An inconvenient truth about saving millions of lives
World grain production grew by an astounding 250 percent between 1950 and 1984. This "Green Revolution" was the product of irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide programs that transformed international agriculture and ensured that food production would keep up with population growth.
Oh, and there was one more component of this famine-averting agenda: a basic form of genetic modification called plant breeding. High-yielding strains of rice, corn and wheat were central to its success. The American agronomist Norman Borlaug, who died on Saturday, introduced these high-yielding varieties to Mexico, Pakistan and India and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work. In a tribute on his 90th birthday in 2004, the US Senate declared, "It is very likely that Dr. Borlaug is directly responsible for saving more lives than anyone else in the twentieth century."
And today? With more mouths than ever to feed and millions dying each year of malnutrition, the need to take Borlaug's work to the next level is more pressing than ever, but what have we got? Prince Charles declaring that genetic modification is "guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time" and fundamentalists in the EU and the US spreading fear of "Frankenfood".
In Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity by Gregg Easterbrook, which appeared in The Atlantic in 1997, Borlaug said: "Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. 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 fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."
By all means, let's have rigorous testing of genetically modified foods before we introduce them, but let us also grasp the opportunity to help the world's malnourished people by making the best of what biotechnology has to offer. Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution deserves no less.
