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  3. Intensifying agriculture is never going to be the new rock ’n’ roll, but the idea is pretty fashionable right now. Last week a m

Intensifying agriculture is never going to be the new rock ’n’ roll, but the idea is pretty fashionable right now. Last week a m

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问题     Intensifying agriculture is never going to be the new rock ’n’ roll, but the idea is pretty fashionable right now. Last week a major study led by the UK government’s chief scientist John Beddington warned that the only way to feed the world is to produce more food from the same amount of land.
    Some say that misses the point: we already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people, if only we didn’t waste so much. But there is another argument for intensifying agriculture: to save the rainforests. At last December’s climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, many delegates called for investment in farming to be included in REDD, the fund that will pay tropical countries to protect their rainforests and the carbon they lock away. The argument runs like this. As demand for food increases, farmers — already the biggest destroyers of forest are likely to chop down yet more trees. So to prevent further destruction, we urgently need to intensify agriculture. As climate economics guru Nicholas Stern put it in Cancun: "Cattle pasture in Brazil has only one animal per hectare. Raise that to two and you can save the Amazon rainforest. " The Brazilian government’s strategy is based on exactly that premise. The World Bank, which will run the fund, made the same pitch.
    The idea that intensifying agriculture relieves pressure on land is sometimes called the Borlaug hy pothesis after Norman Borlaug, the pioneer of the green revolution, who first articulated it. But before we go ahead we had better be sure that it is true.
    The counter-argument is that farmers don’t clear forests to feed the world; they do it to make money. So helping farmers become more efficient and more productive — especially those living near forests won’t reduce the threat. It will increase it. Tony Simons put it this way, "Borlaug thought that if you addressed poverty in the forest border, they’d stop taking their machetes into the forest. Actually, they get enough money to buy a chainsaw and do much more damage. "
    One recent study seems to bear out this contrarian view. Thomas Rudel of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, compared trends in national agricultural yields with the amount of land under crops since 1990. If Borlaug was right then where yields rose fastest, the rise in cropland should be least. It might even go into reverse. No such luck. Mostly, yields and cultivated area rose together. Rudel compared the finding to the Jevons paradox, named after the 19th-century economist William Jevons who found that increasing the efficiency of coal burning led to more, not less, coal being burned.
    That’s not to say intensification isn’t needed — the world has to be fed, after all. But it won’t necessarily save the forests. Any climate protection scheme that assumes it does is likely to be handing out money for nothing.
Which of the following is true according to paragraph 1 and 2?
选项 A、Waste is the root cause of current food shortage.
B、REDD is a fund dedicated to intensifying agriculture.
C、Intensified farming is greatly motivated by forest protection.
D、Intensified farming has been proved to be a feasible idea.
答案C
解析 第二段第二句指出，发展集约农业的另一个理由是它可以挽救雨林，然后对这一观点进行了具体阐述：随着食物需求的增加，农民可能会砍倒更多的树木，因此，为了防止进一步的森林破坏，我们亟需发展集约农业。巴西政府和世界银行也支持“通过发展集约农业来保护雨林”这一策略。因此，[C]选项符合文意。
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