Vandal Science

Norman Borlaug

Have you ever heard of Norman Borlaug? One of four Americans to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize? A man who single-handedly saved up to a billion lives around the world?

If the answer is no, don’t worry, you’re not alone. I’d never heard of him either.

Until today.

Borlaug passed away Saturday night. I’m slightly ashamed to say I’d never heard of the father of the Green Revolution; the man Penn and Teller called history’s “greatest human being.” So I’m taking the time to talk about his accomplishments and the issue he devoted his life to: saving the world from hunger.

In the 1960’s many politicians and scientists were warning of a world famine. India’s population was growing faster than their food production, as was the case in several countries. Borlaug’s solution was to introduce a new strain of wheat that produced much higher yields to countries that traditional farmed rice, lentils and cassava. He also advocated the use of synthetic fertilizer and modern irrigation systems.

The result? India and Pakistan make enough food to feed themselves. The world’s food production over the last half-century rose 170 percent while using only 1 percent more land. Billions of people may have been saved from starvation without losing innumerable natural land preserves to agricultural production.

Borlaug attempted to take his same successes to Africa where the food crisis has never been solved. However, his efforts were blocked by environmentalists and interest groups both home and abroad.

Why? Some supported taking the money needed to bring high-yield crops to Africa and instead applying it to efforts intended to reduce global warming. Some claimed the increased use of synthetic fertilizers would bring ecological disaster to Africa. Still others advocated it would be best for Africa to maintain the use of their traditional methods to grow local, traditional crops.

One, is it better to make the world potentially slightly cooler 100 years from now or unquestionably feed tens of millions of malnourished people now? Two, synthetic fertilizers only replace chemicals already found in soil. It is the use of pesticides - which Borlaug despises - that wreaks havoc on the environment. Three, is it ecologically better to bring in new methods and technologies to fully develop land already in use or to slash-and-burn countless acres of natural wilderness?

Here are some telling quotes from a great article from The Atlantic Monthly.

“Waggoner calculates that India’s transition to high-yield farming spared the country from having to plough an additional 100 million acres of virgin land — an area about equivalent to California.”

“As the former Indian diplomat Karan Singh is reported to have said, ‘Development is the best contraceptive.’ In subsistence agriculture children are viewed as manual labor, and thus large numbers are desired. In technical agriculture knowledge becomes more important, and parents thus have fewer children in order to devote resources to their education.”

“Though some mythology now attributes the Dust Bowl to a conversion to technological farming methods, in Borlaug’s mind the problem was the lack of such methods. Since then American farming has become far more technological, and no Dust Bowl conditions have recurred. In the summer of 1988 the Dakotas had a drought as bad as that in the Dust Bowl, but clouds of soil were rare because few crops failed.”

“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.’”

Thanks to the TierneyLab Blog for bringing this issue to my attention.

Here’s to the life of one of the world’s greatest humanitarians. May his passing help promote the dreams of his life.