HAVE MORE KIDS, WE'LL MAKE MORE FOOD:

The Man Who Defused the "Bomb" (Steven Martinovich, 03/25/2004, Tech Central Station)

In the long history of the global popularity contest known as the Nobel Prizes it's beyond debate that more than a few of them were undeserved. What should also be beyond debate, however, was the merit in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. Norman Borlaug in 1970. Despite the fact that Borlaug -- who celebrates his 90th birthday on March 25 -- isn't a household name, he is owed a debt by the world that is simply beyond calculation.

Borlaug's contribution to the world is what we know today as high-yield farming. During the Depression Borlaug, who had already made a name for himself researching the rust fungus, noted that areas that employed high-yield farming saw less soil lost to wind than those that employed traditional practices. Borlaug decided that his life's mission would be to spread the word about the benefits of high-yield farming.

Borlaug took that mission to Mexico in the 1940s when he became director of a wheat program. There he developed crops that were able to grow in a wide variety of climates and more quickly. Combined with fertilizer and irrigation, Borlaug's new wheat was the answer to a problem that not many people were thinking about in the years after the Second World War. The world's population was growing quickly and many third world nations faced the prospect of perpetual famine.

In 1965, India and Pakistan were two of those nations. The famines were so extreme that the institutional resistance to Borlaug's technology disappeared. The results spoke for themselves. Just three years later Pakistan became self-sufficient in wheat product. Despite a prediction by Paul Ehrlich in 1968's "The Population Bomb" that it was a "fantasy" that India would ever do the same, it managed the feat for all cereals by 1974. In 1967, the average Indian consumed 1,875 calories a day. That same average Indian consumed 2,466 calories a day in 1998 even while the population of India doubled during that period.

What Borlaug was able to do, as Gregg Easterbrook illustrated in a 1997 Atlantic Monthly essay, was grow more grain, for more people on only marginally more land. [...]

[H]e continues to add to his legacy as the man, as Easterbrook wrote, who "has already saved more lives than any other person who ever lived."

Here's a bit of free advice: if a Malthusian offers you a bet, take it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 25, 2004 7:57 PM