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graniteclimber
Trad climber
Nowhere
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Topic Author's Original Post - Sep 14, 2009 - 04:32pm PT
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Norman Borlaug
Ronald Bailey, 09.14.09, 03:40 PM EDT
The greatest humanitarian.
Norman Borlaug
Norman Borlaug, the man whose work saved more human lives than anyone else in history, died at age 95 this past Saturday, Sept. 12, 2009. Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution, the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s. For spearheading this achievement, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007.
Borlaug grew up on a small farm in Iowa and graduated from the University of Minnesota, where he studied forestry and plant pathology in the 1930s. In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation invited him to work on a project to boost wheat production in Mexico. At the time, Mexico was importing a good share of its grain. Borlaug and his staff in Mexico spent nearly 20 years breeding the high-yield dwarf wheat that sparked the Green Revolution, the transformation that forestalled the mass starvation predicted by neo-Malthusians.
In the late 1960s, most experts were predicting imminent global famines in which billions would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 best seller The Population Bomb. "In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He insisted "India couldn't possibly feed 200 million more people by 1980."
However, Borlaug and his team were already engaged in exactly the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn't work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. In 1965, Borlaug and his colleagues had begun a massive campaign to ship the miracle wheat to Pakistan and India and teach local farmers how to cultivate it properly. By 1968, when Ehrlich's book appeared, the U.S. Agency for International Development had already hailed Borlaug's achievement as a "Green Revolution."
In Pakistan, wheat yields rose from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million in 1970. In India, they rose from 12.3 million tons to 20 million. And the yields continue to increase. In 2008, India harvested a record 78.5 million tons of wheat. Since Ehrlich's dire predictions in 1968, India's population has more than doubled, its wheat production has nearly quadrupled, and its economy has grown tenfold. Crop breeders at a research institute in the Philippines later used Borlaug's insights to develop high-yield rice and spread the Green Revolution to most of Asia. As with wheat, so with rice: Short-stalked varieties proved more productive. Consequently, instead of massive famines, the past four decades have seen a "progress explosion" that has handily outmatched any "population explosion."
Unfortunately, in recent years, a gaggle of left-wing environmentalist critics have attacked the Green Revolution, arguing that intensive modern agriculture is ecologically damaging. These environmentalist gadflies oddly overlook the huge ecological benefit of saving billions of acres of forests and mountain terrain from being plowed under that tripling crop yields is chiefly responsible for. Had crop yields been frozen at 1961 levels, growing as much food produced today would require more than a doubling cropland, from 3.7 to 8 billion acres. This is an area nearly equal to the size of South America. In other words, the entire Amazon rain forest would now be gone.
Borlaug was a man who understood trade-offs, arguing that the Green Revolution has been "a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia." Borlaug properly dismissed many of his soi-disant "green" critics as ignorant elitists. "They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger," he told the Atlantic Monthly in 1997. "They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."
Borlaug never stopped working. He remained very active up until quite recently, working as a consultant to the International Maize and Wheat Center in Mexico and as president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, a private Japanese foundation working to spread the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa.
Let us pause a moment to mourn the death of a truly great man.
Ronald Bailey is the science correspondent for Reason magazine and had the great privilege of interviewing and talking with Borlaug many times over the past decade.
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hobo_dan
Social climber
Minnesota
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Sep 14, 2009 - 07:41pm PT
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Probably the most important man alive for his impact-giving another 3 billion people a shot at it.
Remains to be seen what the implications of that will be but the fact remains he helped double the population of the earth
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Sep 14, 2009 - 08:38pm PT
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but the fact remains he helped double the population of the earth
The real fact is he kept half the population of earth from starving to death.
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couchmaster
climber
pdx
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Sep 14, 2009 - 08:39pm PT
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Amazingly influential man whom no one ever had heard of. Look for the Jeopardy questions starting next year.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Sep 14, 2009 - 11:05pm PT
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Fortunately as I sat here in my office all day, Borlaug did make it into the media many times. This was on mainstream TV today.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Sep 14, 2009 - 11:44pm PT
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Borlaug was a great man whose legacy is cheated by the following bit of journalist terrorism (aka, scare tactics):
Unfortunately, in recent years, a gaggle of left-wing environmentalist critics have attacked the Green Revolution, arguing that intensive modern agriculture is ecologically damaging. These environmentalist gadflies oddly overlook the huge ecological benefit of saving billions of acres of forests and mountain terrain from being plowed under that tripling crop yields is chiefly responsible for. Had crop yields been frozen at 1961 levels, growing as much food produced today would require more than a doubling cropland, from 3.7 to 8 billion acres. This is an area nearly equal to the size of South America. In other words, the entire Amazon rain forest would now be gone.
A more balanced approach would list some of the Green Revolutions shortfalls, including the withering effect on bio-diversity, which could have dire effects on crop management over the long haul.
JL
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krahmes
Social climber
Dow Villa, InyoCo
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Sep 15, 2009 - 01:05am PT
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As I sit atop my left wing environmental perch and look at a mass extinction going on in real time, climate change due to release of terrestrial carbon into the atmosphere, and the collapse of the ocean's ecosystem... I realize what I want is less solitude and more neighbors, because people are all so great and full of altruism.
Some day and some way the loan is going to come due with interest. Anyway I got go run around with my gaggle. Now where are those neo-Malthusians hiding?
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aguacaliente
climber
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Sep 15, 2009 - 02:30am PT
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The NY Times obituary had a more nuanced version of Borlaug's relation with environmental issues, and it also went into more detail about the often-difficult fieldwork he had to do - he wasn't just a genius who thought things up, but spent a lot of hard time in the fields in Mexico and sleeping in tents (hey that almost makes it on-topic, right?)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html
a couple of brief excerpts:
Urgent queries began to pour in from other poor countries, for they were caught in a bind. After World War II, the introduction of basic sanitation in many developing countries caused death rates to plunge, but birth rates were slow to follow. As a result, the global population had exploded, putting immense strain on food supplies. ...
Dr. Borlaug’s later years were partly occupied by arguments over the social and environmental consequences of the Green Revolution. Many critics on the left attacked it, saying it displaced smaller farmers, encouraged overreliance on chemicals and paved the way for greater corporate control of agriculture.
In a characteristic complaint, Vandana Shiva, an Indian critic, wrote in 1991 that “in perceiving nature’s limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable practices worldwide.”
Dr. Borlaug declared that such arguments often came from “elitists” who were rich enough not to worry about where their next meal was coming from. But over time, he acknowledged the validity of some environmental concerns, and embraced more judicious use of fertilizers and pesticides. He was frustrated throughout his life that governments did not do more to tackle what he called “the population monster” by lowering birth rates.
It's worth remembering both that conditions were so bad in the developing world that simple sanitation saved many lives; and that population growth is still a huge problem, in part because of women's lack of access to family planning (birth control).
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