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Opening Arguments

RIP, Norman Borlaug

"An adequate supply of food is the first component of social justice." That was from the speech of Norman Borlaug in 1970 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize; he was one of the winners who actually deserved the prize. It is said that he saved a billion lives, which might be a slight exaggeration, but he certainly saved tens of millions with his work on wheat and rice that resulted in far greatrer yields per acre. This put him at odds with environmentalists unhappy with the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers:

"They claim that the consumer is being poisoned out of existence by the current high-yielding systems of agricultural production and recommend we revert back to lower-yielding, so-called sustainable technologies," he said in a speech in New Orleans in 1993.

Unfortunately, he said, it is not possible to turn the clock back to the 1930s, when the population of the world was 2.2 billion. It was estimated at 5.6 billion in 1995 and was projected to rise to 8.3 billion by 2025.

He was no Malthusian, but he worried about the planet having too many mouths to feed for there to be a decent standard of living for all. But since man is "a potentially rational being," he held out hope humankind would recognize its "self-destructive course" and adjust growth rates.

Comments

Doug
Mon, 09/14/2009 - 10:17am

Malthus was off on the numbers, but I still think he had a point. We are definitely capable of reproducing ourselves at a rate that exceeds our ability to come up with new ways to feed ourselves. (See, e.g. the Duggars - "it's a uterus, not a clown car!")

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