http://www.reason.com/0004/fe.rb.billions.html
_Reason_ magazine interviews Norman Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel
Peace Prize and father of the 1960s "Green Revolution" in agricultural
productivity. Borlaug talks about how better crops and better methods
prevented the predicted starvation in India, how modern agricultural
efficiency allowed Clinton to set aside 50 million acres as protected
wilderness, how genetic engineering brings surgical precision to the
task of producing environmentally safe crops, and how the
environmentalists' attempts to ban genetically modified crops may
finally produce the famines they've been predicting for decades.
Required reading for anyone interested in environmentalism or genetic engineering.
> Who has saved more human lives than anyone else in history? Who won the
> Nobel Peace Prize in 1970? Who still teaches at Texas A&M at the age of
> 86? The answer is Norman Borlaug.
>
> Who? Norman Borlaug, the father of the "Green Revolution," the dramatic
> improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s.
>
> Borlaug grew up on a small farm in Iowa and graduated from the University
> of Minnesota, where he studied forestry and plant pathology, in the 1930s. In
> 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation invited him to work on a project to boost
> wheat production in Mexico. At the time Mexico was importing a good share
> of its grain. Borlaug and his staff in Mexico spent nearly 20 years breeding
> the high-yield dwarf wheat that sparked the Green Revolution, the
> transformation that forestalled the mass starvation predicted by
> neo-Malthusians.
[...]
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Member, Extropy Institute
Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:06:45 MDT