Is sustainable agriculture a fallacy?

Excerpt

According to the United Nations Population Fund, the world's population has Aeached and exceeded G billion with the birth of 370,000 children on October 11, 1999. Population has doubled since 1960 and it is projected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050. Schools of thought are divided between celebrating this milestone as a “tribute to human ingenuity,” and condemning it as an explosion and a symptom of inevitable gloom and doom in the future of the human race.

Optimists remind us that agriculture has been a most dynamic enterprise with a remarkable historic track record for meeting global human needs. They cite:

•Persisting low prices and open (free) glob al markets for staple agricultural commodities,

•Data showing that agricultural food production continues to match or exceed the demand for food on most continents (Africa is the exception),

•Statistics showing that the rate of population increase in many countries is slowing as better educational opportunities are provided to their people, and

•Technical innovations that allowed accomplishments such as the Green Revolution and other similar successes in natural resources protection and conservation.

Skeptics, on the other hand, argue that: …