Oh dear Og. Not this hippy nonsense again. This tripe was soundly debunked in the 70s, and here we have someone is trotting out again.
It’s a load of old cobblers.
There are two crippling problems with the argument: the cause and the effect.
WRT to the cause, the biggest problem with it is that depletion of farmland is a matter of management, not productivity. There isn’t a shred of evidence that the degradation of farmland is linked in any way to productivity. There is plenty of land on Earth that has been productively farmed for millenia with no known degradation. In contrast there is plenty of land that has been farmed at very low production rates that has been severely degraded. There have been any number of studies looking at this, and there simply isn’t any convincing evidence that higher productivity results in increased degradation, nor that decreased prodcutivity results in decraesed productivity.
Good *management *leads to reduced degradation and vice versa. Badly managed unproductive land is more likely to be degraded than well managed highly productive land. We actually do have some evidence of a negative, though non-causative, correlation between productivity and degradation. At the more extreme low end of productivity land values become so low that there is no incentive to land conservation. Basically, when someone is scratching a $10/ha living out of 500, 000ha of dirt, it is not worthwhile to preserve the land. It becomes cheaper to simply write off the land than to try to rehabilitate or even preserve it. In that sense, lower productivity actual increases land degradation.
So, since there is no evidence that the amount of food produced has any impact on degradation, how does the author link the US exporting food to increased degradation? As far as the facts go, it is just as likely that reducing output will increase land degradation. With no market for the food grown, prices will decline and the land will no longer be worth preserving.
Then we move onto the premise that “the earth has finite resources”. That is pretty much nonsense. The Earth isn’t alifeboat, it’s a self-sustaining planet with a population of experts, an infinite variety of tools and a population that can feed those experts while they work. It’s nothing like a lifeboat. Any argument that tries to compare Earth to a lifeboat is bunkum from the outset.
Julian Simon debunked this idea 50 years ago, yet it’s still being trotted out regularly. The reality is that for the human species, effectively no resources are finite. As one resource become economically limiting we simply move onto an alternative. Always have, always will. This is certainly true of any resource that we use to produce food. We certainly do not need farmland to grow food, so any argument that farmland is a finite resource is misleading at the very best.
There are also problems with the concept of “irreplaceably depleting” land and lack of hard figure son what the rates of land degradation are. Suffice it to say, we certainly lack figures to make bold statements that will lead to the loss of billion of lives.
Next we move onto effect.
Sustainability is time dependent. Learn this. Repeat it. Nothing we do on this rock is sustainable. In a few billion years the sun is gonna swallow us whole. That is the maximum upper limit on sustainability. Anything we do that we claim is sustainable isn’t. It can only be sustainable for a given time period. So, what is the time period that we need to keep “contributing excess resources”? Well, all the experts agree that it’s less than 100 years. World population will reach its maximum within the next 40 years or so, and thereafter go into an exponential decline. So we aren’t going to have to keep depleting farmland forever. We only have to do it for the next 100 years at most.
So what happens if we don’t do this? Well, the one thing we do know is that population growth only ever declines when standards of living reach a certain level. The single most important criterion in that is infant mortality. In a nutshell, population growth will only decline when people know that they can have two children and they will both survive to age 40. Yet this author is proposing that we stop providing food, ensuring that most children will starve to death.
So the choices are as follows:
A) We stop giving starving children food. They die a slow and painful death, and the ones who survive will give birth to six children each, most of whom will die a slow and painful death. Lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. Net effect: endless human misery, but we might save some farmland though there is no evidence to support such a contention.
B) We give food to staving children. They don’t die. Within 50 years the population will realise that they do not need to have 6 children each. Within 100 years the population will have declined to sustainable levels and there will be no need to give them food. Net effect: an end to this human misery within the lifetime of some of today’s college students, but we might have to risk some farmland though there is no evidence to support such a contention.
Which of these options seems better to you?