Norman Borlaug
If you haven’t read about Norman Borlaug you can get quickly caught up here and here and here. I’ll extract a key bit from the article in The Age:
”Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the Earth, but many of them are elitists,” [Borlaug] told the Atlantic Monthly magazine.
”They’ve 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 fertiliser and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
Sound familiar? Sure. This is the typical refrain you hear from the folks at Monsanto, etcetera, when they are wiffle-batting criticisms of biotech back at “environmentalists.”
So an obit of a man who died at the age of 95 has very modern political relevance in the food world. And, hey, who wouldn’t want a Nobel Peace Prize winner backing up his side of the argument? But it would be a mistake for those advocating sustainable agriculture to react defensively to references to elitists, or to deny Prof Borlaug his due.
Things have changed in the decades since Prof Borlaug struggled to save millions from starvation as the world population exploded. His Nobel Prize, it’s worth remembering, was awarded in 1970. Population growth is still an issue, but now so too is climate change. A modern Borlaug, striving to feed the world’s poor in the coming century, certainly could not and would not dismiss the “environmental lobby” as elitist.
Sustainable agriculture is modern, hi-tech agriculture, even (and perhaps especially) when it is critical of chemical inputs and the use of genetic engineering for profit rather than for people. Almost all organic farmers these days, for example, are innovators, entrepreneurs and developers—nothing like the caricature of a back-to-the-land, hippie Luddite. It is safe for progressives to acknowledge Borlaug’s legacy while continuing to reflect on the defects of the “Green Revolution” and without worrying too much about the way his words and experience may be taken out of context by some people to push product.
i wonder what borlaug said about the idea (fact?) that today the problem of starvation has less to do with inadequate production and more with inadequate distribution, produced, in part, by using starvation as a political tool (as is done quite a bit in africa, if i understand correctly)