"We are told that the enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one of over-production? Our farms, despite measures to remove acreages from production and to pay farmers not to produce, have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the American taxpayer in 1962 is paying out more than $1bn a year as the total carrying cost of the surplus food storage programme. And is the situation helped when one branch of the agriculture department tries to reduce production while another states, as it did in 1958, 'It is believed generally that a reduction of crop acreages under provisions of the soil bank will stimulate interest in use of chemicals to obtain maximum production on the land retained in crops."
Rachel Carson. 'Silent Spring'"Just as water supplies are dwindling, so are agricultural supplies. While production and consumption speed up, the supply of food, and of the biological
resources used industrially, is slowing down: "the production of grain, which dominates human diets, expanded at 3 percent a year from 1950 until 1984...from
then until 1992, it grew less than 1 percent annually, scarcely half the rate of population" 68 There appear to be two principal causes of this. First, growth in
cropland, irrigation, and yield from fertiliser input, have all slowed down:"today, using more fertiliser in agriculturally advanced countries has little effect
on crop yields." Lester Brown, State of the World 1993 A New Era Unfolds, p.11"
Reference: 'Globalisation and its Terrors' by Teresa Brennan