Lester, the Sky Hasn’t Fallen
By James Bovard
Lester Brown and his think tank, the Worldwatch Institute, are a cross between Chicken Little and King Midas. Despite the wrong-headed and dire nature of Mr. Brown’s State of the World messages and other economic and environmental prophecies, many influential people take his word as gold.
Indeed, this month Mr. Brown, a recent winner of a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” was named the 1989 recipient of the $50,000 Sasakawa International Prize, administered by the United Nations Environment Program.
According to the Worldwatch press release, “the Selection Committee stated that ‘Mr. Brown is an environmental activist whose commitment has had a profound impact on both developed and developing countries. His writings over many years have been outstanding in teaching about threats to the biosphere.”‘
Mr. Brown revels in his celebrity status: When I interviewed him in his office, he showed me all of his press clips for a recent month. PBS is preparing a series by Mr. Brown on the decline of the world. But Mr. Brown is a reverse Cassandra: His propheses are wrong, but influential people believe them.
Mr. Brown has always been profoundly pessimistic about humanity’s ability to sufficiently boost food production. In
1976, he urged the U.S. and Canada, the only remaining major grain exporters, to threaten importing countries with a grain embargo unless they adopted strict family-planning programs. He warned that once a nation becomes a food importer, it is almost impossible for it to become an exporter.
Actually, the 1980s have seen an explosion of food production and soaring yields, and world wheat production is expected to set a record this year. Western Europe, Hungary, Saudi Arabia and Tanzania have joined the ranks of exporters, and world grain trade has declined as more and more nations are becoming self-sufficient.
Similarly, Mr. Brown warned last month that there is “not anything in sight to arrest the decline of grain production” in Africa. But as Dennis Avery of World Perspectives, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm, notes, grain production of African nations that have adopted market-oriented reforms has soared in recent years, and several African nations are now burdened with surpluses. Rice production in Mauritania increased 25-fold after the government transferred the title of farmland from communal entities to individual farmers. New seed varieties are allowing Ghanaians to triple their corn yield.
Soil erosion, which Mr. Brown says is a “quiet crisis in the world economy,” is one of the prime trends he warns may “undermine civilization as we know it.” But, Mr. Brown has ignored recent breakthroughs in soil research that have turned the conventional wisdom of agronomy upside down. As a 1988 Agriculture Department survey, summarizing recent discoveries, concluded, “If the present levels of . . . erosion continued for another 100 years, productivity on the soils with the biggest erosion problems might decline only about four percent.”
Mr. Brown bases many of his dire predictions on the notion that food prices are rising; this claim is repeated like an incantation in his writings over the past 15 years. In reality, according to University of Maryland economist Julian Simon, a prominent critic of Mr. Brown, U.S. wheat prices in real terms have declined 85% since 1800, and 60% since 1925. Sugar prices are down 90% since 1800. Poultry prices are down 67% since 1930. The continuing food-price decline is the clearest proof of modern agriculture’s triumph.
Mr. Brown typically assumes that each negative occurrence is part of a trend, and that each dire trend is caused by inexorable forces that humanity is almost helpless to resist. In 1976, he announced that inflation largely was due to population growth. The subsequent collapse of the inflation rate had no impact on the market value of Mr. Brown’s prophecy.
In 1982, after the inflation rate had plummeted, Mr. Brown warned that “supply-side economics . . . will drive the world up steeply rising, inflationary cost curves in both the energy and food sectors.” Oil and grain prices subsequently nose-dived.
Mr. Brown shows an authoritarian desire for the government to enforce his own conservationist values. In 1976, he announced that “the emergence of unprecedented scarcity . . . may require the strictest economic and technological husbandry, as well as the strictest sort of political control.” He lauded China under Mao, observing in 1975: “Chinese success in agriculture cannot be viewed apart from the social reforms and regimentation that have resulted in a rare degree of social equity not only within the rural sector but between the rural and urban sectors as well.”
For Worldwatch, population growth is perhaps the earth’s single greatest enemy. Mr. Brown raves about the Chinese success in reducing the birthrate as a means to restrict future food demand and avoid overstressing the environment, never mentioning the notorious government-forced abortions, the tyrannizing of couples who seek to have more than one child, and the widespread infanticide of newborn girls.
Last month, Mr. Brown declared that Mikhail Gorbachev may become the savior of the world’s environment, and Mr. Brown is extremely proud that Georgi Arbatov, the Soviet Union’s leading expert on ideological warfare, wrote the forward to the Russian edition of State of the World, 1989. Worldwatch criticizes the U.S. for not accepting Mr. Gorbachev’s offer for worldwide nuclear disarmament and urges the adoption of a “nonprovocative defense” a la Maginot Line.
The State of the World 1989 concludes, “Indeed, crossing the perception thresholds needed to respond to these problems launches humanity toward a new moral frontier.” Unfortunately, Mr. Brown’s “new moral frontier” most resembles the Middle Ages — when frightened peasants swore that they constantly saw demons floating around them. Pessimism, authoritarianism, and a denial of the success of modern agriculture are not the best building blocks for utopia.
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Mr. Bovard is an adjunct analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington.
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