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Father of Green Revolution, Norman Borlaug, Dies at 95
countincognito writes "Norman Borlaug, a genuinely remarkable man and the father of the Green Revolution in agriculture, has died of cancer at his Dallas home aged 95. His life's work on developing high-yield, disease-resistant crops has been credited with having saved an estimated one billion people from famine, and one billion hectares of forest and rainforest from being cleared for agricultural production."
And probably now heralded by most 'green' supporters as some sort of horrific monster that messed with nature to create these crops.
A bit of an emendation:
That's what fundamentally made him a good recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He made high-yield new seeds, and encouraged farmers to use them, spread them, replant them in subsequent years, etc., giving them greater food security and freedom. He didn't, to the contrary, patent them, prohibit replanting seeds in subsequent years, and so on. That would have still increased crop yields, but would've made farmers dependent on Borlaug to buy seeds every year, which was the opposite of his intention.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sooner or later you hit a limiting resource. Land, water, energy etc. A better investment would have birth control and birth control education.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Just so slashdotters are aware, Norman Borlaug acted primarily as a humanitarian. His goals often intersected with common sense efforts in ecological preservation and education, but don't go off misinterpreting his "Green Revolution" as an environmental movement just because of the word Green. His greatest goals and achievements were the alleviation of human suffering and famine, and he typically pursued environmental goals as methods of achieving this, not as ends in themselves.
Hey, if you're so worried about overpopulation, I'm sure you'll take one for the team and off yourself right now, won't you?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's 10,000,000 km^2 or larger than Canada, only Russia is larger.
That page mentions this: The total land area of the world is 148,940,000 km2 (57,510,000 sq mi)[3] (about 29.1% of the Earth's surface area).. In other words, what he did prevented the clearing of 6.7 percent of the Earth's surface for agriculture.
I find that figure a little difficult to believe, but I don't know that much about agriculture or what kind of impact deforestation for agriculture has. I did find this bit on forests though:
So what he did saved about 20% of the total forested areas from clearing.
Again, a bit difficult to believe, but whatever.
Why is this the first line of attack anytime the subject of overpopulation comes up? There are at least a few ways to try to reduce the number of humans expected to be inhabiting this planet years from now other than "offing people". Contraception in poorer areas? Raising the standard of living to statistically lower the number of offspring parents have? Just jumping to "OMG OVERPOPULATION KILL YOURSELF LOLROFL!!@#" doesn't add anything to the debate.
Then again, if they're advocating committing mass murder or genocide for the sake of conserving resources...
What you fail to appreciate is that he changed the rules of the game. Where using previous crops, the world could only support x number of people, using his enriched crops, the world could support X+Y people. He increased the efficiency of agriculture, and thereby bushed back the numeric threshold for 'overpopulation' considerably. And since you can get more crops from less land, there was less species depletion, more concentrated land impact, and less ag pollution because of reduced fertilizer needs.
Are there still problems? Yeah. But this guy was a giant, and too an overwhelming problem and made it a little less insurmountable.
Without his contribution, one billion people would have died of famine, and one billion hectares of forest would have been cleared. In other words, the ecosystem could only sustain one billion fewer people, and the existing population would have cleared one billions hectares of forest.
With his contribution, the ecosystem now sustains that additional 1 billion: the total number of mouths is 6 billion. There is now not a need to clear that additional billion hectares of forest.
However, the population continues to grow. It will reach such a size that famine will kill one billion people and that hunger will force the clearing of an additional billion hectares of forest.
Overpopulation is the root cause of many problems: energy shortage, famine, global warming, etc. The 4 horsemen of the apocalypse are approaching. We can already hear the hooves of the horses.
"High-yield, disease-resistant crops" reduce both of these.
Which carbon?
You think global famine would be a good way to stop it?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Wars are caused by 3 things, the top being food. One man actually was able to remove one cause that's plagued mankind for the last 20,000 years with science. For his credit, he even went as far as to push it into Africa. Unfortunately, when you have a vastly unstable region with no government control you can only do so much.
Nah this guy is one of histories greatest individuals. If only the ignorant actually understood what he actually achieved, and what high-yield crop farming could do, they'd figure out that Africa could feed the world, and you wouldn't even need to worry about hunger anywhere.
Than again, maybe you're one of those assholes who believe in positive population checks. You know, all war is good war, all diseases that wipeout mankind are good, and all starvation that keeps the peasants dead are good.
Om, nomnomnom...
There is no such thing as overpopulation that can't be solved by re-engineering our cities/factories and changing our lifestyles. Yes, other species and ecosystems will be be strained and always have been by growing human populations but the idea that the earth can only sustain a certain amount of humans is both naive and absurd. The biomass during this epoch is far less than the Triassic and Jurassic periods when huge 20 ton monsters roamed the country eating a good part of their body weight per day. This went on for 10's of millions of years. Even Americans aren't that big yet. According to the 1970's chicken littles like yourself we should all be dead by now. Well, um that didn't happen because technology solved many of the problems that were emerging at the time and we will continue solving them contrary to naysayers like yourself.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
You have it exactly backwards, my friend.
The population is already there.
Norman Borlaug, by increasing crop yield per area REDUCED the amount of land used for agriculture. This also has the effect of REDUCING deforestation, thereby INCREASING atmospheric carbon loading. By increasing the pest resistance of the crop REDUCED agricultural pollution.
... is no more.
Future generations will scarcely believe that such a man walked the earth.
There are more human ways to control overpopulation. Limited food supplies is the way it works in nature, but we humans should use our intelligence.
Dr. Borlaug himself was aware of the overpopulation problem, but that's something for politicians and religious leaders to solve, a scientist should do his best to alleviate human suffering, even if it should create other problems.
1. Borlaug's wheat wasn't GM. He was saving hundred of million of people in the 1960s. GM crops weren't developed for another 30 years.
2. Seeds aren't organic. It's what you do to the them after you plant them that makes food organic or conventional.
3. Ask any of the Indian cotton pickers, who despite living on less than a dollar a day won't pick non-GM cotton because of the huge amount of pesticides they're exposed to, if they don't want GM crops.
4. Not having anything to eat (called starvation) has been proven by scientists to be bad for your health. Borlaug's wheat wasn't more nutritious, it produced more food on the same land, so people who otherwise would have starved didn't.
5. Most of current GM crops don't increase yield (though there's really cool stuff coming out over the next five years). BT crops reduce the use of toxic insecticides. Herbicide resistance crops let us switch from more toxic herbicides like atrazine to less toxic ones like glyphosate and also promote no-till agriculture which reduces the erosion of the top soil we'll need if we ever want to feed our grandchildren.
In conclusion, you seem to know nothing about these topics (food and agriculture and genetic engineering). If you're interested, educate yourself, I wish more people were engaged. Otherwise don't be surprised if no one takes you seriously.
The checks and balances are still in place and killing an irritating voice won't change anything.
The problem is that antropomorphosizing earth and nature through giving them political tools like "checks and balances" doesn't really shed any light on the real problem that not all people have access to the education/knowledge that puts them in control of how many kids they will have.
There is nothing wrong about recognizing natures limits and living accordingly I would say.
What might arrise from using his particularly unfitting words is that some people may go ahead and enforce the checks and balances before "mother nature" does it, much like your need to keep the idiot count low.
Je me souviens.
On a basic level you are right, but that is not the whole picture. Indeed, a misguided but well intentioned "caretaker" providing food for a feral cat colony will indeed be causing greater suffering than they alleviate as the queens are able to have more and larger litters. This leads to extreme levels of competition for all other resources and the rampant spread of disease. However, there are more nuanced features of population dynamics that have to be considered. When there is a low chance of offspring surviving to reproduction, organisms (including people) tend to have MORE offspring, rather than fewer. In fact, they will have tend to have offspring at a rate that is greater than that which is necessary to maintain population size, because otherwise in the long run you would likely become a genetic dead end. Having this increased birth rate leads to more population stress, leading to lowered rates of survival to breeding age, thus birth rate is increased via breeding earlier and more often. This leads to dramatic boom cycles, followed by bust cycles when the local environment's production capacity is temporally exceeded. These bust/boom cycles, in turn, lead to even higher birthrates per breeding female... and so on.
But, by altering the local environment to increase the chances of an individual offspring making it to adulthood, technological societies reduce the dependence on high birth rate to maintain a genetic lineage. Increased access to nutritional food, clean water, and basic health care will increase survivorship leading to a short lived population boom, but at this time the perceived value of an individual life is increased somewhat. The key here is allowing some level of self interest where a person can pursue goals which are not merely survival oriented, but for the long term betterment of themselves, and thus society.
Our ability to manipulate our environment such that a literally supernatural proportion of children survive to adulthood, and thus the care this affords us to put into each individual child, allows human beings to place an extraordinarily high value on an individual life: contrary to the opinion that many have of humans being a violent species, our rate of intraspecific killing is about 1/1000th that of the average animal. This lower rate of person on person killing of course leads to higher value of human life, so more care put into an individual child and therefore lower birth rates. As has been pointed out elsewhere, this is to the point that most Westernized societies actually have negative internal population growth (I.E. death rate minus birth rate) and population sizes are only increasing due to immigration from poorer places with higher population growth.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
His work was funded by the US Government, the Mexican Government, and the Rockefeller foundation among others. Seeds, like software, do more good for more people when they're free. But if we want more Norman Borlaugs, we (the public) need to support their research and their outreach to the farmers who need their help. Otherwise all the new breakthroughs will be made by for-profic companies like Monsanto with the negative intellectual property consequences you mention.
The best example of this I can think of is golden rice, which would be fighting vitamin A deficiency around the world, but still hasn't been released because of a lack of public funding for safety trials and introgressing the trait into the kinds of rice best adapted to different parts of the world.
And since you can get more crops from less land, there was less species depletion, more concentrated land impact, and less ag pollution because of reduced fertilizer needs.
Despite all the great things about Green Revolution, reduced fertilizer use isn't one of them. The high-yield crops outperform the traditional crops under "certain conditions", and that certain conditions are: (1) high pesticide use, to counteract the possibility of widespread pest due to the monoculture nature of high-yield crops, (2) high fertilizer use, since just basic chemistry tells you that it would need more nutrients to produce more seeds, (3) high water use, for the same reason.
Green revolution may have helped reduce the overall use of these three things per capita and help concentrate the use to limited area of lands, but I wouldn't be so hasty to claim that without some proof somewhere—and since this is a case of what might have been, chances are, it's hard to prove it one way or another.
I apologize for not being clear... I was the author of the second anonymous coward post, not the original. I in no way endorse the views of the first, and understand your sentiment in your response to them. Feeding hungry people should never be denigrated. Nonetheless, jumping to the "just kill yourself if you think the world is overpopulated" line of attack doesn't really contribute anything to the conversation. The best way to fight ignorance isn't always to ridicule; sometimes, clarity of argument and thought goes a long way.
The so called green revolution if anything had no net impact on global hunger and starvation as it simply does not address the core cause: overpopulation.
Your statement is completely incorrect. Famine does not exist to any great extent today, 40 years after Borlaug's seeds went to Pakistan. At the very least Borlaug bought us 40 years to solve the popultion problem, and probably longer since the growth rate of world population has decreased due to improved economic conditions in much of the world.
As far as pesticides, there is no epidemiological study that backs up your wild claims. And as far as topsoil erosion, that issue has largely been resolved by no or low till farming. And in any case why would Borlaug's work have any negative impact on that at all - in fact by reducing the amount of land in cultivation it has had a remarkable beneficial effect on stopping desertification and soil erosion that we saw so dramatically in the American Midwest in the 1930s, and we still see in the sub-saraha where politics has kept traditional farming techniques and rampant famines ongoing.
If we were to go back to traditional farming methods we would have to reduce the world population by a factor of 4 in order to keep the amount of cultivated land where it is today.
Since you seem to feel so strongly about this issue I STRONGLY recommend that you do your personal best to reduce the overpopulation problem immediately.
Beyond that point, the effect of the "green revolution" has simply been new population growth until disease, environmental destruction, famine, and war limit population size again.
War, disease, and population growth happen regardless. If people are farming just to eat, they can't afford any sort of education, entertainment, or intellectual stimulation; but guess what form of recreation is free? Likewise, people who are well fed and don't have to spend their entire life just trying to grow some food to stay alive, have the time and resources for the above things; most importantly, education. You can say "well, they should have brought education/birth control before you brought food" all they want, but realistically, if people are starving, they aren't going to care about what you say in those regards because they're too busy trying find something to fill the void and hunger pang; in fact, they just might kill you for your sandwich if you had one. It's called desperation.
Worse yet, a lot of the techniques of the "green revolution" are unsustainable, have caused social upheaval, and have cause traditional, sustainable methods to disappear.
Overall, we're worse off with these methods than we would be otherwise.
Traditional methods disappear because they're terribly inefficient. Subsistence farming is a terrible way to live, and I'd rather have a soulless, mechanical, factory farm supplying food to a group than having the population uneducated because they don't have time for any other sort of education, entertainment, or intellectual stimulation.
Overall, we're worse off with these methods than we would be otherwise.
I fail to see hundreds of millions of people suffering from starvation to be "better off otherwise"
Touche. First time contributor, long time lurker. =D
Bolaug is one of two Americans and the only scientist to have won:
The Congressional Gold Medal
The Presidential Medal of Freedom
The Nobel Peace Prize
The other winners are Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Elie Wiesel.
The following is a list of Norman E. Borlaug's major awards and honors:
- Nobel Peace Prize, 1970.
- Election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 1970 and nine Foreign Academies.
- Aztec Eagle, Government of Mexico, 1970.
- Outstanding Agricultural Achievement Award, World Farm Foundation (USA), 1971.
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (USA), 1977.
- Jefferson Award, American Institute for Public Service, 1980.
- Distinguished Achievement Award in Food and Agricultural Sciences, Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (USA), 1982.
- The Presidential World without Hunger Award: Educator/Scientist category (USA), 1985.
- The 1988 Americas Award, The Americas Foundation (USA).
- Jefferson Lifetime Achievement Award (USA), 1997.
- Altruistic Green Revolution Award, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1998.
- Recognition Award for Contributions to World Wheat and Maize Research and Production, Republic of El Salvador, 1999.
- Dedication of Norman E. Borlaug Center for Southern Crop Improvement, Texas A&M University, 1999.
- Vannevar Bush Award, National Science Foundation (USA), 2000.
- Memorial Centennial Medial of the N.I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry (Russia), 2000.
- Public Welfare Medal, National Academy of Sciences (USA), 2002.
- The 2002 Rotary International Award for World Understanding and Peace, Barcelona, Spain.
- The Philip Hauge Abelson Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002.
- Award for Distinguished Achievements to Science and Medicine, American Council of Science and Health, 2003.
- National Medal of Science (USA), 2004.
- Padma Vibhushan in Science and Engineering, awarded by the Government of India, 2006.
- Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture created as part of the Texas A&M University System, 2006.
- Congressional Gold Medal, 2006.
- Honorary Degrees:
Punjab Agricultural University (India), 1969
Royal Norwegian Agricultural College (Norway), 1970
Luther College (USA), 1970
Kanpur University (India), 1970
Uttar Pradesh Agricultural University (India), 1971
Michigan State University (USA), 1971
Universidad de la Plata (Argentina), 1971
University of Arizona (USA), 1972
University of Florida (USA), 1973
Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile), 1974
Universität Hohenheim (Germany), 1976
Punjab Agricultural University, (Pakistan), 1978
Columbia University, (USA), 1980
Ohio State University (USA), 1981
University of Minnesota (USA), 1982
University of Notre Dame (USA), 1987
Oregon State University (USA), 1988
University of Tulsa (USA), 1991
Washington State University (USA) 1995
Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University (India), 1996
Indian Agricultural Research Institute (India), 1996
De Montfort University, (United Kingdom), 1997
Emory University, (U.S.A) 1999
University of the Philippines, 1999
University of Missouri, (USA), 2002
Williams College, (USA), 2002
Wartburg College (USA), 2003
Dartmouth College (USA), 2005
Doctor of Agricultural Sciences:
University of Agricultural Sciences (Godollo, Hungary), 1980
Tokyo University of Agriculture (Japan), 1981
Doctor en Ciencias Agropecuarias Honoris Causa, Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Turena, República Dominicana, 1983
Doctor en Ciencias, Honoris Causa Universidad Central del Este de la República Dominicana, 1983
Doctor Humane Letters:
Gustavus Adolphus College (USA), 1971
Iowa State University (USA), 1992
Cape Coast University (Ghana), 2000
Doctor of Law:
New Mexico State University (USA), 1973
Doctor of Agriculture:
True, but that was possible only because his work was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. Ironically, the biggest "robber baron" the world ever saw started a philantropic foundation that made possible the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug.
You first then. If you really believe overpopulation is the problem, then how about you do what you can to solve it and off yourself? After all, the fact that you have Internet access and time to mess around on Slashdot shows that you are privileged, you live in an industrial nation and use more resources than many in the world, so you'll do more good.
Don't want to kill yourself? Then let's not hear how bad someone is who worked to keep others alive. If you think it is ok for you to stick around, you don't have the right to hate on others for wishing to do the same.
Then there's your idiotic GMO rant. Never mind that total factual inaccuracy (with corresponding lack of support) there is the fact that as Pauli said "That's not right. It's not even wrong." Borlaug's work did not start with GMOs, it was with cross breeding and the like, introducing new strains to harsh areas. If you oppose selective breeding too, well then you are going to find it hard to eat anything. Next to nothing we eat, not even "organic" foods haven't been engineered in that fashion. It has been going on for over a century in a systematic way, and long before that in a less precise way.
So tell you what, if you aren't interested in putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak, and removing yourself and your resource usage, how about you go and live in a developing country for a while. I don't mean visit one and stay in a hotel, I mean go live a subsistence lifestyle. Go live without power, running water and so on for a bit. Live where your ability to eat depends on what you can grow or kill. See how things are. Then see if maybe your opinion on people like Dr. Borlaug changes a bit.
I get more than a little annoyed with people who live privileged lives bitching about those trying to help people without. STFU and enjoy your nice life. That, or prove you are serious about overpopulation being the real problem and are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in that regard. But don't hate on those that disagree with you, and just want to make things better for everyone.
Your assumption is based on the idea that the only energy we can receive is from the sun, and the only land we can populate is Earth. Why is that the case? While we can't currently populate other worlds, it seems pretty stupid to declare we'll never be able to. We have no idea what our future technology will make possible. However, it is fair to say, that it'll be far and above what we have now, including some things that are inconceivable at this point.
There is no reason that overpopulation will happen. It may, but it is far from certain. There are two major things that could prevent it:
1) Technology grows at a rate that allows us to produce resources at a greater rate than the population grows. That's what has been happening so far. Our technology has been progressing fast enough that we can produce enough to feed our growth. These days, sadly, the problem with hunger is usually one of politics, not one of production limitations. You have places like Zimbabwe that could produce massive amounts of food, but don't because of the people in power. So far, we haven't started needing more than we can produce, our technology has grown faster.
2) Voluntary reduction in population growth. Something you discover is that in nations with a high standard of living, growth rate tends to be low or even negative. People voluntarily stop having so many children. As such it stands to reason that if we can bring up the standard of living around the world, over all birth rate will fall. Eventually, we may reach a slow/no growth level, simply by choice, rather than any kind of scarcity forcing it.
I'm not saying this is how it will go. I have no idea, nor does anyone. What I'm saying is that this idea of overpopulation being inevitable is bunk. No, we may well develop technology that more or less allows us to grow infinitely, we may choose to slow our growth, maybe both.
Personally, I have no issue at all with Al Gore spending his money as he sees fit. His hypocrisy doesn't bother me much, either. It's when governments use his line of crap as a basis for misanthropic policies that I have a problem.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The so called green revolution if anything had no net impact on global hunger and starvation as it simply does not address the core cause: overpopulation.
OK then, kill yourself, do your bitch Gaia a favor.
Oh, did you mean just poor brown short people should die/never be born then?
Their point is simply that people who want to prevent "overpopulation" are being completely unrealistic. Reproduction is something that living creatures do instinctively. It's not going to stop, and it probably won't even slow down of it's own accord unless you are able to educate *everyone* to believe it. You might as well say that we should start offing ourselves as well, because individual survival is only one step up from reproduction on the importance scale. It would also be a more efficient means of dealing with overpopulation since you are getting the problem at the root... assuming you are someone who is someday going to reproduce.
Let's be clear here, when there was high mortality rates, people didn't stop having kids, they kept having kids until some of them survived long enough. That is what you are facing when you are making the overpopulation argument. People do not *want* to control the population. On a macro scale, they cannot do it, unless repression is employed, and even then, I'm not convinced that it can be maintained.
That's why "solving" overpopulation is really not where you are going to get much traction on the problem. And that is why it is absurd to cut down the achievements of someone who increased the carrying capacity of the planet to allow for more people to suffer less with less environmental damage.
Actually reduced fertilizer use is one of them
Interestingly, world fertilizer use went up from 69 million tons in 1970 to 145 million tons in 1988, more than doubling while population only went up 30%.
Since then, we've leveled out around 140 million tons with nearly twice the population of 1970, so we are about at the same amount of fertilizer per capita.
While I realise you want to suggest that he kills himself, his personal best isn't killing one person, it's killing off a few dozen. Nothing like a trailer park or high school massacre to reduce the local populace.
You aim so low! Mao starved 30 million people to death during the Great Leap Forward farm collectivization. Think about how many people you can kill if you are a politician!
On the one hand (and I'd say the bigger hand), the Green Revolution ushered in the world-wide use of many really good technologies for helping to feed the planet -- high-yield crops and better use of irrigation.
On the other hand, it also ushered in a world of heavy use of herbicides and pesticides (much of which is petroleum based) and nitrogen-fertilizers (which are made in a process that burns natural gas). Fertilizer run-off is killing huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico due to algal blooms and anoxic zones, and pesticide use in some Midwestern states taints the groundwater and causes birth defects. The dependency on petroleum resources in our agriculture bodes ill because of climate change and dwindling oil supplies over the next century.
In the balance between the two, it's undeniable that the Green Revolution has saved far more lives than it has harmed, but a lot people in the environmental movement tend to less aware of the problems solved by the solutions of half a century ago than the problems they cause today. That latter fact tends to lead (as ANY political argument about ANYTHING does) to demonizing people responsible for the problems we face today, when we should view the Green Revolution as a great achievement with a few flaws here and there that can be improved upon with better science and with grassroots demand for cleaner, greener food (and not just cheap food). We can thank the Green Revolution for the luxury to demand that.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Quite simply.
1. The technology was developed mostly because of environmental concerned about pollen drift. Farmers have been buying hybrid seed since the 1940s.
2. When the technology was announced, everyone hated it (as you well know). To the point where Monsanto hasn't actually sold a single seed containing the trait. I'm serious.
Find me a field of commercial (not research) corn or soybeans or cotton or anything else that'll produce nothing by sterile seeds and I'll eat my words. Until then stop spreading the misinformation that'll be mindlessly echoed by poor people like Starcub who trust you.