to 2020, almost entirely offsetting the reduction in forest area (-4.2 percent) over that same period. Put differently, while the global forested area is smaller, forests have become greener and denser, nearly balancing out the total amount of biomass. This vegetation boom happened because, as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the growth of everything green accelerates – which makes sense since CO2 is plant food.
The stock of sequestered carbon in roots, soil, branches, and trunks is today level with what it was in 2010, and only 1 percent less than what it was in 1990 – an annual rate of decline of 0.03 percent. While the world’s forests are not without their (largely local) problems, the amount of green in the world is tantalizingly close to stabilization. All of us, from climate alarmists to optimists, should cherish that.
Even more extraordinary is the decline of deforestation across South America. In the 2010s, the deforested area was half that of the previous decade (2.6 million hectares vs. 5.2 million hectares in the 2000s). Despite all the doom and gloom about Brazil’s relatively modest increase in deforestation under President Jair Bolsonaro, the more than 700 contributors to the GFRA report conclude that “the deforestation hotspot is now in Africa.”
While Brazil was the single-largest deforester in the 2010s (15 million hectares), its reduction in total forest area is not far above the Democratic Republic of Congo (11 million hectares). Combining the DRC’s deforestation with that of Angola (6 million hectares) and Tanzania (4 million hectares) shows that Africa’s deforestation is more worrying than Brazil’s Amazonian blunders.
I and many others investigating the Environmental Kuznets Curve (an inverted-U shape relationship between income per capita and environmental impacts like deforestation) have argued that we shouldn’t focus too much on Brazilian deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere. As long as Brazilians get richer, their impact on Brazil’s pristine forests will gradually lessen.
Many critics have said that Brazil invalidates the EKC theory, citing the rapid increase in deforestation in the Amazon. Despite being much richer in terms of GDP per-capita than other top deforesters (Angola, Tanzania, DRC, Mozambique, Bolivia, Indonesia), Brazil nearly doubled its deforested area in recent years– from 457,000 hectares in 2012 to 1,012,900 hectares in 2019.
What that criticism overlooks is that Brazil is a deeply unequal country, regionally and economically. Its rich southern states have income levels on par with many European countries, whereas the North and Northwest – where most of the forests are – are closer to income levels in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, Pará, one of Brazil’s poorest states and equal to Namibia or Indonesia in per-capita income, is almost entirely responsible for Brazil’s increased deforestation rate in the last few years.
The shift of the last decade – from South America as the primary source of deforestation to Africa – has been overlooked, as has the decade-by-decade decline in deforestation rates. Despite the much-publicized news about fires in the Amazon, most deforestation now takes place in Africa. This isn’t surprising, as Africa is the poorest continent, and we know that poverty often means living off the land and cutting down forests for fuel. Similarly, the latest UN reports show us that deforestation is a poverty story, not a story about bad regional politics or market failures.
In contrast to the many negative stories about rainforests, the latest deforestation numbers are a reason to rejoice. And here’s my prediction: the next time the GFRA publishes aggregate data, we will see still lower deforestation rates, perhaps even zero. Gradually, but steadily, the Environmental Kuznets Curve is playing out, and the planet is slowly becoming greener.
