Popcorn

Lies. Damn Lies, and Statistics

If Babies Threaten the World, Why IVF?

An article in this Review (p. 11), noted the expenditures of time, money and resources that some infertile couples resort to in order to have their own “blessed event,” a baby. But the world’s would-be population controllers — International Planned Parenthood Federation, Paul Ehrlich, the UNFPA, Lester Brown, Werner Fornos, etc. — all claim that babies are the greatest single threat to the continued existence of mankind. According to the overpopulationists, all the world’s peoples must be contracepted, drugged, sterilized and aborted in order to stop an alleged plague of children.

So why has a major, and very lucrative, industry grown up to solve the infertility problems experienced by many couples?

If babies were really the threat that some claim, one would think there would be rejoicing over the fact that some couples are unable to procreate, and thus cannot threaten the world with their childrens’ demands.

Apparently, it all comes down to this: If you can afford the expense, no effort will be spared to overcome your infertility. In this instance, one’s reproductive rights include in—vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, egg donation, and a host of techniques to help produce one’s own baby.

But if you are poor, your reproductive rights include sterilization, norplant, IUDs, and abortion. In this case, one is entitled to few, if any children, and in many cases, to nothing more than a dead baby.

Not To Worry: There’s Plenty To Eat

Once again dire forecasts are circulating of impending big famines in the near future. As usual, Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute is the principal wolf-cryer in this regard. Mr. Brown has been predicting famine nearly every year for the past quarter century — he’s always been wrong but that’s never stopped him — and now he’s back again with much the same old story.1

Dennis Avery, the director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis, has recently made an excellent answer to Lester Brown’s principal arguments.2 Avery does agree with Brown on one point, however: world grain stocks are indeed way down from the levels of l0 years ago when the stockpiles stood at 30 percent of yearly consumption. Today, the stockpiles stand at 13 percent, a situation which Brown offers up prima facie evidence that global food security is in jeopardy.

Avery, however, correctly notes that when the world held the immense stockpiles of the mid- l980s, world grain prices collapsed and agricultural production was held back worldwide. (Prices were so low that subsistence farmers were driven out of their fields and Third World agricultural production was devastated: production costs could not be recovered from the sale of the harvests.) Accordingly, the United States and the European Union have been getting out of the grain storage business as the world learns to cope with lower grain stocks. Interestingly enough, in many of the underdeveloped nations, grain stockpiles have remained constant or even increased: wheat stocks throughout Asia, India’s rice supply, and Asia’s corn stockpiles, for instance.

Most of the grain stockpile decreases have occurred in the United States and Europe, areas which have long enjoyed bountiful food supplies and can well afford to get out of the stockpile business. Far from being the calamity foretold by Brown, the United States and Europe will benefit from lower taxes as agricultural subsidies and the carrying costs of government-held stockpiles are reduced or eliminated. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will receive a strong stimulus to increase agricultural production, inevitably resulting in better food security for those areas long accustomed to feeding off the supplies of other countries.

The most interesting aspect of Avery’s answer involves his analysis
of past and current grain stockpile levels vis-à-vis the
amounts actually needed to fulfill human consumption requirements.
While Lester Brown points to recent yearly drops in the world’s
stockpile of rice — down from nearly 59 million metric tons in
1990/9l to “just” 43 million metric tons today —
Avery sagely notes that “in the past 15 Years,” the
world’s yearly rice harvest “has never fallen more than six
million [metric] tons short of consumption.”3 The current carryover of some 43
million metric tons thus represents a cushion some seven times the
biggest shortage the world has faced.

Similarly, in the ease of wheat, Avery notes that wheat food consumption has never jumped more than 21 million tons in any two-year period. Avery argues that “To be secure, we might want to double that [figure] — 42 million [metric] tons in stock.” The USDA, however, forecasts the current year’s carryover at nearly 100 million metric tons.4 The world’s current wheat stocks, the lowest in 20 years, are nevertheless twice the “safety” level, which is itself two times the largest two-year increment in human wheat consumption recorded over the post 25 years! Avery goes on to point out that some 100 million to 130 million metric tons of wheat goes to livestock and poultry feed each year. That tonnage could easily be recaptured through the substitution of grain sorghum for wheat, thus again doubling the human wheat supply.

Endnotes