From the Better Living Through Learning desk, a book review in today’s WSJ reminds us how much progress has come via the tools of memory, reason and skill with which humanity has been blessed:
[Nobel Peace Prize laureate] Norman Borlaug, 92, is the father of the “Green Revolution,” the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s. He is now the subject of an admiring biography by Leon Hesser, a former State Department official who first met Mr. Borlaug 40 years ago in Pakistan, where they worked together to boost that country’s grain production. “The Man Who Fed the World” describes, in a workmanlike way, how a poor Iowa farm boy trained in forestry and plant pathology came to be one of humanity’s greatest benefactors.
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[…] Mr. Borlaug and his staff spent nearly 20 years breeding the high-yield dwarf wheat that sparked the Green Revolution. […] They also changed the architecture of the wheat, from tall gangly stems to shorter sturdier ones that produced more grain.
It was an achievement that made Mexico self-sufficient in wheat by the late 1950s and, when later deployed throughout much of the developing world, forestalled the mass starvation predicted by neo-Malthusians.
In the late 1960s, lest we forget, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions of people would perish. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in “The Population Bomb,” his 1968 best seller. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
As Mr. Ehrlich was making his dark predictions, Mr. Borlaug was embarking on just such a crash program. Working with scientists and administrators in India and Pakistan, he succeeded in getting his highly productive dwarf wheat varieties to hundreds of thousands of South Asian peasant farmers. These varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than traditional varieties.
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[Dr. Borlaug] also laments the unnecessary suspicion with which biotech is treated these days. “Activists have resisted research,” he notes, “and governments have overregulated it.” They both miss the point. “Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy: starvation is.”
From The Man Who Fed the World ($), by Ronald Bailey, WSJ Online, Sept. 5, 2006 (paragraphing slightly edited).
Read more about Dr. Borlaug and his achievements in his Wikipedia entry. Pictures of him from recent years depict a man astonishingly vigorous for his age.
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