While Patrick Swayze’s death gets more media attention, (I never got Dirty Dancing, but his turn in Donnie Darko remains one of the more disturbing performances I’ve ever seen) a man who made a far greater impact on the lives of more people died a few days ago after a very long and exceptionally productive life. Norman Borlaug brought modern plant-breeding techniques to the developing world, allowing countries like Mexico and India to become self-sufficient in grain production, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work.
Borlaug remained an unapologetic advocate for industrial agriculture, as shown in this 2000 interview, making a point that is often neglected in discussions of the environmental impact of organic compared to high-tech agriculture:
Reason: Environmentalists say agricultural biotech will harm biodiversity.
Borlaug: I don’t believe that. If we grow our food and fiber on the land best suited to farming with the technology that we have and what’s coming, including proper use of genetic engineering and biotechnology, we will leave untouched vast tracts of land, with all of their plant and animal diversity. It is because we use farmland so effectively now that President Clinton was recently able to set aside another 50 or 60 million acres of land as wilderness areas. That would not have been possible had it not been for the efficiency of modern agriculture.
You’re right, Robert – Borlaug saved far, far more lives than Oxfam, Medecin sans Frontieres, Bob Geldof and Mother Teresa combined. And saved more rainforest too.
But where are all the organic wholistic (sic) ecologically sound commenters? Are they too ashamed to acknowledge the legacy of an unabashed promoter of technology (including pesticides, artificial fertilisers and above all genetic engineeeering) in the service of humanity?
I wouldn’t say that the correct path is that of the idealogue in either direction, technophile or luddite. I suppose someone else will list all the things like CJD and dead rivers that are the other side of this coin.
If we are going to live with climate change without large proportions of the population starving we will need to use all the smarts we have. For example, Australian agriculture depends heavily on crops that “need good follow-up rains” to produce anything. In a world of more uncertain weather we need to find crops and ways of farming that can take advantage of an isolated storm.
We also needs ways of farming that use fertilizers, water etc. more efficiently.
“But where are all the organic wholistic (sic) ecologically sound commenters? Are they too ashamed to acknowledge the legacy of an unabashed promoter of technology (including pesticides, artificial fertilisers and above all genetic engineeeering) in the service of humanity?”
Perhaps those of [ecologically] sound mind are aware that the issue of equitable distribution of food, like every other resource in the world, is a more complex issue than technology alone can solve.
It’s sad that such a complex and difficult topic as food security and how the heck to do it sustainably is reduced to simplistic sneering, not least by the hilariously named “Reason” magazine. Shame you couldn’t find an interview with Burlaug in a more credible home Robert, it would have done the man more credit, which he deserves.
Whether the final verdict on the Green Revolution will be overall a positive or a negative remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt that people like Burlaug were motivated by the very best of reasons and contributed enormously to the world. I hope Burlaug passed away secure in the knowledge of what he had achieved – I reckon the Nobel might have helped with that.
Now onto DD -
You’re right, Robert – Borlaug saved far, far more lives than Oxfam, Medecin sans Frontieres, Bob Geldof and Mother Teresa combined. And saved more rainforest too.
First of all I’m really not sure what you’re trying to prove by throwing in MSF, who deal solely in supplying medical aid, most often after conflict or natural disaster and have nothing to do with food aid or security, or sustainability. Ditto Mother Teresa. I can only assume you were grasping about for a suitable group of organisations to deride and got it wrong, or weren’t really sure of the point you were trying to make.
But where are all the organic wholistic (sic) ecologically sound commenters? Are they too ashamed to acknowledge the legacy of an unabashed promoter of technology (including pesticides, artificial fertilisers and above all genetic engineeeering) in the service of humanity?
Right here! You might care to read a few articles on the considerable body of evidence across fields as diverse as sociology, geopolitics, ecology, agronomy and economics that point out the very serious flaws of industrial agriculture as promoted by the Green Revolution.
You can find a handy summary for kids on the FAO website, here.
A more in-depth article on the impacts of the Green Revolution on women as one example can be found at the FAO here
The work of people like Burlaug was incredibly important for finding some relatively immediate solutions for widespread hunger. Unfortunately it came at a considerable price, particularly in terms of soil degradation and erosion; unsustainable water use and contamination of water supplies; reliance on external inputs that stratified the benefits of the Revolution and also had the unintended consequence of forcing farmers to rely on their ability to purchase fertiliser, pesticided and herbicides to crop and loss of agricultural biodiversity.
It also had the consequence of reorienting a great deal of food production in developing nations from sustainable polycultures that fed local populations to export-oriented monocultures – ie food production to feed locals was displaced by those with enough money to invest and gain access to the same lands to grow food for export (either regionally or internationally). In some areas this also had a considerable impact on nutrition – some have argued that the Green Revolution stopped widespread mass starvation, but replaced it with widespread malnutrition as traditional high nutrient crops were replaced with single monocultures. The historic replacement of pulse crops in the Indian Punjab with wheat is a good example.
this paper from the Rodale Institute makes a good case for where to next, ie a sustainable green revolution. If it happens, it will nonetheless be built on the shoulders of Burlaug and others despite the shortcomings touched on above.
oh crap, with apologies to the late Prof. Borlaug, I didn’t notice that my spell checker ‘corrected’ his name.
Brilliant, Furious lays out the short version, and Myriad comes in for the smack down. Couldn’t agree more with either of you.
Borlaugh was motivated by the best of reasons, and his direct actions without doubt saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. Unfortunately his legacy will be a mixed one that may very well cost more, as others have taken what was intended to be a short term solution – or at least specific solutuion – and applied it with no thought to the future.
This said, the man is a hero in my book. It would have been very easy for him to take a profit-maximising route with his reasearch, but instead he focussed mostly on those who needed it most at the time. A very selfless act.
Myriad, thanks for the links.
That said, I personally think that the long term future of the rural poor is a replication of what has happened in developed countries. In short, most people moving out of the agricultural sector entirely, rather than trying to recreate a more technologically sophisticated version of subsistence farming.
How many documented cases are there of Borlaug’s GR actually preventing the sort of famine they were sposed to prevent?
I’d be curious to know.
I prefer Vandana Shiva to NB and think she had some valid criticisms of the green revolution. Tho I dunno how fair it is to lay all that at borlaug’s feet.
One real problem is that the green revolution has contributed to population expansion, and a fair bit of the GR as its played out is dependant on energy inputs in the form of ferts pesticides and the machinery needed to harvest huge areas, not to mention transport packaging etc etc.
We are facing peak oil, if we haven’t already passed it and without cheap oil much of the continued argicultural output we have these days may be in threatened.
in threatened??? sorry me need engrish lessons.
Jules, fair point about population. However, Borlaug himself noted the need for limiting population growth.
As for peak oil and agriculture. For the purposes of making pesticides, we can synthesize virtually any petrochemical you want from any organic feedstock, provided you’re prepared to pay a high enough price for it. Given pesticides are very high-value products, the cost of synthesizing the base chemicals from coal or even biomass would be a relatively small part of the costs.
For making fertilizer, you need hydrogen, which in the past few decades has come from natural gas, and possibly carbon dioxide, which as we all know can be had in fairly abundant supply from combusting any organic compound you choose. But you can get hydrogen from coal or from the electrolysis of water if needs be, at not too outrageous a price.
Farm machinery is another question, but as a last resort steam tractors would work.
Jules,
I’d be cautious about making claims that the GR contributed to population expansion, I really don’t think we can say that definitively. There’s certainly a body of evidence that points the other way, ie as food security increased for many population stabilised or declined in response to the greater stability afforded by (relatively) more abundant food.
Robert, I know this is your view of where agriculture is heading, but personally I hope you’re wrong as the developed world suffers just as much from many of the deleterious impacts of industrial farming, and we not only need to address that, we certainly need to stop exporting it as a solution.
That said it’s doubtful that given the particularly high human density forms of farming practiced in many parts of the world that this will remain – accessibility to other viable options both on-farm and off will drive that. But sadly people are still currently leaving rural communities the world over for mostly the wrong set of push and pull factors, not the right ones.
From Borlaug’s own mouth re: population
“Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the ‘Population Monster’ … If it continues to increase at the estimated present rate of two percent a year, the world population will reach 6.5 billion by the year 2000. Currently, with each second, or tick of the clock, about 2.2 additional people are added to the world population. The rhythm of increase will accelerate to 2.7, 3.3, and 4.0 for each tick of the clock by 1980, 1990, and 2000, respectively, unless man becomes more realistic and preoccupied about this impending doom. The tick-tock of the clock will continually grow louder and more menacing each decade. Where will it all end?”
“…I have no doubt yields will keep going up, whether they can go up enough to feed the population monster is another matter. Unless progress with agricultural yields remains very strong, the next century will experience sheer human misery that, on a numerical scale, will exceed the worst of everything that has come before.”
patrickg – so Borlaug was a bit Malthusiatic about the future then?
How are those aquifers, a.k.a. “fossil water”, looking?
I’m sure Emma Tom has already suggested that we farm vegetarians for meat.
Excellent modest proposal, Sean @ 16!
Then we can all be cannibals on a health kick …
Very much so, FDB, by my [limited] understanding.
Wilful, I think it’s easy to cast those stones from the west when we’re not starving to death. He never intended his work to be a permanent or an exclusive solution.
As he 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.”
patrickg, if the water isn’t there for the future, then it simply isn’t there for the future. Just as many people will starve in the 21st century as would have starved in the 20th. More actually (in gross terms), while the pressures on natural areas simply haven’t slowed down.
I certainly don’t want to piss on the grave of Borlaug, he did what he thought was right then, but an unintended consequence was the intensification and continued further draw down of natural capital that has taken aeons to build up. We’re badly in debt now, there will be a reckoning.
Why should I have to know about Borlaug!?I mean to say most of what he has stated has proven to be crap.Australian dry-land farming can still be improved on,leads the world in some way,despite the wonderfully astute scientific inputs from the Gerhard Pearson’s of Aboriginal descent.If you are some sort of hero as plant breeder,it could also mean,by bitter experience of farmers,a moron about other issues to do with farm.That is probably why,Bill Mollison of Permaculture fame,set out later in life to reset the balance caused by the “Green Revolution” which meant breeding and dependency on irrigated water.To make a critical statement of organic farming processes because somehow Borlaug castes a shadow,is plain bonkers.The Green Revolution impact in Australia was probably more a reflection rather than development.The Mildura area had water trenches for production before that fellow coughed loud to say I am here and I am important.History will never be the death of one man when talking about food production and fibre.If you want to think in themes that is fine!But don’t embarass yourself by asking where was this man’s initial influence on Australian Production capacity!?Which would require research.
If the consequence was unintended, how can you blame him for it?
patrickg@21…”If the consequence was unintended, how can you blame him for it?”
Ahh.. guilt without volition. I’ve been chasing that one since PD113 at UQ more years ago than I care to remember.
Still no satisfactory answer
The production of nitrate fertilizers from both fossil and bio fuels is easy. However, the real problem is the availablity of mineral based fertilizers such as phosphate. Mining people have begun talking about shortages of phosphate ores but it is hard to be sure how much more will become economic as the price goes up.
Robert forgive me, but your version of solutions to the problem peak oil poses for agriculture is to replace
a) fossil-based pest/herbicides with organically sourced ones – which is exactly the mistake we are seeing played out with first generation biofuels; and
b) replacing fossil-based fertilizer with…fossil-based fertilizer.
As Audrey Lourde so succinctly put it “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Of course she was writing about patriarchy primarily as a radical feminist, but it’s simply the sociological version of Einstein’s definition of insanity ie doing the same thing over and over again and expectng different results.
In suggesting continuing on in the same vein will nigh-on guarantee the followng kind of results:
“The industrial Green Revolution has not, and cannot, feed the world. Instead of helping people feed themselves, it has created a cycle of dependency. In a world of 6.5 billion people, some 923 million people are seriously undernourished (FAO SOFI Report 2007) with more than two billion people suffering from micronutrient malnutrition, or ‘hidden hunger’ caused by inadequate and non-diversified diets (FAO SOFI Report 2002).
25,000 men, women and children die each day from starvation (World Health Report 2000). Experts project that the world food supply will need to double again over the next 40 years to feed our planet’s population.”
The heart of the matter that must be addressed is the energy consumption required to produce food based on industrial fossil-driven agriculture. Food is simply energy, and at the moment it takes more energy from fossil sources to produce the energy value of our food. Continuing down this path is a nil sum game unless we switch to sunlight as the principle organic energy source, which it clearly is.
Mining companies are the ongoing blind man’s glasses in Australia.Why not seek other sources of fertiliser by solid biological based sciences.After all nearly every bloody University and the C.S.I.R.O. have knowledge of bio producers out in the Earth’s existence,even the humble worm may add to improvements.And yet bacteriology a study that has been around for donkey’s years always has to play second fiddle to the commercial mining blindness.The awe schucks ,attitude about lack of fertilisers isn’t even getting near the bolder question that maybe these fertilizers are simply not what they claim they are.As application rates and methodologies have changed over time.You can beat up a story about Borlaug,but his understandings were not built on the shoulders of giants.The humble gut of sea-faring birds can be replicated,in part at least today ,and ,maybe the soils of the world have been turned round to meet the fertiliser requirements rather than their special locational needs.Thus looking at natural producers of fertiliser even in very small microscopic locational sites,seems like the way to go.Much still goes on about root growth tropisms and nodulation thereof.
myriad@5 – in no way was I sneering at Oxfam, MSF or even Mother Teresa (well, I’ve read Hitchens on the saint and maybe there are a couple of things worth sneering at in the last). They save and improve lives – just many fewer than Borlaug did.
I think mass technology is by no means a sufficient answer, but it is most definitely a necessary one. I’m not at all Panglossian – lots of humans are stuck in misery, we face real threats to the world’s future and every course we adopt from here has real downsides. It’s just that nostalgia for “traditional” lifestyles are neither necessary nor sufficient, and are actively harmful.
myriad, quantity matters.
The quantity of petroleum required to produce the world’s supply of pesticides and herbicides is tiny compared to the amount we use for transport. Biological sources of carbon may not be sufficient to supply transport usage, but they are surely more than sufficient to supply pesticides and herbicides.
As for energy, we don’t have an energy shortage, even if peak oil is correct. We have a shortage of transportable, dispatchable, and non co2-emitting energy at current prices. None of this matters for electrolyzing hydrogen to produce fertilizer, which was standard practice before and during WWII (one of the most famed commando raids of the war related to this – see this Wikipedia entry. A bigger concern is a potential long-term shortage of phosphate rocks.
Part of the problem is that we don’t use fertilizers very efficientlyy hence the problems with nutrient run-off. In some cases we may actually do better if we used less soluble fertilizers that reuire the action of mychroizial(spelling) fungi to release the nutrient or, in the case of nitrates use more nitogen fixing plants.
The other alternative is that we go the home based hypherphonic route with the aim of reducing water and fertilizer requirements as well as reducing fuel reuired for food transport. It may be part of what has to be done to live with climate change.
DD – fair enough (and I too have reservations about Mother T – and Geldof for that matter!) – but to be honest I think the comparison is kind of pointless. There are many ways to save a life and it seems a fruitless exercise to me to bother with comparisons that only matter in a hypothetical parallel outcome universe thingy. I do think that all of those you listed, like Borlaug, deserves credit for what they do well, as well as clear-eyed critique of the problems with their approach.
re: nostalgia for traditional lifestyles – while I have met my fair share of people who talk in such romantic terms, the reality is they fall within the uninformed part of the spectrum, and I feel like talking about them is basically shadow-boxing. It’s much more pertinent to talk about grass-roots led empowerment movements (V. Shiva has already come up) which have real credibility because they are home-grown approaches to this problem, and therefore deserve respectful engagement and critique. Worrying about emoting westerners disconnected from reality is something I actively avoid these days precisely because they don’t in my experience make up the majority in any serious paradigm / movement looking at food security, rural poverty / sustainability etc.
I hope that makes sense.
Robert,
yes quantity matters, but going by figures I found googling about (and then closed the page, d’oh!), as of 2003 we’re using just under 3 million tonnes of pesticides (herb +insect-icides) p.a globally; and why we’d want to divert arable land to grow that quantity of substances that the overall verdict is need to be phased out because of their environmental/human health consequences is beyond me. To put this in perspective with ‘organically’ branded natural pesticides, global pyrethrum production annually is about 10 – 15,000 tonnes, and the bulk of that is not certified for organic use. Out of interest, Kenya as the once biggest producer of pyrethrum was growing about 30-40,000 ha of pyrethrum to produce about 8,000 tonnes of product. Obviously there’s no straight ratio of plants / ha to tonnes for whatever pesticides we decided to produce from plants as you’ve suggested, but for the sake of a thought experiment:
we’re currently using 3 million tonnes of pesticides / annum
Pyrethrum makes up 0.005% (15,000t) of that current annual global pesticide consumption and takes about 50,000 hectares to grow – which means about 3.3ha per tonne of pyrethrum.
If we had to grow all our pesticide needs at the same rate as pyrethrum, we’d be looking at needing about 10 million ha of arable land to grow it.
that doesn’t look like a trivial amount of land to me, especially given that
a) we’re rapidly losing arable land
and
b) pesticides do nothing to restore / build up / protect arable land, unlike other organic methods of pest control.
As for energy, we don’t have an energy shortage, even if peak oil is correct. We have a shortage of transportable, dispatchable, and non co2-emitting energy at current prices. None of this matters for electrolyzing hydrogen to produce fertilizer, which was standard practice before and during WWII (one of the most famed commando raids of the war related to this – see this Wikipedia entry. A bigger concern is a potential long-term shortage of phosphate rocks.
Or we could use the sun, which doesn’t have transport problems, is infinite for our purposes, and produces nutrients and fertilizer that actually reflects nature’s complexity, doesn’t deplete soils or our nutrition, costs even less, has no industrial manufacturing requirements and produces the same sort of crop proudction stats as dumping simple fertilizer salts on the land.
“Or we could use the sun, which doesn’t have transport problems, is infinite for our purposes, and produces nutrients and fertilizer that actually reflects nature’s complexity, doesn’t deplete soils or our nutrition, costs even less, has no industrial manufacturing requirements and produces the same sort of crop production stats as dumping simple fertilizer salts on the land.”
That is all great for building carbon levels but will not replace or restore Phosphorus levels which are typically low all over Australia.
If the levels of available Nitrogen are low for grain making plants you can look out over a beautiful green paddock but have seed which is hopeless as a food for any animal or people.
If we want to eat this will take nutrients out of the soil they must be replaced and the Sun doesn’t have any way to do that .You can’t get a plant to photosyntesis Molybdenum or Selenium .
Again you might get the same kg of dry weight yield in an organic system but the metabolisable energy level will be off , there can be micronutrient deficiency and the people or animals eating the plant material will be malnourished.
As Pterosaur mentioned once before it might be argued that Australia only needs 10% of it’s current agricultural production to feed itself .
Would it be progressive for us as a nation to limit food production and show the rest of the world that we are contributing to the solution to negative environmental change by leaving others to find other sources of food for themselves?
Murph, using the sun means using it as the principal source of energy to power the whole system, which should be a polyculture precisely because you can then grow green manure crops and animals for their manure to build the soil and ensure micro- nutrients etc. are in place. This has been shown to be just as successful in Australia with it’s low phosphorous levels, and goes a long way towards addressing other low mineral levels – we may well need to add some like selenium for health, but probably not for very long or very often, as organic / permaculture methods retain soil structure and content, not strip it as current industrial farming methods do.
If you’re interested in some examples of restorative practices, go to youtube and put in ‘permaculture desert’ – some amazing videos.
Sorry, missed half my answer
so when you say MtS:
Again you might get the same kg of dry weight yield in an organic system but the metabolisable energy level will be off , there can be micronutrient deficiency and the people or animals eating the plant material will be malnourished.
well, actually all the evidence points in the other direction. Have a read of the Rodale Institute study I linked to upthread – it has plenty of references to follow up as well as providing an excellent summary case for organic.
I think in your last question you’re asking me if I think Australia should limit it’s food production to domestic needs, and perhaps are implying that this is the implication of the system methods I’m putting forward?
– at any rate my answer is no, I don’t think Australia should limit it’s food production to feeding itself, and I don’t think that is a logical extension of reforming our agricultural practises. I do think we should phase out demonstrably unsustainable practices such as running massive herds of cattle on semi-arid lands that are being trashed and the heavy emphasis on an export meat market, and I do think that we need to wean ourselves rapidly off the teat of high input, water-intensive monocultural industrial farming practices. But there is enough arable land to feed many more people than Australia’s population, and there’s the third most populous nation right on our doorstep for starters. Of course climate change will alter what is viable farming land quite a bit. But it’s also an opportunity to take a new approach.
another article on research from Cornell on the benefits of organic farming to the USA
‘…I do think that we need to wean ourselves rapidly off the teat of high input, water-intensive monocultural industrial farming practices.’
So, the lesson to learn on the death of NB is that we need to stop doing what has worked and revert to what never worked in the past when mass starvation was a regular event?! Oh Well.
That sort of thinking is to be expected of those that are simply not convincing people anywhere in the third world to return from the city (even from shanty towns and other obvious slums) to a life of rural drudgery, and who are themselves not producing rice, wheat, sugar etc. It is just something to smile at as the rest of us continue to buy industrially farmed foods and continue to lead longer and healthier lives.
The clearest refutation of this twaddle can be found in the Japanese people who are now demonstrably bigger than their close to nature nutrient deficient great grandparents. Those great grandparents led exactly the sort of life that our chemical phobic worry-warts recommend. They are the ‘green’ descendants of Rachael Carson and the idiotic Paul Ehrlich of population bomb infamy.
Wrong consistently the green method is now not to convince the masses of anything but to insist that living standards be cut to impose sustainability. Thus the latest and greatest carbon hysterics.
Norm’s earlier worries about population levels are the sort of worry that many at the time (not demographers in 2009) held before they became self evidently non issues as we see population levels unable to be sustained in one industrialised country after another throughout the world.
The obvious solution to overpopulation worries, is in doing what humans have been doing (only dramatically speeding it up) and industrialising every country on the planet as rapidly as possible.
Norm’s worries about population were from even before the period when an imbecile like Ehrlich could make a fortune from his best seller of doom and gloom in 1968. Since then, the underlying reality of ageing populations that will lead to collapsing population levels has unfolded along with the ongoing industrialization. Yet still this junk worries itself onwards.
Vale Norman ‘Sure you shone out like a shaft of gold when all around was darkness.’