It almost seems an understatement to say that Norman Borlaug, dead at 95, was one of the greatest men of his time. Through his plant breeding techniques, he saved more lives than anyone in human history, maybe a billion, and you would think there would be universal applause. Only there is not.
He had his opponents, people who are still fighting against ingenious means of increasing food production to defeat famine and malnutrition. They cite science but actually ignore it, refusing to consult facts that make palaver of their supposed profundities. Their real allegiance is to an anti-technology, anti-capitalist, radically pessimistic ideology of environmental extremism. I call them killer greenies.
From the time this man raised on an Iowa farm first began his tedious work in hot Mexican fields, trying everyway his genius could imagine to increase wheat yields, he had to deal with screeches nothing would work, that the population explosion meant hunger and agonizing death throughout the world. And yet he kept at it and found answers, the sum of which became known as "The Green Revolution."
It was no small thing, this revolution, as various accounts remind us. In so many desperate places -- India, Pakistan and Latin America -- grain output increased astonishingly, putting food in mouths that would otherwise have had little or nothing to chew, but the killer greenies still did not shut up, the bureaucrats never stopped getting in the way. Borlaug's techniques were furthering unsustainable population growth, destroying land and threatening biodiversity, some said. What was needed instead was more organic production.
The truth, as you discover in published interviews with Borlaug in such publications as Reason magazine and from the writings of strong defenders such as Dennis Avery of Hudson Institute, was something else on all these fronts.
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Because third-world farmers could produce more with fewer people using Borlaug's techniques, they had fewer children, slowing down the population boom. His methods enabled more food to be produced on little more land than had been used prior to their development, meaning that it was possible to preserve wilderness and protect biodiversity. Trying to feed everyone with organic techniques would require virtually every scrap of land not yet developed and still leave hundreds of millions to starve.
Borlaug, described as decidedly humble and self-effacing, nevertheless did speak out about "elites" who seemed to think undeveloped countries should be left that way, with scarcely a new road built and certainly no big corporation allowed to do the work necessary to help provide full stomachs. He saw a certain brand of environmental activists and sympathetic bureaucrats in international agencies as having done considerable harm and feared the misery they might cause through stymieing the extraordinary world-feeding potentiality of new bioengineered crops.
I myself find it nothing short of incredible that governments have been so much influenced by the preachments of such radicals on so many subjects and with such dire consequences. Some have been a force against using DDT to fight malaria and have thus contributed to countless deaths of children in sub-Saharan Africa.
They have fought against irradiation as a means of eradicating food poisoning. They have stood in the way of nuclear power even as they have aimed to reduce fossil-fuel production not replaceable in more than insignificant amounts by wind or solar power. They have stood against commercial forest thinning with the result of making wildfires worse.
As part of a Borlaug legacy that includes a goodly portion of the world population that might not be here without his work, his example of positive hope and scientific effort should stay very much alive in our consciousness, informing our own conclusions as people of drastically different disposition make their case, including some figures of considerable power in the Obama administration.
The killer greenies should not be allowed to win.
-- Ambrose is the former Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers. E-mail him at SpeaktoJay@aol.com .
