Will Biotechnology Overcrowd the Planet?

Genetic modification has gotten a hostile reception from activists who claim to be protecting the planet. But the most powerful underlying emotion for their unrea-soned fear—rapid human population growth—is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Will biotechnology overcrowd the planet by saving more sick people while producing more food to fuel more population growth? In a word, no. The opposition of the eco-activists is ironic, at least. Without the Green Revolution's high-yield farming, the world would already have had to clear most or all of its 16 million square miles of forests to produce today's food supply. Plant breeding, chemical fertilizers, irrigation pumps, and pesticides have been the key technologies to date in " growing more food per acre to leave more room for nature. " But each of these advances in farming has been pilloried by activist groups who claim to fear insect-protected cotton (that helps prevent devastation of the textile-dependent economies in China and India), vitamin-A-enriched " golden " rice (to prevent blindness in poor Asian children), and blight-resistant potatoes (that could prevent a re-enactment of the Irish potato famine in potato-dependent Bangladesh). Why are these people not joyful about the conservation benefits of high-yield farming? Apparently because they fear growing more food will mean even larger human populations. Fearing overpopulation was understandable in the 1960s, when the Green Revolution was suddenly tripling Asian crop yields and DDT began preventing millions of malaria deaths. Today, however, the world is 40 years into the first era when bigger harvests mean better nutrition for children instead of more people. The world's population surge is losing its steam, even though the number of people added each year is still near all-time highs. In a completely unexpected development, world birth rates per women have plummeted as radically as death rates in the era of modern medicine. Third world birth rates have come three-fourths of the way to stability, having dropped from 6.2 births per women in 1960 to 3.1 today. (Stability is 2.1.) This trend in birth rates is massive and unprecedented. The UN Population Division has just—again— lowered its estimate of the peak human population, this time to between 8 and 9 billions. (We are at 6.3 billions now.) Poor farmers almost always have big families, but affluent urban couples almost always have two children or less. The entire world (except Africa) is now on the path to urban affluence. Africa, eventually, will find …