Rob:  Well, I believe we do an exceptional job of protecting wildlife in this country, but I also recognize that around the world, there are not as many safeguards.  How important is high-yield conservation to protecting our environment?
Avery:  Our high-yield declaration signers endorsed the reality that we would already, without the green revolution, have plowed down another 12-million square miles of wildlife habitat.  The world’s whole forests total 16-million square miles.  That’s not even counting the land that we’ve saved with confinement feeding.  The world’s high-yield farmers have saved almost the equivalent of the entire world forest area by growing more food on less land.
Rob:  So, can we still accomplish what you’re talking about, if we transition to more organic farming practices?
Avery:  There’s a very serious problem with organic farming.  Now, recognize, first of all, that the British Advertising Standards Authority does not allow organic farmers to make any claims about better nutrition or better safety, because they’ve never proven any, anywhere in the world.  But they have claimed they were better for the environment.  With organic farming, you give up the nitrogen that conventional farmers take from the air.  Seventy-eight percent of what I’m, breathing in right now, is nitrogen.  And we use natural gas to turn that into nitrogen fertilizer.  First rule of organic farming is no chemical fertilizer.  Well, that means the first impact of an organic farming mandate for the world is another 9 to10-billion cattle raised for their manure, not because we need their meat or their milk, just because we need the nitrogen in their waste to keep our soil fertility.  In America, we would need the manure from another billion cattle.  We’ve got two-billion acres in the lower 48 states.  We’d have room for cities and manure production, but no food, no national forests, no Yellowstone Park.  This is not better for the environment.   This is the death of the environment.  And the people who are pushing organic farming cannot really be trying to help the environment.
Rob:  Now, I think there are plenty of people in the environmental movement that would disagree with you, but say you are right, what do you think the environmentalists’ motivation is?
Avery:  I don’t know.  I’ve talked to many of them; and I don’t understand the motivation.  Typically, they simply deny that organic farms would need the nitrogen.  Or, they deny that we have a global shortage of organic nitrogen.  And yet, China tried it without fertilizer, under Mao Tse-tung, 200-million malnourished people and the worst soil erosion in Chinese history, not sustainable.
Rob:  And now I assume they’re putting as many chemical fertilizers on their fields as we are?
Avery:  China now has world’s largest nitrogen fertilizer industry.
Rob:  Okay.
Avery:  And needs it.
Rob:  Now, you mentioned a green revolution.  Let’s talk about biotechnology real quick.  What are your feelings about biotechnology and how it’s being treated as both a science and a business?
Avery:  It typically takes 25 to 40 years to introduce a really new idea to society.  And the problem is that biotech is already maybe 20 years old.  If we’re talking about tripling the yields again by 2040 or 2050, we don’t have much more time to swing this thing into action.  The Soil and Water Conservation Society of the U S, in 1995, praised conventional farming as the most sustainable farming in history, the high powered seeds, the irrigation, the integrated pest management, the conservation-tillage.  But now we need to triple it again, and we’re already using those things.  It’s going to take something additional to meet this challenge.  Well, already, biotechnology has given us crops that not only grow in salt water, but would actually take salt out of the soil, and 40 percent of the world’s food comes from irrigated land which is building up salt, because there’s salt in all the water.  Suddenly, the 40 percent of world food production that wasn’t sustainable is, with one break-through.  The biggest pest problem in Africa is a parasitic weed called witch weed; lurks in the soil, when a corn plant sprouts, the witch weed invades the root; you don’t even know it’s there until your corn stalk sprouts a bright red flower instead of an ear.  There’s nothing you can do about it.  Millions of small African farmers unable to feed their families because of witch weed, and apparently if we take roundup ready corn, herbicide resistant, soak it in a systemic herbicide, plant it, when that seed sprouts, the witch weed tries to invade, and it’s killed internally.  This is something we already have, on the shelf.  All we need is permission to field test it in Africa, and we may not get that permission.  
Rob:  And is that simply because of the politics involved?
Avery:  That’s because of the fear.  That’s because of the fear that’s been deliberately fostered, primarily by European activists, but some here in America, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth.  We have a famine in Africa this spring, southern part of that country, severe drought.  America sent corn as food aid, their favorite staple food.  And the activists said that corn is poison; don’t give that to your people.  And they haven’t.  We’ve got people literally starving in southern Africa, because of the debate between environmental activists, quote-unquote, and the rest of us, about the safety of biotech food.  
Rob:  Now I was on a trade mission to the Middle East where I saw first-hand that particular mindset.  And what we would hear are people say, you could test this stuff on yourself, but don’t test bio stuff on us.
Avery:  We’re perfectly willing to test it on ourselves.  We’ve been eating it for almost a decade.  I eat cornflakes most mornings.  Thirty percent of our corn, roughly, is genetically modified.  But it’s genetically modified in a very precise way.  It doesn’t affect the kernels.  Nobody, in any scientific laboratory, has been able to find any difference in those kernels.  And you see, this is the difference between biotech and conventional plant breeding.  In conventional plant breeding, you take two plants, 10,000 genes a piece, stick them together and see what comes out.  In biotech, you’re making a very precise modification.  You hope you know exactly what you’re doing.  After you find out that you did modify it, then you test it to see that, that was the only modification you made.  And then you ask three different government agencies to test it and give their approval, and that’s what we do.  And so far, we have yet to find even a skin rash due to biotech modifications of our crops.