Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Listen to "the greatest living American"
The greatest living American, who is also the greatest living Iowan*, was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal yesterday, and nobody noticed. Gregg Easterbrook in the HuffPo:
Born 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived. A plant breeder, in the 1940s he moved to Mexico to study how to adopt high-yield crops to feed impoverished nations. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India's food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes. Borlaug moved on to working in South America. Every nation his green thumb touched has known dramatic food production increases plus falling fertility rates (as the transition from subsistence to high-tech farm production makes knowledge more important than brawn), higher girls' education rates (as girls and young women become seen as carriers of knowledge rather than water) and rising living standards for average people. Last fall, Borlaug crowned his magnificent career by persuading the Ford, Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations to begin a major push for high-yield farming in Africa, the one place the Green Revolution has not reached.
Yet Borlaug is unknown in the United States, and if my unscientific survey of tonight's major newscasts is reliable, television tonight ignored his receipt of the Congressional Gold Medal, America's highest civilian award. I clicked around to ABC, CBS and NBC and heard no mention of Borlaug; no piece about him is posted on these networks' evening news websites; CBS Evening News did have time for video of a bicycle hitting a dog. (I am not making that up.) Will the major papers say anything about Borlaug tomorrow?
Easterbrook thinks that the press does not cover Norman Borlaug because of his modesty.
Borlaug's story is ignored because his is a story of righteousness -- shunning wealth and comfort, this magnificent man lived nearly all his life in impoverished nations. If he'd blown something up, lied under oath or been caught offering money for fun, ABC, CBS and NBC would have crowded the Capitol Rotunda today with cameras, hoping to record an embarrassing gaffe. Because instead Borlaug devoted his life to serving the poor, he is considered Not News.
Maybe -- he is certainly both modest and accomplished in comparison to the other living American Nobel Peace Prize winner -- but there is something more going on. Borlaug, even at age 93, is a champion for the politically very incorrect idea that we should enthusiastically promote biotech in agriculture, especially in the developing world. I suspect that rich-country journalists know that if they glorify Norman Borlaug and his cause they will be shunned from all the best cocktail parties. It is far easier in such circles to glorify Jimmy Carter and his cause, or even Yasser Arafat and his cause.
Here at TigerHawk, though, we are at no risk of being shunned -- we have never been invited to the best cocktail parties -- so we can happily present a fair use excerpt from Norman Borlaug's most recent wisdom, an op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal titled "Continuing the Green Revolution":
Over the millennia, farmers have practiced bringing together the best characteristics of individual plants and animals to make more vigorous and productive offspring. The early domesticators of our food and animal species -- most likely Neolithic women -- were also the first biotechnologists, as they selected more adaptable, durable and resilient plants and animals to provide food, clothing and shelter.
In the late 19th century the foundations for science-based crop improvement were laid by Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur and others. Pioneering plant breeders applied systematic cross-breeding of plants and selection of offspring with desirable traits to develop hybrid corn, the first great practical science-based products of genetic engineering.
Early crossbreeding experiments to select desirable characteristics took years to reach the desired developmental state of a plant or animal. Today, with the tools of biotechnology, such as molecular and marker-assisted selection, the ends are reached in a more organized and accelerated way. The result has been the advent of a "Gene" Revolution that stands to equal, if not exceed, the Green Revolution of the 20th century.
Consider these examples:
• Since 1996, the planting of genetically modified crops developed through biotechnology has spread to about 250 million acres from about five million acres around the world, with half of that area in Latin America and Asia. This has increased global farm income by $27 billion annually.
• Ag biotechnology has reduced pesticide applications by nearly 500 million pounds since 1996. In each of the last six years, biotech cotton saved U.S. farmers from using 93 million gallons of water in water-scarce areas, 2.4 million gallons of fuel, and 41,000 person-days to apply the pesticides they formerly used.
• Herbicide-tolerant corn and soybeans have enabled greater adoption of minimum-tillage practices. No-till farming has increased 35% in the U.S. since 1996, saving millions of gallons of fuel, perhaps one billion tons of soil each year from running into waterways, and significantly improving moisture conservation as well.
• Improvements in crop yields and processing through biotechnology can accelerate the availability of biofuels. While the current emphasis is on using corn and soybeans to produce ethanol, the long-term solution will be cellulosic ethanol made from forest industry by-products and products.
Listen to Norman Borlaug.
_______________________________
*I appreciate the categorical problem in this clause -- all Iowans are Americans -- but the point is very important to Iowans.
8 Comments:
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Wed Jul 18, 09:34:00 AM:
Amazing -- the moonbats in the comments there are bashing the guy.
By TigerHawk, at
Wed Jul 18, 09:50:00 AM:
Agreed, PA, which I think supports my point that transnational progressives really do not like Borlaug's advocacy.
By Escort81, at
Wed Jul 18, 10:55:00 AM:
Borlaug did get a mention some five or six years ago in the epilogue of an episode of the TV show "West Wing." Maybe the center-left likes him.
There is something odd about the reaction in parts of the left to the use of western science in an effort to improve the quality of life for people in LDCs. Obviously, no one wants a situation where the applied technology backfires and does more harm than good (as, for example, happens in the U.S. when FDA pulls a drug or device from the market, although sometime that is even a close call from a cost/benefit standpoint), but does that mean that it shouldn't be tried?
Borlaug follows in the footsteps of another great Iowan, Henry Wallace, who was there at the founding of Pioneer Hi-Bred, the company that changed the way corn was planted and farmed by developing hybrid seed corn (using quasi-Mendelian techniques). He could also be considered the father of modern agricultural economic analysis. Wallace served as Sec. of Agriculture and then VP under FDR, and briefly as Truman's Sec. of Commerce. Setting aside his massive blind spot with respect to the Soviet Union during his run for the presidency in 1948 under the banner of the Progressive Party (Strom Thurmond was another third party candidate that year), which he admitted to some years later, he had an impressive career of service. Wallace is likely the most "progressive" politician to serve as either VP or President in the history of the U.S., yet if he were alive today, the enviro-left would excoriate him for messing with GMOs.
By tomcog, at
Wed Jul 18, 11:34:00 AM:
Yay for Borlaug, obviously a scandinavian, like some we know. Who was it said, "no good deed shall go unpunished?"
By Escort81, at
Wed Jul 18, 11:45:00 AM:
Also, Tigerhawk, you can't be expected to go to the best cocktail parties if you belonged to a club that only served beer (as a preamble to Trees & Trolls) and not actual cocktails. Grain punch doesn't count either, for all of you fellow Cheesers out there. A proper cocktail can't be dispensed from a large waste receptacle with dry ice in the bottom of it.
By Cardinalpark, at
Wed Jul 18, 12:03:00 PM:
In fairness, the WSJ also wrote an oped in yesterday's paper recognizing him. Now if Murdoch comes to own the WSJ, more folks will of course read about him and know about him.
But that's another story for another day. Soon.
By 
, at
Wed Jul 18, 09:59:00 PM:
Score another one for better living through science! If I were in a position to do science advocacy or education, rather than a mere graduate student, Borlaug is the kind of person I'd try to hold up as reason why you should consider science as a career path. Kudos to you, TH!
By SR, at
Wed Jul 18, 10:37:00 PM:
Yeah, but what happened to the butterfly genome in Mexico?
