Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:53 pm Posts: 20537 Location: The City Of Trees
Whenever the day would come, I had planned to create a thread with almost this exact same title. Of course, it happened while I was out of town and John Tierney scooped me. Oh well. As you might expect, in the spoiler is the Penn and Teller video that explains the argument well.
Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, was celebrated for performing “miracles” by President Bartlet and an African leader in “The West Wing” (see the video clip below). He was described as history’s “greatest human being” by Penn and Teller (in their program featuring Dr. Borlaug and some of his opponents, like Greenpeace). Since his death on Saturday night at the age of 95, tributes from world leaders have been flowing.
I wrote about Dr. Borlaug, who was crediting with saving hundreds of millions of lives, in a post last year about environmentalists’ role in exacerbating food shortages (and pressuring the Rockefeller and Ford foundations to reduce support for Dr. Borlaug’s agricultural research). In a lecture given on the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Borlaug told an audience in Oslo in 2000:
Quote:
I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called “organic” methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low-income, food-deficit nations cannot.
It took some 10,000 years to expand food production to the current level of about 5 billion tons per year. By 2025, we will have to nearly double current production again. This cannot be done unless farmers across the world have access to current high-yielding crop-production methods as well as new biotechnological breakthroughs that can increase the yields, dependability, and nutritional quality of our basic food crops.
Dr. Borlaug wrote an introduction to “The Frankenfood Myth,” a 2004 book by Greg Conko, who has posted a tribute to Dr. Borlaug at the OpenMarket blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Mr. Conko reviews Dr. Borlaug’s achievements and concludes, “Never was so much owed by so many to a single man.”
There’s also a tribute to Dr. Borlaug from Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health, an organization for which Dr. Borlaug served as a founding director.
At Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Ronald Bailey has written about a rap song honoring Dr. Borlaug and also posted a tribute contrasting Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 predictions of mass starvation (”The battle to feed all of humanity is over”) with the progress that Dr. Borlaug helped achieve:
Quote:
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. Last year, India harvested a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, up 11.5 percent from 1998. Since Ehrlich’s dire predictions in 1968, India’s population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown nine-fold. Soon after Borlaug’s success with wheat, his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research developed high-yield rice varieties that quickly spread the Green Revolution through most of Asia.
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