Borlaug Quotes

You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.

think of the adherents of these two perspectives as Wizards and Prophets—Wizards unveiling technological fixes, Prophets decrying the consequences of our heedlessness. Borlaug has become a model for the Wizards. Vogt was in many ways the founder of the Prophets.

nearly all of the astonishing productivity gains of the last century trace back to the work of a single man, Norman Borlaug, perhaps the best argument for the humanitarian virtue of America’s imperial century. Born to Iowa family farmers in 1914, he went to state school, found work at DuPont, and then, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed a new collection of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties that are now credited with saving the lives of a billion people worldwide.

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest? How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world’s farmland to organic farming, we’d need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today. Combined, we’d need to chop down roughly half of the world’s remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today. That’s not a viable path.

But there was a lacuna in Nehru’s concept of science: he saw it exclusively in terms of laboratory science, not field science; physics and molecular biology, not ecology, botany, or agronomy. He understood that India’s farmers were poor in part because they were unproductive—they harvested much less grain per acre than farmers elsewhere in the world. But unlike Borlaug, Nehru and his ministers believed that the poor harvests were due not to lack of technology—artificial fertilizer, irrigated water, and high-yield seeds—but to social factors like inefficient management, misallocation of land, lack of education, rigid application of the caste system, and financial speculation (large property owners were supposedly hoarding their wheat and rice until they could get better prices). This was not crazy: more than one out of five families in rural India owned no land at all, and about two out of five owned less than 2.5 acres, not enough land to feed themselves. Meanwhile, a tiny proportion of absentee landowners controlled huge swathes of terrain. The solution to rural poverty, Nehru therefore believed, was less new technology than new policies: give land from big landowners to ordinary farmers, free the latter from the burdens of caste, and then gather the liberated smallholders into more-efficient, technician-advised cooperatives. This set of ideas had the side benefit of fitting nicely into Nehru’s industrial policy: enacting them would cost next to nothing, reserving more money for building factories.

The United Nations and the U.S. government were also deeply involved. But early on, they had little success transferring “production technology from the industrialized temperate zones to the tropics and sub tropics.” This is why, according to Borlaug, the cooperative Mexican government–Rockefeller Foundation model “ultimately proved to be superior” to “public sector foreign technical assistance programs.... ”114 By the time the Green Revolution really took off, these national and supranational bodies had recognized the success of the foundation-pioneered model and supported it, as demonstrated by USAID’s commitment of funds to the international centers.115 The Green Revolution would not have been possible without earlier scientific breakthroughs. Dr. Borlaug estimates that fully 40 percent of the world’s current population would not be alive today were it not for the Haber-Bosch ammonia-synthesizing process.116 The spread of Mexican dwarf wheat and IR8 rice (and their continually improving offspring) would have been impossible without such breakthroughs in fertilizer technology. But that is the nature of progress. Scientific achievement is not diminished by its debt to the work of previous generations. It has been argued that the Green Revolution produced negative side effects commensurate with its benefits. Critics point out that, in some parts of the world, the greatest benefits of new seed varieties and agricultural technologies have flowed more to well-off rather than poor farmers. They also claim that the irrigation needs of high-yield agriculture drain local water resources. And fertilizer use, essential if high-yield crops are to reach their full potential, can lead to runoff that pollutes streams and rivers. Observers have also worried that, by enabling the developing world to feed more and more of its people, the Green Revolution has been a disincentive for them to get serious about population control. But population growth historically levels out in developed nations, and it is impossible to make the leap from developing to developed without an adequate supply of food.

To a biologist like Margulis, who spent her career arguing that humans are simply part of evolution’s handiwork, the answer should be clear. All life is similar at base, she and others say. All species seek to make more of themselves—that is their goal. By multiplying until we reach our maximum possible numbers, we are following the laws of biology, even as we take out much of the planet. Eventually, in accordance with those same laws, the human enterprise will wipe itself out. Shouting from the edge of the petri dish, Borlaug and Vogt might as well be trying to hold back the tide. From this standpoint, the answer to the question “Are we doomed to destroy ourselves?” is “Yes.” That we could be some sort of magical exception—it seems unscientific. Why should we be different? Is there any evidence that we are special?

what was left out was the color of the bran, the texture of the grain, the pleasure of having several different types of flour, or, more important still, the relationship of the farmers to their land, and to each other, and the structure of power in a community or a nation. And then there was the omnipresence of greed. Borlaug was like a physicist who figures out how something should work on an idealized frictionless plane and then is startled when it doesn’t function in the same way in the real world of hills and valleys.

None of this is to deny that environmental problems are real. Overfishing, deforestation, soil degradation, contaminated groundwater, declining populations of mammals and birds, and, most alarming, the possibility of very rapid climate change—all of these are important. But the contribution of population growth to them is indirect, and the relationship to economic growth is equivocal. Focusing on them as a root cause, as Vogt did, is a distraction. It was a waste of two decades, and doubly unfortunate because the fight over population sometimes shrouded the more important part of Vogt’s message, the part about limits. He denounced social scientists as fools, but he should have listened to them. And that, alas, applies to Borlaug, too.

The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation—to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajío. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to “feed everyone; not just the hungry. Opt to feed the whole populace.” Produce enough not only to feed every man and woman in Mexico but also to export to other food-short nations.

Borlaug thought, the process would be too slow. As a rule of thumb, wheat breeders needed ten to fifteen harvests to select, test, and propagate a new variety. The process couldn’t be hurried; farmers could grow only one crop of winter or spring wheat a year. But the Rockefeller Foundation wasn’t going to wait fifteen years. And the farmers needed help now.

In November, after the harvest, Borlaug would take his four surviving varieties to Sonora, where he would breed them with each other and many other cultivars in an effort to produce new cultivars that both resisted stem rust (as the four survivors did) and produced a lot of grain (as the other strains would if they didn’t succumb to rust). In April he would harvest the seed from the best plants and take it to the Bajío, where he would perform a second round of crossbreeding. Because summer in the Bajío was wet, the area was like an incubator for plant diseases. Borlaug could use the second generation as a screen to check susceptibility to diseases other than P. graminis: viruses, bacteria, different types of fungi.

The parallels between Borlaug and Vogt are inexact. Borlaug never wrote a manifesto and mostly declined the roles of theorist and exponent. Instead he became, by the example of his life, the emblem of a way of thought—the Wizard’s way. His success would show, at least to Wizards, that science and technology, properly applied, could allow humankind to produce its way into a prosperous future.

Such stories occurred all over India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia, according to witnesses like Boyce and Hartmann. Latin America saw them, too. The increase in yields made farmland more valuable, which made it worth seizing. Rich landowners, seeing an opportunity for advancement, evicted sharecroppers and renters and went into business for themselves, monopolizing local access to seeds and fertilizer. Increased harvests made prices fall. Big estate-holders could more than make up for the decline with volume; smallholders were immiserated. All of this had begun in Mexico. In the name of increasing yields, Borlaug had shifted the program from the poor in the Bajío to a few prosperous landowners in Sonora. Those landowning farmers had worked hard, but they had reaped almost all the gains. The other big winners were corporate middlemen: grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill and agrichemical suppliers like Monsanto and DuPont.

Borlaug seldom replied directly, though the attacks stung. In private, he told friends that most of the criticism was sheer elitism. Somehow rich environmentalists in the West thought the world was better off if people in poor areas didn’t improve their lives. He had nothing against organic this or that but it was unrealistic to promote it as a solution to hunger in the world of 10 billion. And it was immoral to stand in the way of feeding hungry people.

The most important point, in his view, was that the new methods and new crops had done what they were supposed to: increase yields. Economists have estimated that the global average productivity gains from Green Revolution crops are about 1 percent per year for wheat, 0.8 percent per year for rice, and 0.7 percent per year for maize. The numbers sound small, but over time the impacts grow large, compound-interest style. Between 1960 and 2000, wheat harvests in developing countries tripled. Rice harvests doubled. Maize harvests more than doubled. The extra food, Borlaug said, was why the population could increase while the proportion of hungry people went down.

When Norman Borlaug set about working his magic in Africa in the early 1980s, environmentalists persuaded the World Bank and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations not to fund him.

By some estimates, Norman Borlaug saved more lives—perhaps a billion—than any other human in history. The famines that Ehrlich predicted never occurred, in part because Borlaug, as obsessed as Ehrlich about the dangers of overpopulation, took the approach of providing more food now and striving for lower population later.

Education puts power into a man, Norm Boy. Governments come and governments go, but if you’ve got a good education no one can take that from you.

He's no great shakes as a scholar; his arithmetic is awful--but he sticks to it! He's got grit. High school will make him!

The conflict between these visions is not between good and evil, but between different ideas of the good life, between ethical orders that give priority to personal liberty and those that give priority to what might be called connection. To Borlaug, the landscape of late-twentieth-century capitalism, with its teeming global markets dominated by big corporations, was morally acceptable, though ever in need of repair. Its emphasis on personal autonomy, social and physical mobility, and the rights of the individual were resonant. Vogt thought differently. By the time he died, in 1968, he had come to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with Western-style consumer societies. People needed to live in smaller, more stable communities, closer to the earth, controlling the exploitative frenzy of the global market. The freedom and flexibility touted by advocates of consumer society were an illusion; individuals’ rights mean little if they live in atomized isolation, cut off from Nature and each other.

Homo sapiens, she once told me, is an unusually successful species. And it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out—that is the way things work in biology. By “wipe itself out” Margulis didn’t necessarily mean extinction—just that something comprehensively bad would happen, wrecking the human enterprise. Borlaug and Vogt might have wanted to stop us from destroying ourselves, she would have said, but they were kidding themselves. Neither conservation nor technology has anything to do with biological reality.

Humans are no different, Margulis believed. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one creature among many, no different at base than P. vulgaris. We and they are controlled by the same forces, produced by the same processes, subject to the same fate. When Borlaug and Vogt stood on the tract of bad land, looking at the city, they were on the edge of the petri dish. Wizard or Prophet, it didn’t matter. Homo sapiens, in Margulis’s eyes, was just another briefly successful species.

If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.

The two people were William Vogt and Norman Borlaug. Vogt, born in 1902, laid out the basic ideas for the modern environmental movement. In particular, he founded what the Hampshire College demographer Betsy Hartmann has called “apocalyptic environmentalism”—the belief that unless humankind drastically reduces consumption its growing numbers and appetite will overwhelm the planet’s ecosystems. In best-selling books and powerful speeches, Vogt argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem. Our prosperity is temporary, he said, because it is based on taking more from Earth than it can give. If we continue, the unavoidable result will be devastation on a global scale, perhaps including our extinction. Cut back! Cut back! was his mantra. Otherwise everyone will lose! Borlaug, born twelve years later, has become the emblem of what has been termed “techno-optimism” or “cornucopianism”—the view that science and technology, properly applied, can help us produce our way out of our predicament. Exemplifying this idea, Borlaug was the primary figure in the research that in the 1960s created the “Green Revolution,” the combination of high-yielding crop varieties and agronomic techniques that raised grain harvests around the world, helping to avert tens of millions of deaths from hunger. To Borlaug, affluence was not the problem but the solution. Only by getting richer, smarter, and more knowledgeable can humankind create the science that will resolve our environmental dilemmas. Innovate! Innovate! was Borlaug’s cry. Only in that way can everyone win!

Vogt and Borlaug have the same mission: to use the discoveries of modern science to spare Mexico from a future of poverty and environmental degradation. But prospects are unlikely, in Mexico in 1946, for this to happen; indeed, Vogt and Borlaug believe that the situation grows direr by the day.

Vogt sees the city reaching across the dry lake bed to engulf the last fields and streams and says: Hold it back! We cannot let our species overwhelm the natural systems on which we all depend! Borlaug sees the pitiful scrim of wheat and maize on the tract of land and says: How can we give people a better chance to thrive? Vogt wants to protect the land; Borlaug wants to equip its occupants.

Fifteen years ago, when I went to a park at the edge of the Hudson, I couldn’t step into the river—the sharp edges of open mussel shells were too thick underfoot. Nowadays at the park the creatures are mostly gone. Children splash happily in the shallows. Crumbled shells lie in the sediment, testament to the mussel’s collapse. Humans are no different, Margulis believed. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one creature among many, no different at base than P. vulgaris. We and they are controlled by the same forces, produced by the same processes, subject to the same fate. When Borlaug and Vogt stood on the tract of bad land, looking at the city, they were on the edge of the petri dish. Wizard or Prophet, it didn’t matter. Homo sapiens, in Margulis’s eyes, was just another briefly successful species.