The food security challenge…

Commentary

As the Obama Administration continues to ricochet from issue to issue — the inability to prioritize and push a directed agenda right now is startling — and the GOP points fingers and calls names, and members of Congress sign on in droves to a resolution commemorating Confucius’ birthday, we need to hack down some of these weeds and see if we can recognize a couple of things with some true importance.

I like at least the concept of World Food Day on October 16.

On that day, I’ll be in Beijing, China, speaking at a global animal health symposium on the need to balance animal and human health in the use of certain animal drugs. My message that day will be that the planet better pretty much figure out how it’s going to feed itself given the United Nation’s estimates we’ll need to increase food production by 70% by 2050, and do it without cutting down the rainforests or the redwoods of Yosemite.

My message will be less one of balance and more one of the need to embrace technologies — safe, proven, effective and sustainable — if we’re to meet our food production challenges. And it will be a message of the need to ignore most of the drumbeaters who want us to farm as our grandfathers did while denying progess to developing nations.

I will share with my global brothers and sisters that the rush to “balance” implies something is out of balance, and that imbalance would have to be proven and demonstrated by confirmable science. In the case of the animal drugs in questions, there is no smoking gun evidence their use in animal production contributes to human health risks or actual problems. Ergo, no imbalance.

I will hopefully convince folks in the audience that regulating the “what if” when it comes to food safety risk, i.e. the much-loved European “precautionary approach,” proves the law of unintended consequences every time. In Europe, they banned the growth promotion uses of antibiotics on farms. The powers that be did not see a reduction in human resistance to antibiotics; what they did see was a reemergence of animal diseases not seen in 20 years; more antibiotic use by vets to treat sick and dying animals than was ever used in feed or water, and a $1.50 per head increase in the cost of producing a pig to market weight.

It must be recognized that an activist group with the price of a full-page ad in a national newspaper is no reason to ban a product or a practice. That’s essentially deciding to cure dandruff with a guillotine. A picket line of folks who wouldn’t recognize or care about the truth of the science if they fell over it is no reason to jeopardize our food production system.

What I’m saying is that we’ve got to stay focused. We’ve got to understand the consequences of short-term political actions and then avoid those short-term actions like the plague.

It’s time to show some backbone in the face of our food production challenges. If we don’t, there are going to be alot of unemployed politicians, because, even worse, there will be a lot of very hungry and some starving people — and not just overseas.