In the world of unintended consequences, some extreme-minded environmentalists might take the cake. That's because in their quest to revert agriculture to the stone ages, they could actually be starving millions of people.

In the minds of these extremists, it makes sense to destroy test plots of new seeds designed to maximize crop yields while minimizing environmental impact through reduced fertilizer applications. And it seems okay to use scarce taxpayer dollars to test and re-test herbicides that have already undergone countless tests and been used safely since 1960.

The only problem: these new seed varieties and herbicides are critical tools in feeding all the extra people born on earth every day.

Global population currently stands at 6.8 billion—up from 2.5 billion in 1950 and 4.2 billion in 1980. It will reach 9 billion by 2050, according to the United Nations, which will mean never-before-seen challenges to global food production.

And without advancement in technology, there's little hope for success. Take weed controllers, for example. These herbicides consistently find themselves in the crosshairs of the radical wing of the environmental movement.

Without herbicides, U.S. crop harvests could suffer yield reductions of more than 289 billion pounds, according to 2005 study by the Crop Research Institute. Nationwide, the cotton crop would likely experience a 27 percent loss in yield; peanuts, a 52 percent loss; and soybeans, a 26 percent loss—not the direction yields need to head as global demand grows.

If those numbers aren't stark enough, here's another fact that should raise some eyebrows.

The National Center for Food and Policy calculated in 2003 that in order to continue to produce current crop yields without herbicides, an additional 70 million farmhands would be needed. In other words, one in four Americans would be pulling weeds on farms for a month out of the year.

The current subject of herbicide hysteria is atrazine, a weed killer that has been safely used by corn, sorghum, and sugarcane farmers in this country and 60 foreign nations since John F. Kennedy sat in the Oval Office.

Atrazine is set to go under the Environmental Protection Agency's microscope again in February, even though it received a full review as recently as 2006, and farmers from coast to coast will be watching closely.

That's because the economic loss to rural America will be in excess of $2 billion per year if atrazine is taken off the market, according to a 2003 EPA review of the herbicide.

Growers are quietly optimistic that the latest round of tests will end up just as the previous ones have—once again proving the herbicide's safety.

"Every EPA Administration since the EPA was founded—Republican and Democrat—has endorsed atrazine's safety," explained Jere White, executive director of the Kansas corn and grain sorghum growers associations.

In fact, Tim Dritz, a corn grower in Minnesota, wonders why the EPA is even wasting taxpayer dollars in today's economic climate, given the stacks of studies that already exist on the herbicide.

"Just last month, a study conducted jointly by the Minnesota Department of Health, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture concluded that atrazine does not harm water supplies," Dritz said. "Add that to 50 years of field testing and about 6,000 previous studies, and it seems to me that the EPA could be spending its scarce resources a little better. No farmer I know would ever use a product that they thought was harmful to their neighbors or the environment."

Regardless of the outcome of the EPA's latest foray into atrazine, the attacks from the extreme environmental community are unlikely to stop anytime soon, and that is always dangerous, especially as the population explodes.

As Norman Borlaug, the late Nobel Laureate and father of the "green revolution," who some credit with saving more human lives than any other person in history by forestalling mass global starvation, once said of such attacks: "There's an element of Lysenkoism [a reference to Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin's favorite biologist, Lysenko] all tangled up with…pseudoscience and environmentalism. I like to remind my friends what pseudoscience and misinformation can do to destroy a nation."