Norman Borlaug: Savior of Millions
Norman Borlaug, the greatest American you’ve never heard of. Gregg Easterbrook was at a medal ceremony in his honor and wrote,
Born 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived. A plant breeder, in the 1940s he moved to Mexico to study how to adopt high-yield crops to feed impoverished nations. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes. Borlaug moved on to working in South America. Every nation his green thumb touched has known dramatic food production increases plus falling fertility rates (as the transition from subsistence to high-tech farm production makes knowledge more important than brawn), higher girls’ education rates (as girls and young women become seen as carriers of knowledge rather than water) and rising living standards for average people. Last fall, Borlaug crowned his magnificent career by persuading the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations to begin a major push for high-yield farming in Africa, the one place the Green Revolution has not reached.
Tigerhawk points out Borlaug is an Iowan and the reason for his lack of celebrity has to do with his politically incorrect method of saving millions:
Borlaug, even at age 93, is a champion for the politically very incorrect idea that we should enthusiastically promote biotech in agriculture, especially in the developing world. I suspect that rich-country journalists know that if they glorify Norman Borlaug and his cause they will be shunned from all the best cocktail parties. It is far easier in such circles to glorify Jimmy Carter and his cause, or even Yasser Arafat and his cause.
Reason magazine interviewed Borlaug in 2000. Here’s a portion:
Reason: Environmental activists often oppose road building. They say such roads will lead to the destruction of the rain forests or other wildernesses. What would you say to them?
Borlaug: These extremists who are living in great affluence…are saying that poor people shouldn’t have roads. I would like to see them not just go out in the bush backpacking for a week but be forced to spend the rest of their lives out there and have their children raised out there. Let’s see whether they’d have the same point of view then.
I should point out that I was originally trained as a forester. I worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and during one of my assignments I was reputed to be the most isolated member of the Forest Service, back in the middle fork of the Salmon River, the biggest primitive area in the southern 48 states. I like the back country, wildlife and all of that, but it’s wrong to force poor people to live that way.
…Reason: A lot of activists say that it’s wrong to cross genetic barriers between species. Do you agree?
Borlaug: No. As a matter of fact, Mother Nature has crossed species barriers, and sometimes nature crosses barriers between genera–that is, between unrelated groups of species. Take the case of wheat. It is the result of a natural cross made by Mother Nature long before there was scientific man. Today’s modern red wheat variety is made up of three groups of seven chromosomes, and each of those three groups of seven chromosomes came from a different wild grass. First, Mother Nature crossed two of the grasses, and this cross became the durum wheats, which were the commercial grains of the first civilizations spanning from Sumeria until well into the Roman period. Then Mother Nature crossed that 14-chromosome durum wheat with another wild wheat grass to create what was essentially modern wheat at the time of the Roman Empire.
Durum wheat was OK for making flat Arab bread, but it didn’t have elastic gluten. The thing that makes modern wheat different from all of the other cereals is that it has two proteins that give it the doughy quality when it’s mixed with water. Durum wheats don’t have gluten, and that’s why we use them to make spaghetti today. The second cross of durum wheat with the other wild wheat produced a wheat whose dough could be fermented with yeast to produce a big loaf. So modern bread wheat is the result of crossing three species barriers, a kind of natural genetic engineering.
Reason: Environmentalists say agricultural biotech will harm biodiversity.
Borlaug: I don’t believe that. If we grow our food and fiber on the land best suited to farming with the technology that we have and what’s coming, including proper use of genetic engineering and biotechnology, we will leave untouched vast tracts of land, with all of their plant and animal diversity. It is because we use farmland so effectively now that President Clinton was recently able to set aside another 50 or 60 million acres of land as wilderness areas. That would not have been possible had it not been for the efficiency of modern agriculture.
…
Reason: What do you think of organic farming? A lot of people claim it’s better for human health and the environment.
Borlaug: That’s ridiculous. This shouldn’t even be a debate. Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.
At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.
If people want to believe that the organic food has better nutritive value, it’s up to them to make that foolish decision. But there’s absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition. As far as plants are concerned, they can’t tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter. If some consumers believe that it’s better from the point of view of their health to have organic food, God bless them. Let them buy it. Let them pay a bit more. It’s a free society. But don’t tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That’s when this misinformation becomes destructive.
No wonder many environmentalists ignore Borlaug. He actually thinks Man can do something useful by altering Nature through science.
“Greatest Living American Ignored” [via memeorandum]
You need to understand that there’s two environmentalist movements.
The first is the one Borlaug belongs to (and I agree that he’s the greatest humanitarian who has ever lived), the one that embraces the use of science to discern and combat environmental destruction. This is the movement of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; the movement that discovered and proved anthropogenic global warming; the one that is consistently rebuffed by the Bush administration.
The second is largely parasitic on the first; it’s the hippy-dippy stoners who couldn’t be bothered to understand the science behind their claims. It’s the movement that conservatives like you point to in order to discredit environmentalism as a whole. It’s the movement that’s concerned about crystal power. It’s the movement that complains about the heat being the result of “global warming.” In other words – it’s the part of the movement you should stop pretending represents the whole.
Sometimes we in the first refer to ourselves as “conservationalists”, but the principle is the same – discerning balance. That some people in the movement are indolent stupid hippies doesn’t detract from the reams of science that support things like global warming, etc.