CHAPTER EIGHT ARE WE LOSING GROUND? CHAPTER EIGHT: TABLE OF CONTENTS The Trend of Arable Land: Losing Ground? Where is the Amount of Cultivated Land Declining? Is Land Different From Other Resources? Conclusion The most important fact about the world's agricultural land is that less and less of it is needed as the decades pass. This idea is utterly counterintuitive. It seems obvious that a growing world population must need larger amounts of farmland. But the title of a remarkably prescient 1951 article by the only economist to win a Nobel Prize for agricultural economics, Theodore Schultz, tells the true story: "The Declining Economic Importance of Land." Consider these countries, and try to guess which one(s) is (are) rich and which poor: 1. Landlocked, mountainous, almost no oil or metals or other extractive resources, little flat farmland, high population density. 2. So flat and low that it is in constant danger of being flooded by the ocean (which has happened many times in its history), high population density, no natural resources. 3. Fastest population growth rate, and largest rate of immigration, in the world in the past half century, very high population density, no natural resources (not even fresh water). 4. Low population density, huge stores of natural resources, much fertile farmland. In order, the first three countries are Switzerland, Holland, and Hong Kong. The fourth country might be most of the countries in Africa or South America. The first three are among the richest and most economically vibrant countries on earth; many of the fourth group are dirt poor. The reduced economic importance of land is shown by the long- run diminution in the proportion of total tangible assets that farmland has represented in various countries (See figure 8-1). Fig 8-1[-g from Eaton and Goldsmith Productivity of food per unit of land has grown much faster than has world population in recent decades (see chapter 5), and there is sound reason to expect this trend to continue; this implies that there is less and less reason to worry about the supply of land. Nevertheless, let us address the supposed problem of land shortage. The title for this chapter comes from the 1976 book by Erik P. Eckholm, Losing Ground. That book was written "with the support and cooperation of the United Nations Environment Program," and contains a laudatory foreword by Maurice F. Strong, the executive director of the UN Environment Program. I draw attention to the auspices of Eckholm's book because it was (and is) representative of the "official" position of the interlinked world community of environmental and population organizations. The thesis of Eckholm's book is that the world's farmland is deteriorating. In the language of Strong's foreword, "our delicately balanced food systems are being ecologically undermined through deforestation, overgrazing, soil erosion and abandonment, desertification, the setting of irrigation systems etc." As a New York Times headline about the book put it, "Fertile Land Areas Dwindling in Poor Countries Despite Aid." And, in conjunction with the appearance of Eckholm's book, the UN convened a conference on "desertification." Front-page headlines in the New York Times reported "14 Million Acres a Year Vanishing as Deserts Spread Round Globe." Newsweek's headline to a full- page story was "Lethal Spread of the Sands." Children's books tell this story in simple terms: "Our Soil Wasted and Lost." The clear implication of these frightening statements is that the world's supply of arable land is decreasing. Not true. The world is not "losing ground" on a net basis, as this chapter shows. Of course arable land in some places is going out of cultivation because of erosion and other destructive forces, as well as because productivity elsewhere is increasing and the land is no longer needed (for example, in Wisconsin and the southeastern states of the U.S.). But taken as a whole, the amount of arable land in the world is increasing year by year, in flat contradiction to the clear implications of the statements quoted above. Indeed, Eckholm now says - and it is good to hear - "My book did not assert that the world as a whole is losing arable land on a net basis, nor did I intend to imply that," though as the quotations above show, journalists and environmentalists (and I) did read a clear net-loss message in Eckholm's book. The soil-erosion scare goes back a long way - to the story of the Spanish Conquest destroying native cultures by introducing cultivation practices that led to destructive erosion. Now research shows that erosion was as bad before Columbus as afterwards, and going back 3500 years; indeed, erosion may have declined after the Spaniards because of reduced population due to disease. (At the rate that myth-shattering new information is becoming available, I may never finish this book; it accumulates faster than I can chronicle it.) How can it be that agricultural land is becoming less important? Let us first step back and specify the questions to address, which are never easy to formulate. We should first ask: What is the present trend in the supply of arable land? Next we ask: What is the effect of increasing affluence on the supply of agricultural land? And last: What is the effect of population growth on the supply of agricultural land and recreational land? The first two questions are answered in this chapter; the third is answered in chapter 29. As to the meanings of "arable" and "suitable for crops": Here again, economics cannot be separated from semantics. At one time most of Europe could not be planted, because the soils were "too heavy." When a plow was invented that could farm the heavy soil, most of Europe suddenly became "arable" in the eyes of the people who lived there. Most of Ireland and New England originally were too hilly and stony to be farmed, but with backbreaking toil stones were removed and the land became "suitable for crops." In the twentieth century, bulldozers and dynamite have pulled out stumps that kept land from being cropped. And in the future, cheap water transportation and desalination will transform more of what are now deserts into "arable" lands (just as happened with much of California). The definitions change as technology develops and the demand for land changes. Hence any calculation of "arable" land should be seen for what it is - a rough temporary assessment that may be useful for a while but has no permanent validity. "You can even make agricultural land out of Mount Everest, but it would cost a fortune to do so," is a common reply to such optimism by those who worry that we are running out of land. But in many parts of the world, new land can be bought and cleared right now for amounts that are considerably below the purchase price of good developed land. Furthermore, the cost of acquiring and clearing land nowadays is less than it was in the past, when tree cutting, stump pulling, and irrigation-ditch digging had to be done by hand or with animal power. New areas are made habitable for agriculture as well as for urban activity with air conditioning. THE TREND OF ARABLE LAND: LOSING GROUND? The quantity of farmland is not a crucial issue, as we saw in chapter 6. In fact (as Chapter 29 documents), some African officials contend that Africa has too much land - at the same time that the U.S. State Department's AID is wringing its hands and pushing policies in Africa intended to reduce the people/land ratio. Using technology that is in commercial use to raise food in hydroponic artificial-light factories like PhytoFarm (see chapter 6), the entire population of the world can be fed using only the land area of Massachusetts plus Vermont, or Netherlands plus Jamaica. And the area necessary can be reduced to a tenth or a hundredth of that by producing the food in ten or hundred story buildings. Nevertheless, doomsters spook the public with fears that we are losing the quantity that now exists. Hence we need to examine the data in order to reassure you. Eckholm and others provide frightening anecdotes aplenty about how the world is "losing land" to deserts, dust, overgrazing, woodcutting, and salting due to irrigation - often the stories are travelers' impressions and other casual evidence. But statistics they do not give. "Ideally, a book on the ecological undermining of food-production systems would include detailed national statistics. Unfortunately, such comprehensive data are not available," Eckholm says. But in fact comprehensive data are available. And these data contradict the picture suggested by the anecdotes. Joginder Kumar laboriously collected and standardized the first set of data on land supply and use throughout the world. His finding: Nine percent more total arable land in 1960 than in 1950 in the eighty-seven countries for which he could find data; these countries account for 73 percent of the total land area of the world. More details on this impressive gain of almost 1 percent per year may be found in table 8.1. Some of the places where the quantity of cultivated land is going up may surprise you - India, for example, where the amount of cultivated land rose from 1,261,000 to 1,379,190 square kilometers between 1951 and 1960. The trend that Kumar found from 1950 to 1960 still continues. The UNFAO now has collected data back to the 1960s showing that there was a rise in "arable and permanent cropland" in the world as a whole during the period 1961-65 to 1989 from 10.41 percent to 11.03 percent of Earth's dry-land area, which represents an increase of 5 percent in arable area for the roughly 25-year period (table 8-2); the data for agricultural (arable plus pasture) are comparable, as table 8-2 shows. Furthermore, the gain in the developing countries is particularly significant and heartening. We begin, then, by taking notice of the fact that the amount of arable land in the world - and especially in the poor and hungry countries - is increasing, rather than decreasing as the popular press would have it. Nor should we worry about diminishing returns in the long run due to successively poorer land being brought into use, because average yields per acre are increasing. TABLES 8-1 and 8-2. Changes in Arable Land [maybe omit] Where Is the Amount of Cultivated Land Declining? The amount of cultivated land certainly is going down in some places. But this decline is not necessarily a bad sign. In the U.S., the trend is downward, as can be seen in figure 8-2. This has happened because both the total agricultural output and average yields per acre have been going up sharply in the U.S. This high output is obtained in large part with huge farm machines that require flat land for efficiency. The combination of increased productivity per acre of good land, and increased use of equipment adapted to flat land, has made it unprofitable to farm some land that formerly was cultivated. For example, in New Hampshire between 1860 and 1950 the tillable area declined from 2,367,000 acres to 451,000 acres. FIGURE 8-2. Cropland Harvested in the U.S. (48 states) There are, however, places where, for negative reasons - usually wars, or fights about land tenure - good land that was formerly cultivated is no longer farmed. Mexico in the 1970s was a typical example. Frustrated by the slow pace of agrarian reform, Mexican peasants began seizing land. In fear of more seizures, the big estates then cut their investments. "The agrarian unrest has interrupted agricultural production and investment at a time of economic crisis. - Sonora's farmers, who grow more than half the country's wheat, complain that their 1977 production will be reduced as much as 15%, or 220,000 tons, because of the unrest". Even the persons who worry about the "loss" of land acknowledge that it is in our own power to have more land if we will work for it. Eckholm wrote, "Today the human species has the knowledge of past mistakes, and the analytical and technical skills, to halt destructive trends and to provide an adequate diet for all using lands well-suited for agriculture." When confronted by these aggregate data, the loss- of-land worriers bring up the supposed "desertification," especially in the Sahara region. This has been hard to disprove until recently. But once again the anecdotal claim is confounded by scientific evidence when it can be gathered: Despite the widely held impression that the sands of the Sahara are relentlessly expanding, consuming villages and contributing to famine in Africa, a new analysis of satellite images...shows the greatest desert on Earth has stopped growing and is now shrinking. For years, researchers and agencies have assumed the Sahara's advance was implacable, but scientists who examined 4,500 satellite pictures taken over the past decade say it is clear the Sahara essentially reversed its expansion in 1984, and has since contracted dramatically. The story goes on to quote Compton J. Tucker and Harold Dregne as saying that the previous belief in Sahara expansion was "simply assumed," and that expansion and contraction seem to be natural. Trying "to stop the natural process probably would be fruitless." Desertification certainly can occur in some circumstances. For example, recent satellite evidence shows that in the western U.S., "hundreds of millions of acres are being degraded" by cattle. But this degradation is taking place on public lands, where individuals do not have a stake in maintaining the value of the land assets and where the prices they pay for grazing rights may be too low, leading to overgrazing. Where the land is privately owned, the satellite apparently did not report degradation. So desertification is not the result of population growth but rather of faulty economic arrangements. Unfortunately, however, many biologists and environmentalists focus on the physical rather than the social systems, making such forecasts as "Future desertification is likely to be exacerbated by global warming and to cause significant changes in global biogeochemical cycles." Indeed, even in the Sahel, private ownership can cause land to be improved rather than degraded. Figure 8-3 shows an area of private agricultural land in the Sahel; its borders sharply demarcate the green zone within from the brown area outside. Nor is the problem of "sustainability" the bogey it is made out to be. Land can be used indefinitely, even on an intensive basis, without loss of fertility. This may be seen in the Morrow Plots at the University of Illinois, the oldest experimental agriculture station in the U.S. (my favorite place to take visitors in the years I taught there). Starting in 1876, corn has been planted every year without any fertilizer, and the yields are visibly scrawny. But land that has been planted every year but rotated among corn and other crops retains excellent fertility, the corn towering over the no-fertilizer-no-rotation yields, with no observable loss of soil fertility. Crops using commercial and organic fertilizer both do as well as the rotation crops. And crops using both rotation and fertilizer do best of all. Figure 8-3 from Access to Energy Jan 1990 Now we proceed to our second question, leaving the third question, about the effects of population growth, for chapter 29. IS LAND DIFFERENT FROM OTHER RESOURCES? Many people consider land to be a special kind of resource. But like other natural resources, land is the result of the human creative process, as discussed in chapters 1-3. Though the stock of usable land seems fixed at any moment, it is constantly being increased - at a rapid rate in many cases - by the clearing of new fields or the reclamation of wasteland. Land also is constantly being enhanced by increasing the number of crops grown per year on each unit of land, and by increasing the yield per crop with better farming methods and with chemical fertilizer. Last but not least, land is created anew where there was none. For example, much of Holland originally belonged more to the sea than to the land. "According to strict geographical determinism, one would expect to find there nothing but a fever-ridden delta and lagoons, the undisputed domain of sea fowl and migratory birds. Instead, we find a prosperous and densely-peopled country, with in fact the highest densities of population in Europe." The new land was won by diking and draining. "This is essentially a triumph of human will, it is the imprint of civilization on the landscape." A hundred years ago someone said of the Netherlands, "This is not soil, it is the flesh and blood and sweat of men." Modern Japan is applying the lesson of Holland. When land around Tokyo becomes scarce and extraordinarily expensive, the Japanese build an artificial island in Tokyo Bay and contemplate large floating structures, including perhaps an airport. And Hong Kong is planning to build a new airport on reclaimed land just off one of its islands. Holland was created by muscle power. But the potential for creating new land has increased as new power sources and our knowledge and machinery have developed. In the future, the potential for creating new and better land will be even greater. We will make mountains where there now is water, learn new techniques of changing the nature of soils, and develop our ability to transport fresh water to arid regions. Extending the process into a third dimension which Holland demonstrated in two dimensions, the capacity to grow food in multilevel structures with the use of artificial light (see the discussion of Phytofarm in chapter 6) means that the supply of effective agricultural land can be expanded without limit - that is, it is not finite. This is no pipedream, but a demonstrated reality that is economic even at current prices. The role of landbuilding in population history became clear to Malthus, who said of the Germans in Roman times, ...when the return of famine severely admonished them of the insufficiency of their scanty resources, they accused the sterility of a country which refused to supply the multitude of its inhabitants, but instead of clearing their forests, draining their swamps, and rendering their soil fit to support an extended population, they found it more congenial to their martial habits and impatient dispositions, to go in quest of "food, of plunder, or of glory," into other countries. The cooperative interrelationship among landbuilding, irrigation, population growth, and prosperity in prehistoric times is also well understood by historians of the ancient Middle East. In the great alluvial valleys of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the Indus system collective effort had created artificial environments. The organized exploitation of lands reclaimed from swamp and desert was yielding unprecedented supplies of corn, fish and other foodstuffs". But once built, land can be lost through neglect and depopulation, as happened in the same Tigris-Euphrates area. "Many of these districts have not been settled or cultivated in a thousand years or more, and have been deeply and cleanly scoured by wind erosion during that interval." One can see, under the sand, traces of the old abandoned ghanats - irrigation systems - when flying over the desert. Investment in land is as important in the modern world as it was in the ancient world. The key idea is that land is made by people, just like other inputs to farm production. "The productive capacity of a farm is the cumulative result of what has been done to the land in the past and is largely the result of investment. The more progressive agriculture becomes, the smaller is its dependency on the natural endowments." Furthermore, whether land deteriorates or improves depends on its treatment by farmers. Land owned in common tends to deteriorate because no one has a property stake in maintaining it; in contrast, private farm owners improve their land because it raises the value of their investment. Reports about increasing soil erosion in various countries should be seen in this context. The extent of land improvement on subsistence-agriculture farms can be very great, depending on needs. Much agricultural investment has always come from the additional labor done by farmers during the off-season. For example, in agriculturally primitive Rapitok Parish in New Britain, "men of working age invest one-quarter of their manpower per year in the formation of new agricultural assets such as cocoa and coconut trees. This is a longterm agricultural investment." In Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where our family lived two decades in the midst of some of the most valuable corn and soybean farmland in the world, townpeople are surprised to learn that before the pioneer farmers applied their labor and sweat (and lives) in developing this land, it was a malarial swamp. Though the area is flat, it was also waterlogged and therefore unproductive. "Until white settlers drained the prairie, Champaign County was very marshy. Early settlers noted that the Indians built platforms high in the trees to escape the mosquitoes." The schoolchild imagines a vast, untapped prairie frontier where the white man, if he was brave enough to stand up to the Indians, needed only to drop seeds in the earth to have a bountiful crop. This is simply a myth. Nor is landbuilding a thing of the past, even in Illinois. In Champaign County, Harold Schlensker is a retired farmer whose farmholdings, which his sons work, are worth perhaps a million dollars. Much of the increase in the value of his land came from reclamation. "Pointing out the back window of his house, Schlensker indicated a drainage ditch that was one of his first improvements to try to upgrade a plot of land he characterized as `just swampland.' He said, `I put that ditch in and some tile, and brought it up to good productive land." In various parts of the U.S., new cropland is being created at the rate of 1.25 (or another estimate, 1.7) million acres yearly by irrigation, swamp drainage, and other techniques. This is a much larger quantity of land than the amount that is converted to cities and highways each year, as we shall see in the next chapter. Compare this with the nightmarish Limits to Growth view that land is fixed in quantity and that agricultural capacity is being "lost" to cities and highways. The U.S. was blessed with an endowment of land and water that long made irrigation unprofitable. But now, with an increased demand for food and new technological advances, irrigation has become important in creating new land. California's San Joaquin Valley illustrates the miracle: "A century ago it was desert, but today a Rhode Island-size tract in California's arid San Joaquin Valley known as the Westlands Water District contains some of the richest farmland in the world - the product mainly of multi-billion-dollar Federal reclamation projects that irrigated the parched valley floor with water from government dams." Center-pivot irrigation is a landbuilding innovation so promising that it deserves special attention. (Those are the huge circles you see below you as you fly west from Ohio to the West Coast.) In its natural state, the land along the Columbia River in eastern Washington and Oregon is a forbidding expanse of shifting sand, sage brush and Russian thistle, and only the hardiest of farmers or ranchers would try to wrest a living from it. The region is so desolate that the Navy uses some of the land as a bombing range. But for all this, the mid-Columbia region is one of the most thriving new agricultural areas in the world. Thanks to a remarkable new system of irrigation, the desert along the river is blooming.... With pivot irrigation, the water is pumped from the river to the center of a round field a half mile in diameter. A giant arm of 6-inch pipe a quarter-of- a-mile long pivots around the center of the field like the hand of a clock, making one revolution every 12 hours. Since much of the land is almost pure sand, it must be continuously fertilized, and here too the sprinkler system is used by feeding the appropriate nutrients into the water. By the 1970s irrigation had begun to appear even in fertile areas such as Champaign County, Illinois, whose corn-and-soybean land is as rich as any in the world even without irrigation. And in areas where water is too scarce or saline for ordinary irrigation, and where labor is scarce, the Blass system of drip irrigation (also called "trickle irrigation") multiplies yields. There are vast barren areas of the planet that may be brought into cultivation when energy, together with desalination and irrigation technology, become cheaper. To fly over the Nile River in Egypt is an amazing experience. A beautiful verdant strip surrounds the river. But beyond a few thousand meters from the river the rest of the country is entirely brown. That narrow green strip supports 56 million Egyptians (1990). Irrigation and desalination could make the rest of the country green, too. Then there is outer space and the planets. Science fiction?Many respected scientists see potential there. Making plans so bold that they seem almost unbelievable, many of the nation's leading scientists are calling for immediate steps to begin colonizing space. Their goal is to make the vast reaches of space the natural habitat of man with Mother Earth remembered as the "old world." Peering into their crystal balls at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the scientists concluded that space colonization is inevitable - and sooner than we think. As with other resources, the demand for land lessens when new substances are found to substitute for agricultural products. For example, "In India in 1897 nearly two million acres were used for cultivating indigo plants." Along came the German chemical industry and synthesized an indigo dye that was cheaper than the natural product. The two million acres were no longer needed for indigo. In high-tech farming, knowledge substitutes for land. Chapter 6 described how hydroponic farming can produce as much in one acre as conventional agriculture in a hundred or a thousand acres. And of course high-rise buildings greatly economize on surface area used for living. CONCLUSION I do not preach complacency about the supply of land. I am not suggesting that we cease to care about our agricultural fields, worldwide or regionally. Just as homeowners must take care of their lawns lest they go to ruin, farmers must continually protect and renew their acreage so the stock of good land is increased and improved. The message of these land data is that there is no ground for the panic into which anecdotal accounts can throw us when they are not balanced by the larger picture of accurate figures. And there is no basis in these figures for opposition to continuing economic and population growth. (The wisdom of such growth with respect to land, as opposed to the feasibility, will be discussed in chapter 29.) The hoaxes (by now old and tired) about "urban sprawl" and soil erosion wasting the farmland of the United States are exposed in the next chapter, along with a discussion of the newer concern about loss of wetlands. page # \ultres\ tchar08\ October 23, 1993