The New Population Bomb

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 MEN: You're suggesting in part that GATT was intended as a blank check for predaciousness upon the natural resources of several global communities?

Tobias: Most of them. There are very few that are immune to the fallout of the GATT. I thought House Leader Dick Gephardt's visit recently to the Maquiladoras Zone in Mexico was instructive in that regard. He came back, according to the news reports I read, horrified by what he saw with respect to environmental deregulation and abuse. I just spent the weekend with U.S. Fish and Wildlife law enforcement agents, includ ing some who patrol the Maquiladoras Zone, and they had tales that were absolutely horrifying with respect to the abuse of the environment. The laws are being cast out in lieu of the free license now to extract, pollute, and profiteer under the name of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]. The GATT is a disaster for the environment. It will induce every known carnal and lascivious and material appetite known to the human spirit, I'm afraid at the expense of animals, first non-human and of course eventually we will succeed in eliminating ourselves. We're already seeing increased plunder in the Amazon despite 25 years of global consciousness-raising with regard to rain forest burning .. . . Environmental causes have fallen on hard times, and it has taken place at the very moment that ecooptimism seems to be rising. As we approach the end of the millennium, we're essentially divided into that camp that sees doom and gloom and those who are convinced that the New Age is going to be resurrected and that we have ample reason to be optimistic.

 MEN: One of the statistics that seems to contradict some of the things that both you and Paul Ehrlich are saying comes from the World Bank, which stated recently that despite the rapidly increasing global population, the world's per capita food production actually increased by 30 percent in the period 1951 to 1992, and the price of food fell substantially over the same period. Again, according to their data, chronic malnutrition in the Third World declined from 36 percent during the late 1960s to 20 percent during the late 1980s. Only 11 percent of the world's land surface is currently used for agricultural crops, and by one commonly accepted estimate the world's land and water use for agriculture could more than double. What is your reaction to their statements?

 Tobias: I don't know the source for that information within the World Bank, which, incidentally, is a gigantic industry whose job it is to churn out information to suit clients and to justify World Bank projects. It would be foolish of me to respond to it because almost everything you mentioned I would categorically refute, but to do so in an interview like this without the ammunition of dozens of reports would be foolhardy. I think, more important, that as a general response I would say that one of the most knowing and informed refutations for most of that data can be easily read by anyone simply by contacting the WorldWatch Institute or the World Resources Institute and asking for their basic fact sheets. Those numbers and percentages that you just quoted just beg refutation from dozens of informed sources.

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