Thursday, Sept. 3, 2009
Few who are long in the tooth in the vast agricultural complex would ignore Norman Borlaug, a Texas A&M professor who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in bolstering the world’s food supply during the 1960s with the so-called Green Revolution. That revolution silenced doom-sayers by converting Mexico and India into net exporters of grain from net importers, with India particularly infamous prior to the breakthrough for its starving masses.
Borlaug and his fellow workers developed grain varieties adapted for those climates, increasing yields and literally saving millions of lives in the ensuing four decades. His remains an active voice, and as late as this past July 31 penned an opinion essay for the Wall Street Journal, warning against the “unfounded doubts” now assaulting the world’s modern food production tools for farmers. Those farming aids include items from the realms of science and technology. Genetically modified seed, synthetic fertilizer and pesticides are huge contributors to the ability of the world to fend off hunger. Even with them, Borlaug noted, 25,000 residents of this world die each day from malnutrition.
Here at home, he said, “some elements of popular culture romanticize older, inefficient production methods and shun fertilizers and pesticides, arguing that the U.S. should revert to producing only local organic food.”
He said those people who wish to buy organic foods and can afford them, should do so, “but not at the expense of the world’s hungry.”
In other words, why not try an attitude of live and let live? That might mean modern food policies based on the use of fertilizers and hybrid seeds and other measures that have fed the fortunate residents of the developed world, should be installed or invested or placed “into the hands of small-holder farmers in remote places like Africa with the potential for noted and measured impact.”
Borlaug operates from the baseline of facts. He wrote that the world’s current agricultural productivity developed over 10,000 years to become able to yield roughly six billion tons of food a year, which are nearly all consumed by almost seven billion persons. He projects another three billion people on earth by 2050. Somehow farmers on a shrinking available arable land base are going to have to increase production a lot. Factoring in increased prosperity (which presumably would create a demand for more expensive diets) and the 10 billion people, he said farmers will have to double their production. Even if they had to increase by just 50 or 60 percent, it appears to this columnist that meeting the food needs of 2050 will be difficult indeed.
The same kinds of gains in corn (40 percent) and soybeans (30 percent) in the 20 years between 1987 and 2007 must be done for rice and wheat, which have lagged behind, he said, at relative levels the same as they were at the close of the Green Revolution in 1970.
Borlaug calls for more public and private investments in wheat and rice to add productivity. Civilization, he said, cannot evolve or even survive without an adequate food supply. And, he said, the pace of investment and innovation must be accelerated in order for our children and grandchildren’s civilization to evolve.
