This article originally appeared at Forbes and has been republished here with permission of the author.
In the 1960s, when biologist Paul Ehrlich was predicting imminent mass starvation due to a rising world population and physicist John Holdren–who would later become President Obama’s science advisor–was recommending mass sterilization to control population, plant breeder Norman Borlaug was at work developing the new crops and approaches to agriculture that would become mainstays of the Green Revolution.
Those advances, along with other innovations in agricultural technology, are credited with preventing more than a billion deaths from starvation; and billions more people today have better nutrition than ever before in human history.
The Green Revolution also saved the environment from massive despoliation. According to a Stanford University study, since 1961 modern agricultural technology, which has led to increases in net crop yield, has reduced greenhouse gas emissions and spared the equivalent of three Amazon Rain Forests–or double the area of the lower 48 states of the U.S.–from having to be cleared of trees and plowed up for farmland. “[T]he climatic impacts of historical agricultural intensification were preferable to those of a system with lower inputs that instead expanded cropland to meet global demand for food,” the authors concluded.
Moreover, since 1996 the introduction of genetically engineered crops has reduced pesticide use by 581 million kg, representing an 18.5% decline in the associated environmental impact.
One might think that environmentalists would embrace these developments. On the contrary, they’re more likely to condemn them and promote instead a return to inefficient, low-yield approaches under the rubric “agro-ecology.” Included within that is primitive “peasant agriculture,” which would undermine food security and lead to greater starvation and malnutrition.
Helping to promote that folly, the UN Human Rights Council has weighed in with a report from a “special rapporteur” that slammed modern pesticides and genetic engineering as violations of human rights and calling for a worldwide regime of agro-ecology. The long-disreputable Council–which includes such human rights exemplars as China, Cuba, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela–usually contents itself with bashing Israel. But in 2000, at the urging of Cuba, it created the position of “Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,” the first of whom was a Swiss ally of the Castro regime and cofounder and recipient of the “Muammar Gaddafi Human Rights Prize.” (The irony was, I assume, unintentional.)
According to UN Watch, the current rapporteur, Hilal Elver, a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has cited works that claim the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government to justify its war on Muslims, and her position on food reflects the same paranoid, anti-American, anti-corporate mindset. She opposes “industrial food production” and trade liberalization, and frequently collaborates with Greenpeace and other radical environmentalists.
Indeed, much of her latest report parrots the delusional musings of organic industry-funded NGOs, accusing agricultural innovations of “destabilizing the ecosystem” and claiming they are unnecessary to increase crop yields, which is rather like denying the relationship between sunlight and photosynthesis.
This all might be dismissed as simply more UN activist extremism, except that it is part of a broader effort by global NGOs, together with EU allies, to outlaw critical farm input–including pesticides and genetically engineered crop plants–and force agriculture toward an agro-ecology model. That effort is mediated primarily via a network of UN agencies and programs, international treaties and agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, and the International Agency on Research on Cancer (IARC).
The developing world is particularly vulnerable to these radical regulatory regimes, in part because foreign aid is often contingent on compliance with them, but it can also have direct impacts on regulation in the EU and other signatories in the industrialized world. Even in the United States–which in most cases has wisely declined to sign on–these international agreements are frequently invoked to influence new regulations.
Contrary to the report of the “special rapporteur,” the real human rights tragedy is the lack of access to modern crop protection for millions of smallholder farmers in the developing world. Hand-weeding, for instance, is literally backbreaking labor, but necessary in the absence of herbicides. To weed a one-hectare plot, farmers–usually women and children–have to walk 10 kilometers in a stooped position. The permanent spinal injuries that result are the reason that hand weeding by agricultural workers was outlawed in California in 2004 (although an exception was made for organic farms, which refuse to use herbicides).
It is hard to overstate the perversity of the NGO-Human Rights Council position. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (which hasn’t yet completely succumbed to the activists) estimates that without pesticides, farmers would lose up to 80% of their harvests to insects, disease and weeds. (Consider, for example, the impact of the fall armyworm, which, in the last 18 months alone, has marched across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, devastating maize crops.) In developing countries, where farming typically lacks sufficient resilience and there is tenuous food security, harvest failures caused by the inaccessibility of modern approaches to agriculture are a death sentence. That is the true human rights violation.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley said earlier this month that the United States would decide whether to withdraw from the Human Rights Council after its three-week session in Geneva ends at the end of June. As she, other members of the Cabinet and the President contemplate that decision, they should add this latest report to the Council’s litany of offenses against logic, science and common decency. And then Ambassador Haley should announce that we’re pulling out.
Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller.
