When people get rich, they stop eating dogs and put them on leashes. He predicts farm trade will become more liberalized around the globe. Meanwhile, farm subsidies in the United States and European Union will drop due to the strain on treasuries. But Avery's optimistic outlook was coupled with a warning about the challenges to modern agriculture, especially biotechnology. He sees biotechnology as something that producers should ferociously defend from what he calls conservationists since it is needed to meet the growing global food demand.
Biotechnology is the only tool that looks capable of achieving that goal.
Critics of biotechnology talk about the risks it may pose to the environment. Avery spoke of the environmental benefits the technology might provide. He said increased crop production based on biotechnology could ease the pressure to tear up tropical rain forests and marginal land for crops. Much of the land saved from the plow would be tropical forest, which has far more biodiversity than the good cropland in places like the Great Plains of North America, the north China plain or the Argentine pampas. That would argue for making biotech crops sterile, so they couldn't escape.