The Man Who Defused the 'Population Bomb'

[DarrinS]

It has been esimated that American agronomist, Norman Borlaug, has saved the lives of one billion people. You've probably never heard of him, but he died Saturday, at age 95.

A good read for you people that consider yourselves environmentalists.

Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture.

Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II.

In 1999, the Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug's efforts combined with those of the many developing-world agriculture-extension agents he trained and the crop-research facilities he founded in poor nations saved the lives of one billion human beings.

As a young agronomist, Borlaug helped develop some of the principles of Green Revolution agriculture on which the world now relies including hybrid crops selectively bred for vigor, and "shuttle breeding," a technique for accelerating the movement of disease immunity between strains of crops. He also helped develop cereals that were insensitive to the number of hours of light in a day, and could therefore be grown in many climates.

Green Revolution techniques caused both reliable harvests, and spectacular output. From the Civil War through the Dust Bowl, the typical American farm produced about 24 bushels of corn per acre; by 2006, the figure was about 155 bushels per acre.

Hoping to spread high-yield agriculture to the world's poor, in 1943 Borlaug moved to rural Mexico to establish an agricultural research station, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Borlaug's little research station became the International Maize and Wheat Center, known by its Spanish abbreviation CIMMYT, that is now one of the globe's most important agricultural study facilities. At CIMMYT, Borlaug developed the high-yield, low-pesticide "dwarf" wheat upon which a substantial portion of the world's population now depends for sustenance.

In 1950, as Borlaug began his work in earnest, the world produced 692 million tons of grain for 2.2 billion people. By 1992, with Borlaug's concepts common, production was 1.9 billion tons of grain for 5.6 billion men and women: 2.8 times the food for 2.2 times the people. Global grain yields more than doubled during the period, from half a ton per acre to 1.1 tons; yields of rice and other foodstuffs improved similarly. Hunger declined in sync: From 1965 to 2005, global per capita food consumption rose to 2,798 calories daily from 2,063, with most of the increase in developing nations. In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization declared that malnutrition stands "at the lowest level in human history," despite the global population having trebled in a single century.

In the mid-1960s, India and Pakistan were exceptions to the trend toward more efficient food production; subsistence cultivation of rice remained the rule, and famine struck. In 1965, Borlaug arranged for a convoy of 35 trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los Angeles dock for shipment to India and Pakistan. He and a coterie of Mexican assistants accompanied the seeds. They arrived to discover that war had broken out between the two nations. Sometimes working within sight of artillery flashes, Borlaug and his assistants sowed the Subcontinent's first crop of high-yield grain. Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was "a fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug's arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques.

Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have 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 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things."

Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.

"Without high-yield agriculture," Borlaug said, "increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion." Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.

In the late 1980s, when even the World Bank cut funding for developing-world agricultural improvement, Borlaug turned for support to Ryoichi Sasakawa, a maverick Japanese industrialist. Sasakawa funded his high-yield programs in a few African nations and, predictably, the programs succeeded. The final triumph of Borlaug's life came three years ago when the Rockefeller Foundation, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced a major expansion of high-yield agriculture throughout Africa. As he approached his 90s, Borlaug "retired" to teaching agronomy at Texas A&M, where he urged students to live in the developing world and serve the poor.

Often it is said America lacks heroes who can provide constructive examples to the young. Here was such a hero. Yet though streets and buildings are named for Norman Borlaug throughout the developing world, most Americans don't even know his name.

[coyotes_geek]

Interesting read. Thanks for posting.

[ChumpDumper]

I heard of him years ago.

RIP.

[jman3000]

I think WH posted this earlier this week.

Pretty amazing.

[Winehole23]

If someone posted it here, it wasn't me.

This news is a few days old, isn't it? I think I saw this bouncing around in my chat-lists last week.

[DarrinS]

By the way, the man who wrote "The Populuation Bomb", Paul Ehrlich has published works with John Holdren, Obama's Science Czar.


From the wiki on John Holdren:

Overpopulation was an early concern and interest. In a 1969 article, Holdren and co-author Paul R. Ehrlich argued that, "if the population control measures are not initiated immediately, and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come."[17]

In 1973 Holdren encouraged a decline in fertility to well below replacement in the United States, because "210 million now is too many and 280 million in 2040 is likely to be much too many."[18]

In 1977, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Holdren co-authored the textbook Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment; they discussed the possible role of a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation, from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls,including forced sterilization for women after they gave birth to a designated number of children, and recommended "the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences" such as access to birth control and abortion.[19][7]

Other early publications include Energy (1971), Human Ecology (1973), Energy in Transition (1980), Earth and the Human Future (1986), Strategic Defences and the Future of the Arms Race (1987), Building Global Security Through Cooperation (1990), and Conversion of Military R&D (1998).[10]

Oh, and here is a do ent called "What Needs to be Done" by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, which was a memo sent to then President-elect, Barak Obama.

http://www.populationmedia.org/wp-co...ama-advice.doc




Good stuff.

[ChumpDumper]

So what is Obama doing in response to the memo?

[DarrinS]

So what is Obama doing in response to the memo?

Hopefully he threw it in the trash.


It does suck that Obama's science czar is/was a proponent of eugenics.

[DarrinS]

If dems really wanted to have a "population control policy", they'd probably have to call it something else, like universal health care.


Just kidding.

[ChumpDumper]

Hopefully he threw it in the trash.


It does suck that Obama's science czar is/was a proponent of eugenics.

He never was. None of the ideas presented in the book were endorsed as policy by the authors.

[Winehole23]

I thought you wanted to talk about Martin Borlaug.

[Winehole23]

I guess he was just a springboard for another stale political rant.

[ChumpDumper]

I guess he was just a springboard for another stale political rant.

Yep, one he apparently missed the first time.

[DarrinS]

I thought you wanted to talk about Martin Borlaug.

Actually, a better point than Holdren being a collegue of Paul Ehrlich, is that, historically, people that predict catastrohpe are often wrong. And also, that people in the environmentalist movement, no matter how well-intentioned, may often do more harm than good.

[ChumpDumper]

I thought you wanted to talk about Martin Borlaug.

[Winehole23]

And also, that dinosaur rampages, no matter how well-intentioned, may often do more harm than good.

Fify.

[DarrinS]

I thought you wanted to talk about Martin Borlaug.

What if environmentalists had stopped Martin Borlaug's work?

[ChumpDumper]

More people would have gone hungry.

They didn't.

[Winehole23]

What if environmentalists had stopped Martin Borlaug's work?

They might have done harm if they were influential, or had they even tried to stop Borlaug. They weren't, and they didn't.

Borlaug crushed their Malthusian premises. We're all better off for it.

[baseline bum]

http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134876

[Winehole23]

access to land and money to buy perhaps more decisive than crop yields, as relates to hunger:

The debate over how to "feed the world" amid population growth and climate change often hinges on crop yields. The theory is that if we can squeeze as much crop as possible per acre of farmland, we'll have abundant food for everyone. This idea dominates the marketing material of giant agrichemical firms like Monsanto. "In order to feed the world's growing population, farmers must produce more food in the next fifty years than they have in the past 10,000 years combined," proclaims the company's website. "We are working to double yields in our core crops by 2030." Such rhetoric is routinely echoed by policymakers like US Department of Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack.


But jacking up yields—even if Monsanto and its peers can accomplish that feat, which they haven't so far—won't solve the hunger problem on its own. The globe's farms are already producing enough food to feed 12 billion people—twice the current population and a third again more than the peak of 9 billion expected to be reached in 2050. Yet at least 925 million people lack access to enough to eat. What causes hunger isn't insufficient crop yields but rather people's economic relationships to food: whether they have access to land to grow it, or sufficient income to buy it.


Unfortunately, rising food prices and compe ion for resources appear to be making the situation worse. Take the trend of rich-country investors buying or leasing huge, highly productive tracts of farmland in low-income countries, and exporting the resulting crops. In a scathing report on these "land grabs," the global anti-hunger group Oxfam reports that an "area of land eight times the size of the UK" has been sold off in the past decade—a combined swath of land that "has the potential to feed a billion people," or more than the 925 million who live in hunger. "[V]ery few if any of these land investments benefit local people or help to fight hunger," Oxfam adds.


Investors in these deals aren't agribiz companies like Monsanto, which just want to sell inputs like seeds and agrichemicals, not take on the risk of farming. Rather, they are US or European hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds from nations like China or Saudi Arabia, or companies like Iowa's AgriSol, owned by GOP stalwart, large-scale hog farmer, Iowa university regent, and all-around charmer Bruce Rastetter, whom I wrote about here.


While some land grabs involve domestic elites taking land in low-income areas of their own countries, the more typical cases involve rich-country investors gobbling land in poor countries. According to an April 2012 analysis by the Land Matrix, cited by Oxfam, the average investor in these deals come from a country with a per capita GDP of $18,918, while the target countries' per capita GDPs average $4,404—a more than five-fold disparity.



Oxfam presents a devastating analysis:

Two thirds of agricultural land deals by foreign investors are in countries with a serious hunger problem. Yet perversely, precious little of this land is being used to feed people in those countries, or going into local markets where it is desperately needed. Instead, the land is either being left idle, as speculators wait for its value to increase and then sell it at a profit, or it is predominantly used to grow crops for export, often for use as biofuels.

Nearly a billion people live in hunger today, and yet the land that could be used to sustain them is being bought up by investors and being put to other uses, including speculation.


Let's get this straight. Nearly a billion people live in hunger today, and yet the land that could be used to sustain them is being bought up by investors and being put to other uses, including speculation. Now, defenders of these deals claim that the targeted land is typically abandoned and marginal farmland that can only be made productive with outside intervention.


Not so, Oxfam says. "Most agricultural land deals target quality farmland, particularly land that is irrigated and offers good access to markets," the report states. And "much of this land was already being used for small-scale farming, pastoralism, and other types of natural resource use." Since 2000, according to the Land Matrix's analysis, about 140 million acres of African farmland, or nearly 5 percent of the continent's total agricultural area, have been snapped up in deals. That's a land mass nearly the size of Alaska.

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philp...top-land-grabs

[boutons_deux]

Wealthy Countries and Investors Buying Up Farmland in Poor Countries

http://stephenleahy.net/2012/05/17/w...oor-countries/

[LnGrrrR]

Cool read. Thanks DarrinS.

[boutons_deux]

"Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced a major expansion of high-yield agriculture"

.. is that BigChem/BigOil fertilizer agriculture? Knowing Billy G's faith in science (vaccines for everyone!), I bet it is.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

They might have done harm if they were influential, or had they even tried to stop Borlaug. They weren't, and they didn't.

Borlaug crushed their Malthusian premises. We're all better off for it.

He didn't disprove Malthus. He just expanded the wiggle room before the thresholds for death checks. You don't really think that we can just breed unchecked can you?

East Africa is proving to be a proving ground. Border conflict over water between Kenya, Ethipoia, Eritrea and Sudan has been rising and will stand to grow worse considering the region is experiencing a drought worse than the one seen in the early 80s. Malaria, AIDS and a whole slew of parasitic waterborn diseases that are not much talked about are rampant. Measles came back.

We can pat ourselves on the back for being so wonderful by importing food and staving off the worst of the disaster because of the groundwork Michael Jackson and friends put in but it's not sustainable. There was a whole bunch of famine and death last year. How about we put up one of the articles about the East African famines?

As the price for fuel rises then it is going to be more problematic for nitrogen production domestically as well as transportation required to get the food necessary to feed the millions that do not have the domestic production. We going to build the desalination plants they already don't have to handle seasonal variations? All guys like this guy and Sarin Haber did was push it back and present this illusion that current and technologies of the future will stave off famine and disease in infinitum.