Norman Borlaug has done more to fight world hunger than any other person. Bruce Chassy, professor at the University of Illinois predicts that Borlaug will eventually be recognized as one of the 10 greatest contributors to humankind of the 20th century.
By employing agricultural techniques he developed in Mexico, he was able to nearly double South Asian wheat harvests between 1965 and 1970. His work was coined the “Green Revolution,” and it spread rapidly across Asia. Largely because of Borlaug’s work, global food production outpaced surging population growth over the closing decades of the 20th century, averting the global calamity so many predicted. He is credited with saving the lives of a billion people. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 Yet, according to the Dallas Observer
One reason I opened this thread is that Borlaug was a boyhood hero of mine. I still vividly recall a Readers Digest article about him from the 1950’s. BTW Borlaug wasn’t famous then, either, although he should have been. The cited article is terrific.
Since this is GD, topics for debate include
– Why Borlaug isn’t famous
– The nature of fame
– Whether his critics are full of prunes
– Whether he will ever get the fame he deserves
– Whether is one of the 10 greatest contributors to humankind of the 20th century.
I think he probably is one of the ten greatest contributors of the 20th century. He didn’t get the recognition he deserves. at the time of his contributions, so he’s not likely to get it now. Fame goes to those who seek it, not those who deserve it.
Apologies if this constitutes a hijack, but I think an important question/debate might be, did the green revolution avert the starvation calamity once predicted to occur during the last 1/4 or 1/3 of the 20th century – or just postpone it?
Amazingly enough I was planning to start a thread on this same topic a while back; I never got around to it.
I know only the basic facts about Borlaug but I would agree 100% that he is one of the greatest persons of the 20th century and in fact of any century. I wonder if anyone in all of history has saved as many lives as he did.
IMO it was a scandal that he wasn’t included in the Time Magazine top 100 list of the 20th century.
Not to mention the fact that there is no particular reason to believe that there will in fact be a famine in the future. Biotechnology is still making progress and population growth is slowing down. I haven’t read any projection predicting famine in the future.
Okay, so I’m being a little tongue in cheek, maybe it’s good to postpone it, but in a hypothetical situation, what is more moral, to allow n people to starve to death now, or 2n to starve to death in 30 years? (Innocent question)
If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon starve to death in 30 years. For that matter given the choice between dying now and dying later I suppose I’d always elect later.
ataraxy22 I guess is a modern Malthusian. Many (including me) don’t accept that there will be population crisis; and that given political stability, the gradual adoption of sensible environmental policies and the use of agricultural techniques such as those cited by december food shortages as not inevitable.
I guess my answer to december’s question “Whether his critics are full of prunes” is that I don’t think that a lack of food has ever been the problem in the last century. When there was famine or hunger it wasn’t because there wasn’t enough food to go around. If you accept that, then the green revolution could at best only treat the symptoms and not the cause of hunger.
Well, there are some Green Revolution Revisionists who maintain that the mass production of single-crop plants, the monocrop system, is the greatest evil to come down the agricultural pike since petroleum-derived pesticides, and that Ol’ Norman actually did a huge disservice to the Third World in the 1960s by selling them on the idea that they had to grow American-style enormous monocrop batches of only one or two kinds of, say, rice, instead of continuing to grow the multitudes of microclimate-specific varieties of grain that they had always grown.
With the result that now the Third World as well as the First World is running into problems with pesticide-resistant bugs and depletion of soils, due to overcropping and heavy reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers instead of organic means of soil-building, like the recycling of human and animal manure.
Not to mention the loss of genetic diversity.
The Rodale organic gardening/farming people in particular–you say “Green Revolution” and they make a Mr. Yuk face.
This thread dovetails with another thread on the SDMB right now regarding genetically modified foods. There seems to be a lot of resistance to them by many people. They increase food supply, but lots of people don’t want them because they are afraid of “unhealthy side effects”. Are we supposed to assume that when population reaches the point where they are necessary, these fears will disappear?
This has been covered lots of times on this board, but I am coming from the philosophy that humans have been exploiting a number of one-time accessible resources, that when used up (petroleum, non-salinated cropland, inland aquifers, etc. ), will result in enormous problems. These problems will be exacerbated in proportion to the number of people that happen to be alive at the point when they occur, or rather cross some critical threshold. Furthermore, given humans current level of technology, it is impossible to support the entire world at 1st world levels of comfort. I hope this merely means that we will all learn to live in comfort, but much more thriftily, but I’m not convinced of this. And even if so, it is going to be a rocky road getting there.
Getting back to the OP, perhaps Norman Borlaug isn’t so famous because most people and the press aren’t interested in advancements that maintain the status quo (unlike technological advancements that lead to noticeable material changes such as cars, refrigeration, etc.). For that matter, the vast majority of famous people are entertainers. Maybe if he juggled bananas and pineapples while sowing crops, he’d be more famous?
This wasn’t the point I was trying to make, but I’ll look into it. What I was trying to suggest was that the problem is not a lack of food but that some people lack the means to effectively demand it - either because they are too poor, lack access to insurance or other finance markets or are oppressed by governments who don’t care about them and prevent information reaching those who do. (This is more or less in tune with economist A.K. Sen’s work on famines.)
This is not to say that local food shortages don’t occur or aren’t important, just that I don’t think there is or has been a global food shortage.
Well I dunno, it’s an interesting question. I suppose you could answer it by taking a big-ass model like GTAP and removing techical change. But what most of the doom-sayers tend to suggest is that we’re somehow near maximum feasible food output now (or that we were in the 1960s). I just don’t think this is so. We could produce much more food if we wanted to - but we don’t because agricultural prices are low. There’s lots of land and capital and labour that could be employed in food production. As you say december an effect of the green revolution in the US has been an abandonment of substantial land for agricultural purposes.
This of course is one reason that the green revolution had some undesirable side effects in some countries. If poverty rather than food production was really the problem (a lack of food AND a lack of stuff to trade for food) then technical change could make some farms unprofitable and many landless workers unemployed. In an economy not accustomed to rapid change, people displaced in such a circumstances face very serious problems finding new jobs and getting new skills.
ataraxy22 mentions the GM food thread as one with which this dovetails. Another very recent one is How is wealth created?. Suffice it to say that I am not convinced that it is impossible for all to live at current first world living standards - although if we are so to do we will have to do some things better.
