As a teenager in the 1960s, I remember hearing the fearful talk of the mass famines which many observers predicted would sweep over the underdeveloped world in the 1970s and 1980s. Paul Ehrlich went so far as to write that the struggle was over, and hundreds of millions would starve to death, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. But there were dedicated agronomists and other scientists who refused to accept this grim verdict. The most prominent of these scientists died this past evening: Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, one of the unsung heroes of the twentieth century.
From his official Nobel biography:
In 1944 he accepted an appointment as geneticist and plant pathologist assigned the task of organizing and directing the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico. This program, a joint undertaking by the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation, involved scientific research in genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, agronomy, soil science, and cereal technology. Within twenty years he was spectacularly successful in finding a high-yielding short-strawed, disease-resistant wheat. To his scientific goal he soon added that of the practical humanitarian: arranging to put the new cereal strains into extensive production in order to feed the hungry people of the world - and thus providing, as he says, "a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation," a breathing space in which to deal with the "Population Monster" and the subsequent environmental and social ills that too often lead to conflict between men and between nations. Statistics on the vast acreage planted with the new wheat and on the revolutionary yields harvested in Mexico, India, and Pakistan are given in the presentation speech by Mrs. Lionaes and in the Nobel lecture by Dr. Borlaug. Well advanced, also, is the use of the new wheat in six Latin American countries, six in the Near and Middle East, several in Africa.
And from a 1997 article on him in The Atlantic Monthly:
Borlaug is an eighty-two-year-old plant breeder who for most of the past five decades has lived in developing nations, teaching the techniques of high-yield agriculture. He received the Nobel in 1970, primarily for his work in reversing the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted -- for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine -- 1975! The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.
Let that last line sink in a little. The work of Borlaug, his colleagues, and his students may have saved one billion human beings from starvation. Now, the Green Revolution has come under criticism from certain people on environmental grounds, inasmuch as the intensive use of inorganic fertilizer and extensive irrigation are needed to boost grain production. In fact, Borlaug came under heavy criticism for his methods, mostly from Western observers. Again from The Atlantic:
Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation largely backed away too -- though it might have in any case, because it was shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. "World Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to feeding Africa," Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europe persuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa; an exception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation that makes fertilizer and avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, became, he says, "a tar baby to them politically, because all the ideas the greenies couldn't stand were sticking to me."
Borlaug's reaction to the campaign was anger. He says, "Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. 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 fifty 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."
In truth, what his critics overlooked was this: Borlaug's methods have helped save countless acres of land from slash and burn farming, especially in India, and they promise to do the same in Africa. By preventing the social chaos of mass famine, the Green Revolution helped save both lives and land.
Also, contrary to expectations, when a nation becomes self-sufficient in food, its population growth tends to slow (which is also due to the impact of other, related factors). And really, what other decent option was there but to rapidly increase food production? Borlaug recognized that his methods were a stop-gap and that population control programs had to be implemented. He saw that we simply could not allow famine to do its hideous job of "natural" population control. Further, Borlaug's methods are not the end of all research in agriculture, as he would have quickly pointed out. Other scientific breeding techniques must be developed and encouraged, and they will be necessary to feed the 2-4 BILLION additional people who will be born between now and 2050.
So God bless you, Norman. You never lost sight of the utterly basic fact that people need to eat and that it is our moral duty to see to it that they can. No other American has ever saved more lives, and he deserves to be praised and honored as the genuine hero he was.