Originally published in revista 22.
September 12, 2009 died at the age of 95 years, Norman Borlaug, a researcher in the field of agriculture and Nobel laureate.
We are today around six and a half billion people on Earth and do not seem to stop anytime soon. Since the 18th century, economists such as Thomas Malthus also saw a growth in this impending disaster: there is a finite amount of arable land, so, as the population grows, there will be increasingly less food available per capita. More recently, in the late 1960s, Paul Ralph Ehrlich predicted, based on the same arguments as, starting in the 1970s, it will starve millions due to population explosion. Merchandisers and "obesity epidemic" of today seem to contradict him!
But if agricultural lands are limited, how there is overgrowth problem? The answer is the modern agricultural technology, or, as she was called, "Green Revolution", initiated by Norman Borlaug after World War II. About Borlaug, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, is said to be saved from famine, thanks to the variety of grain for which it has developed and other agricultural techniques, one billion people. Even if agricultural lands are limited, limit agricultural production, which depends on the technology used, it is not in the least bit. Thanks to the Green Revolution in the last 50 years agricultural production grew faster than the population. Thus, the history of hunger in the world is not a history of the problems arising from population explosion, but a history of poor institutions, and fobiei of pseudostiintei technology.
Last time it was starved to death in Western Europe was in the late 1840s. The disaster was disproportionately high in Ireland, where they starved to death in about one million people and another million emigrated to America. Continental Europe has not escaped neither she, some historians considering that this famine, which affected in particular the poor population and of beds because of which died around one hundred thousand people, was the straw that triggered the revolutions of 1848.
And in the United Kingdom it was the key event that prompted the removal of customs duties on agricultural products, which has led to the urbanization of ultrafast island; within a single generation, the English farms were cleared, former peasants becoming the labor force of the industrial revolution. But the reason behind this last great famine was not Western population explosion, but an epidemic of a pest of potato (which spread to other vegetables). Today there is no longer a problem because we use pesticides and, more recently, genetically modified potatoes which were implemented a gene taken from a wild potato species, plant gene that confers immunity to the parasite.
Last time it was starved to death in Eastern Europe was after the second world war, when Communist Governments, in full period of drought, in their fight against the greed of those who trying to make profits by selling food, they introduced price controls on agricultural products, the effect being the disappearance from the market of agricultural products. Because of the Communist economic policy, since 1945 the Romanian agricultural production fell sharply to 38%, and in 1947, disaster struck again Romania, about 30,000 people dying of starvation, after a century of relative prosperity. In the following decades, agricultural production has fallen below (including Communist official statistics!), as a result of the process of collectivization.
Last time it was starved to death in China was in 1958-1961, when they killed between 30 and 40 million people, collateral victims of the "Great Leap Forward". Again, the problem here was not the explosion of population, but State economic policy, combined fatally with the theory of "vernalizarii" Lisenko. Noting that, as the colectivizeaza agricultura, lowers production, Soviet leaders were thought to solve the problem with technology. In principle, the idea was good. Unfortunately, Soviet science was completely politizata. Lisenko's speech since 1935, cheered up by Stalin himself, the good atmosphere: "both in the scientific world, and beyond, an enemy of the class is always an enemy, even if it is a man of science"[1]. As a result of a campaign organized by Pravda, genetics has finally terminated as "bourgeois science", biology textbooks were exchanged, and countless Soviet geneticists who refused to recognize the value of his theories Lisenko (like the idea that if you grow a plant in cold, her descendants will be resistant to cold or the idea of rejecting the use of fertilizers) ended in prison. Nikolai Vavilov, one of the greatest geneticists interwar, he tried to do in the 1930s what Borlaug has managed two decades later, to use modern biological science to increase agricultural productivity. In 1939, Rivne was neither more nor less than the President himself International Genetics Congress, held in Edinburgh; in 1940, he was convicted of treason, sabotage, espionage and contrarevolutie; in 1943, he died in prison at 55 years of age.
Here's what's supposed to abstain Vavilov tell them the members of the Central Committee of the party: "his Position not only Lisenko e geneticienilor research contradicted by the Soviets, but it put curmezisul whole modern biologists". Soviet agriculture, and then tragically and the Chinese, and biology in the Communist world in general were virtually wiped out decades of this politicization antistiintifica, with devastating effects on the population. Things have hardly improved since the 1970s.
Last time it was starved to death in Africa was yesterday. About 25 thousand people die of hunger every day in poor areas of the world. Again, not because it would be too much, but due to economic policies and lack of inepte access to technology. Worldwide there is a surplus of food, for example, in the European Union there are millions of tonnes of grain which sit and rot in warehouses, while some European States paying farmers not to produce the cat might make (the famous Community agricultural policy). And these European farmers do not even use the latest agricultural technologies from irrational fear of european consumer of genetically modified plants. In 2002, in full crisis in Zambia, in which millions of people were on the verge of famine, ecological organisations Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were able to convince the Government that african grain donated by the United States would be "poisoned". The cereals were genetically modified plants which differed with nothing not the eaten routinely by the American population. Other African countries (Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Lesotho) refused and similar aid on the grounds that, although agricultural production of genetically modified plants is superior and less vulnerable to unforeseen environmental factors would no longer be able to export agricultural products in the European Union.
An extensive study of the risks to human health or to the environment, commissioned by the European Union, has passed review 81 research projects on genetically modified plants, tracked over a period of 15 years. The report, published in 2001, failed to identify even a single risk[2]. But European policy has remained unchanged, and antiumana neperturbata for NHS continuing propaganda. We can say that, at present, the European Union and the ecological movement are clearly the main forte antistiintifice in the world in terms of technologies, both cultural and institutional (EU barriers on set them in terms of trade in agricultural products). These obstacles stand in the way of the implementation of the Green Revolution in Africa, the only area on the Earth where the population still grows faster than agricultural production.
Ironically, all of these genetically modified plants are not only not harmful, but are safer and better tested than the plants ' natural '. Buy mushrooms from the forest of an expert is many orders of size more dangerous than eating genetically modified wheat bread. As Steven Pinker have remarked, they have evolved into the idea of being eaten by us (except fruit) and, consequently, natural varieties tend to have all sorts of natural defense mechanisms, such as irritants, toxic or bitter. For instance, some varieties of potato are toxic (plant in its completeness is toxic to all varieties). Only very few plants are edible. All the plants that we eat were genetically altered by the process of artificial selection, so as to be made less dangerous for health, more resistant to environmental factors and more nutritious. Current genetic technologies are but rage in agricultural engineering, and modified plants through these techniques does not differ in any essential way from the wild or those modified by artificial selection. "Biotechnology helps us do what I couldn't up to now and to do it in a more precise and safer," explains Borlaug in an interview in 2000[3]. "In the past, farmers were forced to after they, along with the genes of a plant, which wanted to incorporate them in a new variety, such as resistance to insects or disease, and many other genes. These extra genes often had negative effects and take years of experiments of incrucisare up reuseau to eliminate them. Compared with conventional methods, genetic engineering of incrucisare are very inaccurate. "
Pinker believes that the fear of genetically modified plants is based on the standard "human intuition that every living being has an essence. About natural food is thought to have the pure essence of the plant or animal from which it originates and that would engender cara power invigoration of the pastoral environment in which they grew. About genetically modified food or food containing artificial additives are thought to be deliberately spoliata with contaminants and negatively affected the origin of these substances in a laboratory or in a factory. Arguments that invoke the genetics, biochemistry, evolution and risk analyses are assailed as a wall this way instinctively to conceptualize things. [4]"
Norman Borlaug was perhaps the greatest agronomist of all time. Borlaug began his career trying to improve grain production in Mexico. After two decades of work has managed to develop a variety of wheat resistance to pests and grow production per hectare in spectacular fashion. Borlaug succeeded in producing a variety of "dwarf" wheat, which, due to their lower height, it is able to have more seeds without having to crash to the ground under the weight setting.
In 1943 the half of Mexico imported cereals used in 1956 to become self-sufficient, and in 1963 he became an exporter. In 1961, Borlaug moved together with his family in India, which at the time was on the verge of famine. As a result of the work of Borlaug, between 1965 and 1970 the production of wheat to India and Pakistan almost doubled, while that of rice has increased considerably and she, subsistence farming of rice being replaced with modern techniques. Borlaug has managed these things despite the outbreak of war between India and Pakistan, often working right at the edge of the front lines! In 1968, the year that India had a record agricultural production, Ehrlich publishes best-selling ul Population Bomb, which predicted, among other things, the imminent disaster of India and that India will not be able to feed only ever! Green Revolution initiated by Borlaug then expanded in other areas of the world, and thanks to these new agricultural techniques, global production per acre has tripled in the past 50 years, while the population grew only slightly more than two times. And production in developed countries rose over seven times. Efforts to implement the same reforms and in Africa have had limited success because of the absence of almost total infrastructure, but, even so, in some areas small family farms have doubled or tripled the production per hectare. Currently, efforts to bring the Green Revolution to Africa and are supported by the Rockefeller Foundation (whom he financially supported on Borlaug along his entire career), Ryoichi Sasakawa Japanese industralistul and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
It is a sad irony to the fact that today the expression "Green Revolution" we think rather that the ecological movement, try by all powers to be of agricultural science has curmezisul and who, through which it promotes the aberration, for example, in connection with the "organic" food conjures up his theories rather Lisenko (for instance, for the refusal or the demonization of genetics as a tool of evil capitalisto anti-imperialist conspiracies). The tragic story of some such as Nikolai Vavilov and the tens of millions who died in the "Great Leap Forward" shows us more clearly than anything what is at stake and what is the danger of rejecting scientific knowledge for reasons of ideology or politics. The extraordinary story of Norman Borlaug, a man who simply has done its job and, consequently, has managed to save her from death and misery to more people than he did anyone else in the history of the world, showing us the other facet of things. And maybe we can learn from the tragedy, but also uplifting examples from films. Because the world does not yet lack the ideologies that make an antihuman ideal from returning to poverty and servitude, the ecological movement in the West at an Orthodox fundamentalism in Romania (thanks to which genetics and evolution theory no longer teach in our schools) to islamic fundamentalism, which in Middle East mess. It is important to understand the real stakes of the debate always beyond appearances and rhetorical.
As Gregg Easterbrook5 remark, environmentalists to address Green Revolution seem strange from at least two points of view: in the absence of them, all forests would already have been cleared to be turned into farmland, and then, in every country where they have been introduced modern agricultural technologies, population growth has been slowed down, once the children's education has become more important than their labor force. But these attacks seem to be more easily understood if we accept his diagnosis Vaclav Klaus and understand motion moving the eminently as an ecological policy: environmental polemics upon theprivatization didn't actually nothing to do with science, because they are not real interested in the fate of the environment or of the poor (and therefore the optimal means to address these problems), but are interested in exclusive lifestyle change in Western society in particular for the abolition of the capitalist system (no matter how bizarre this sounds for an East european!).
Here is his perspective on the difficulties with Borlaug we face: "Africa, the former Soviet republics and Brazilian savanna are the last frontiers. After you handle them, and the world has no additional farm land, assuming that we are not willing to cut and all the forests-what should I do. Therefore, agricultural production increase will have to come exclusively from productivity growth. And, although I have no doubt that productivity will continue to grow, the question is whether it will grow fast enough to be able to feed the whole population. If you do not continue to progress quickly, the level of suffering from this century, strictly numeric, will surpass any existed before ". In other words, we need a Green Revolution perpetua, for a long time from now on, if it's to keep us living standards. And wondered about the impact we have environmentalists alarmistii reversing this progress, he remarked: "it worries me if you manage to stop these developments. Is it elitism, and Americans are they vulnerable to him. I'm thinking of extremists from United States and Western Europe … In the United States, 98% of consumers living in cities. Only 2% still live there. In Western Europe in the same way, a very high percentage of them live far from farms and do not understand the complexities of agriculture. Why are easily plugged into the sperieti of all these stories about how we were going to die poisoned by chemicals used by farmers[5].
* Center of analysis and institutional development.
- Quoted by Sean b. Carroll in The Making of the Fittest, W.W. Norton Company, 2006 panorama II p. 223.
2. EC-sponsored research on safety of genetically modified organisms-A review of results, Report EUR 1984, October 2001, the European Union Office for Publications.
3. Billions Served: Norman Borlaug interviewed by Ronald Bailey, Reason Magazine, April 2000.
4. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, Penguin, 2002, p. 231.
5. Gregg Easterbrook, The Man Who Defused the "Population Bomb", Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2009.
