Gregg Easterbrook salutes Norman Borlaug, the anonymous genius who is credited with saving over one billion lives via his "Green Revolution" that boosted agricultural yields sufficiently to forestall mass famines as the world's population bomb went off. Borlaug died last week, age 95. Here is Easterbrook's money paragraph on the results of Borlaug's work:
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.
Leave it, then to (who else?) the Greens to oppose Borlaug bringing hybrid crops & new technology to Africa. Easterbrook offers detail plus Borlaug's tart response:
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.
Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that Europeans are incensed that Team Obama plans to weaken the successor treaty to the expiring Kyoto Accords. Team Obama wishes to substitute its own carbon emissions reduction plan for the European proposal; it would be less stringent, but have a chance to pass the US Senate. Stay tuned.
Manhattan Institute scholar Peter Huber sees Team Obama with the right goal--carbon emission reduction--but the wrong strategy. Instead of relying on renewables to replace oil, 44 should, PH writes, make natural gas, of which America has plenty, the vehicle fuel of the future, supplemented by electric cars.
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