Pope Francis, Here's My Big Bang Theory on Farmers on Climate Change

MANILA: Even the farmers should be listening to Pope Francis when he opens his mouth and exhibits that smile – it brings out the sun. Farmers in the field should be able to generate their own sunny smiles, but they cannot because it seems that everything is against them, including the environment: typhoons, heavy rains, flash floods – and the opposite, droughts.

And having studied agriculture in school (at the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture in Los Baños, Laguna), and having further studied agriculture in the many and diverse technical papers I have been editing during the last 40 years or so, and having served as consultant to the Department of Agrarian Reform, and being a wide reader, I know that the farmers are to blame for climate change. And they don't know it. The sinners are always the last ones to know.

You know, man-made climate change / global warming has to do with too much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And do you know – they don't – where much of the greenhouse gases up there is coming from? Agriculture. Especially from the farmers who love to over-fertilize their crops; in the Philippines, that would be either rice or corn farmers.

How is that?

First of all, I know for a fact that farmers in Pangasinan and La Union in Region 1 apply up to 10 bags of chemical fertilizer per hectare, mostly nitrogen fertilizer in any of these compounds: urea, ammonium sulfate, ammonium phosphate, or ammonium nitrate. Even the so-called complete fertilizer contains nitrogen (in the image, in case you didn't know, 14-14-14 means 14% nitrogen, 14% phosphorus, 14% potassium; the rest of the 58% doesn't matter). Now, I also know that, when these chemical compounds are applied in the field, among other things that happen, the nitrogen in those fertilizers form the gas nitrous oxide, which accounts for 60% of the total emissions from agriculture in the US (Eugene Takle, April 2008, extension.iastate.edu). Our agriculture is patterned after the US; if that's how US agriculture goes in greenhouse gas, can the Philippines be far behind?

You think that cars and other vehicles are the biggest contributors to climate change, don't you? You think that when it comes to greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is the deadlier species? Dead wrong! Nitrous oxide contributes 300 times more to global warming than carbon dioxide, and that's the US government speaking (US EPA, 18 April 2014, epa.gov). In this case, I have no reason not to believe the US government.

So, we have been blaming the wrong people for man-made climate change!

But then, who is to blame for the excessive use of nitrogenous fertilizers in the farms: the manufacturers, or the merchants, or the technicians, or the farmers? What about the University of the Philippines Los Baños for having taught modern agriculture to most farm technicians of the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Agrarian Reform?

If the student has learned, the teacher has taught. The farmers are the main culprit for climate change, but they are not the promoters of the agents of climate change. Graduates of agriculture, including me, taught the farmers the use, and heavy use, of chemical fertilizers.

Another way of putting that is that we have taught the farmers the economic virtue of instant gratification, or the biblical virtue of the miracle of the loaves of bread. Our farmers are always asking for quick responses or miracles; they always want their fertilizers to work at once, and so they apply more. That is not intelligent design by any means.

So, Pope Francis, I know that your encyclical on climate change is undergoing evolution. I know that you are not a magician with a magic wand, but please hurry up anyway and come out with it in a miraculous way – unbelievably fast. Just make sure that you include statistics on fertilizers and their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions all over the world.

From the experiments and experiences of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Africa and India, in my estimation 1 bag of chemical fertilizer is enough for 1 hectare of crop. That is a saving of 9 out of 10 bags – 90% saving in cost of fertilizer (about PhP 9,000, a lot of money to a poor farmer) and 90% "saving" in greenhouse gas emission. To teach them that, the farmers should thank us 9 times for reducing the cost of their farming, and we should thank them 9 times for reducing their contribution to greenhouse gas emission.

What more could the farmers ask from us experts? What more could we ask from the farmers?

Now then, how do we stop agriculture being the major source of greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change? We will have to talk to millions more farmers first, for them to unlearn their profligate ways with chemical fertilizers. We should learn from the slogan of the old World Wildlife Fund against endangered species: "When the buying stops, the killing will too." In the case of chemical fertilizers, "When the buying stops, the selling will too."

Primates! I have always maintained that the answer to Climate Change is Primate Change – I already wrote about that some 8 years ago (see my essay, "Primate Change? Or Climate Change? You Choose! – The Blogal Village Voice," 03 March 2007, iCRiSAT Watch, blogspot.com). We have to change the way we think about agriculture, about farmers, about how we treat the environment – if we don't, the environment will change us, and we already know we don't like it.

And then, when your climate change encyclical comes out, Pope Francis, I can imagine that the best place to learn the best agriculture are the churches and chapels where, of course, we learn first of all to love our fellowmen.

And then, Pope Francis, as we learn from your encyclical and from their theory of evolution and your biblical story of creation that, according to you do not contradict each other (Adam Withnall, 28 October 2014, independent.co.uk), we must now pursue the evolution of a new kind of agriculture and we must preach the biblical story that God meant man to go forth and multiply – but not at the expense of the environment!