There's a whole sub-genre of science fiction written in the late 1950s which took for granted that in the future there would be wars for food and perpetual famine due to an ongoing population explosion. The green revolution and birth control are the two simple but world-changing inventions that staved off that apocalypse, which seemed so inevitable at the time.
I'm honestly not sure why people are dazzled by this guy. Partly it was...his specific intention to increase yields, which make him seem like a humanitarian. The Fordson tractor did more for agriculture (and, much much much more for the economy and day-to-day existence) than this guy. Is Henry Ford the greatest human being who ever lived?
It seems that Europe's population is actually declining, so is japan's, and a lot of advanced countries.
If they keep feed themselves right now, they should be so even 100 years from now, given the same condition (unless we have some drastic global climatic change).
it is the poor countries, whose economies are based in subsistence agriculture, that are having a huge population increase.
So, the other question is, do you have to bring all these countries up to the level of western europe/japan/us in order to stop the population boom? if we have to, then there will certainly not be enough resources for everybody (especially if everybody has to live like american do)?
I have a good counter example for this. You don't have to be super developed in order to have a clear stabilization of the population.
Even my country's Albania (which has about 6kUSD gpd), population growth has halted (from 2.2 children per woman in 1990, to 1.7 last year).
So, you don't have to get super developed to have a decline of 'overfertility'. It seems that bringing economies out of rural ones, and into more mixed (agriculture/services/technology), will help the population not to increase so much.
It seems that this is a noble goal to achieve for the rest of the world, and this guy helped on it.
And making crops more durable, and farmers more productive, will make people move out of villages and go to cities, and redirect economies to towards services/manufacturing/technologies, where education is more advantage, and having more kids is very expenvie.
The problem is that the declining population is temporary. Every area with declining population, except perhaps Japan which I don't know enough about to say, has sub-populations with higher growth. Eventually, those populations are going to become large enough that the population as a whole will start growing again, and will continue increasing until it reaches the rate of the high-growth formerly-sub population. It's just a hiccup. Unless something external - singularity, war, whatever - intervenes.
Scarcity of resources is also a temporary (but serious) problem.
So, pushing back the date of catastrophe far enough is exactly what's needed. Conditions are not static. Often buying more time is all that's necessary.
Currently resources are not scarce except in the economic sense. But a growing population will eventually surpass ANY POSSIBLE resource base. Robin Hanson's most recent post on Overcoming Bias http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/limits-to-growth.html discusses this in some detail.
I don't think that population increases are caused purely by poorness. Culture and rural environment are the most important factors, IMHO. The latter because if you're not living in the city you need kids to help you earn money, and you get the payoff from them faster, since they mostly don't go to (expensive) colleges etc.
I hardly know anything about Albania, but I suppose it's far more urbanised than China and its culture is vastly different.
Are you kidding me? India's green revolution would have never happened without him, and that saved millions of people from almost certain starvation, death and malnutrition.
He wanted to increase yields in order to feed people - saw a global problem problem, figured out a solution, sold it and made it happen - thats why he's awesome.
This guy isn't famous because people who complain about GM food, the environment (or whatever) are louder and harder to ignore than scientists quietly solving those problems. Science and technology have provided most of the solutions to our most pressing problems, typically quietly, over a long period of time, and with little fanfare. This noble work will go on even if "eco-warriors" or anti-GM activists only want to whine and make little impact except to make people feel bad.
"people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker."
No, I hadn't heard of him - that's sorta my point. World changing scientists are not, typically, well known. Famous environmentalists are ten a dollar. So, sure, it's an anti-environmentalist rant because I'm anti-environmentalist but I consider it a pro-science rant at heart.
Unbelievable, I'll take the 'over the top titles' but false economic statements like:
"When his seeds were used widely in 1963, Mexico instantly went from famine-prone to a wheat-exporter. Their wheat harvest was six times greater after"
I guess that's why Mexico has been a net wheat IMPORTER since the 70's , subsidized and even banned wheat imports to protect the agro industry. Relevant sources without the sensationalist tones:
Does any of that contradict the statement: "When his seeds were used widely in 1963, Mexico instantly went from famine-prone to a wheat-exporter. Their wheat harvest was six times greater after" ?
The seeds may have been capable of increasing the Mexican wheat crop by a factor of six, but not capable of making Mexican wheat production price-competitive with producing it elsewhere and shipping it to Mexico. They may have been a net importer since the 1970s, but presumably that means they were in fact a net exporter in the 1960s.
In fact, since the 1970s, the almost sole cause of poor crop production has been political; there have been droughts, but only a small portion of the poor countries have been affected by them at any given time. The most common causes have been either the gov't cutting off supplies to "rebels" or politicians beholden to poor urban masses holding down food prices so much that farmers can't sell their crops for enough to break even, so they grow only enough for themselves (or both together, with other stupidities thrown in, like current Zimbabwe).
Ad hominem attack completely unexamined by the article's author: """Of his harshest critics Borlaug stated, "some… 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." """
Logical breakdown:
1) My critics are elitist who have not experienced hunger.
2) Therefore, they are wrong.
Relationship to actual argument: nonexistent.
As a note, I do think Norman Borlaug was a remarkable person. But there are lots of interesting questions to ask about his work, and it doesn't make someone an "elitist", or a bad person to ask them. Asking them doesn't mean they think Norman Borlaug was a bad person either. A few that spring to mind...
1) How many have died from malnutrition after crop yield booms resulted in rapidly expanding populations suddenly constrained when the next yield limit was hit?
2) If education expenditures for the third world matched those given for improving agriculture and food aid starting in the 1960's, what would the "third world" look like today? Better? Worse? What if expenditures had been divvied evenly between the two?
But there are lots of interesting questions to ask about his work, and it doesn't make someone an "elitist", or a bad person to ask them.
It didn't say anything to the contrary. Note the phrases "of his harshest critics" and "many of them." He claimed that many of his harshest critics were elitists - that does not mean he thought anyone who criticized his ideas was elitist. I would suggest that he believed his harshest critics to be those presenting no reasonable basis (from his POV, at least) for their claims.
This is an honest question: How does creating more food prevent these problems? Won't populations grow enough to consume all available food? Haven't populations in 3rd world countries exploded since the "green revolution"?
More food leads to better health (up to a limit), leading to lower mortality and increased wealth, which means fewer children born. Note that the countries with the most ready access to food have the lowest local population growth.
Couple this with improving sexual education (as tends to occur in wealthier countries) and you end up with population growth going through the floor, not up.
In particular:
"Demographers, who had been watching the exponential rise with alarm, now forecast that the population will peak below ten billion—ten gigapeople—not long after 2050. Such a low forecast would have been unthinkable just two decades ago. Already, in developing countries, the number of children born per woman has fallen from six to three in 50 years. It will have reached replacement-level fertility (where deaths equal births) by 2035.
This is an extraordinary development, unexpected, undeserved—and apparently unnatural. Human beings may be the only creatures that have fewer babies when they are better fed. "
That will NEVER happen. We already have enough food to feed 7 billion people over multiple years. The problem we face now is more related to "distribution of food to the right people" rather than production. What if the population explodes? Earth can sustain more human beings than you can imagine. The only thing we need to be careful about is polluting the atmosphere.
It doesn't need to as long as technology keeps scaling. Pointing out that groundwater and soil aren't going to scale reminds me of the people who freaked out over the scalability of x86 in the mid 90s - we're an ingenious bunch, we find solutions.
Genetically modified meat grown in vats, compact nutrition rich superfoods/tablets.. there are all sorts of technologically possible creations around the corner.
The dramatic increases in per acre yields over the past fifty years are closely tied to equally dramatic increases in per acre energy inputs over the same period. The Green Revolution amounts to the replacement of sunlight with hydrocarbons as the main fuel of food production.
Global oil production has now peaked and will slide, sooner or later, into permanent and progressive decline year-over-year. When that happens, all the blue-sky technology in the world won't keep food production rates increasing.
Global oil production has now peaked and will slide, sooner or later, into permanent and progressive decline year-over-year. When that happens, all the blue-sky technology in the world won't keep food production rates increasing.
Hydrocarbons aren't the only source of energy into the future. Your complaint is like noting that a shortage of horses in the 1880s would lead to a lack of future mobility. When resources fail, you change the rules of the game beyond what can be imagined at the time.
Technology has always and will always tackle our scaling problems. At least, if a few thousand years of such is good precedent.
> Hydrocarbons aren't the only source of energy into the future.
Okay, so name a production-ready source of energy or combination of sources that broadly matches oil's density, portability, fungibility and diversity of uses.
We don't have decades to come up with something else: oil is already at its maximum production rate. As soon as this recession ends and demand for oil starts growing, we'll see triple-digit price spikes again and more economic volatility.
Your blithe mantra about "technology" ignores the crucial fact that the technology that powers our society runs on massive and ever-growing inputs of energy. Our one-time allotment of cheap, abundant energy is already more than half-consumed, and the awkward fact is that we're absolutely not ready to transition our economy over to something else.
Okay, so name a production-ready source of energy or combination of sources that broadly matches oil's density, portability, fungibility and diversity of uses.
I bet people were as cagey as this back when coal ruled supreme and oil was barely used. Solar, nuclear, geo-thermal, tidal, wind - sure, they all have cons compared to oil but they have pros too and technology will advance to a point where these cons are heavily reduced.
We don't have decades to come up with something else: oil is already at its maximum production rate.
That's not true. Just considering OPEC, they keep oil production below maximum to control prices. Further, this past year has been a bumper year for the oil industry with significant new field findings.
Our one-time allotment of cheap, abundant energy is already more than half-consumed
Oil's not a "one time" deal, so I assume you're talking about the Sun. The Sun is half way through its life cycle, granted, but that's a far bigger issue that we can deal with thousands of years down the line.
I LOVE technology (i'm a super geek) but if theres anything I love more then it, it would be food actually it would be eating food. If surviving in the future means i need a tablet to provide all my nutrition... then surviving hardly seems worth it.
I don't disbelieve it, but people have said that about hunting, meat eating, eating bread (e.g. celiac disease sufferers), and smoking (in smoking ban situations) but we tend to adapt in the main.
I think the assumption is that eventually the world's population will stabilize as third-world folks start breeding at bare replacement levels like rich folks do. If we (as a species) can keep producing enough food right up to that point, then we're fine. The alternative is that we hit the point where a massive worldwide famine (like, hundreds of millions of deaths) is required to get things back in balance. I'd rather avoid this if at all possible.
As far as I know, ever since the discovery of agriculture we as a species have never really been at the point (except on local and temporary scales) where the population was limited by available food. Reaching that point would get extremely ugly.
Why does it have to be a "massive worldwide famine" rather than a general slow starvation that forces an overall balance?
I get why some human issues lead to catastrophe like, global warming, but I never get why all issues will lead to catastrophes rather than gradual equilibrium.
Well, if the world were a simple mathematical model it might go as follows: there's enough food to feed ten billion people, so one day a baby is born taking us up to ten billion and one and oops -- somebody dies of starvation. From that moment on, the death rate due to starvation is equal to the birth rate minus the death rate due to non-starvation causes, and that's not _too_ bad.
In practice, though, that's not the way it's gonna happen. For starters, we have a bunch of food stored up, so the population will overshoot the limit by eating stored food, maybe for a bunch of years, enabling the population to get way above what it should. (I'm not just talking about canned beans here -- living animals are "stored food" too). Secondly, food production varies from year to year -- in a good year we might be able to feed eleven billion, and in a bad year only nine... that's gonna cause some problems when a bad year rolls around. Finally, a world where everybody has _just_ enough food to not die is still a pretty miserable and malnourished world... plus you've got the whole "hungry people with guns vs hungry people without guns" problem which leads to a whole bunch of other bad stuff happening.
Anyway, I hope that has been enough to convince you that awful things happen anytime you get a population anywhere near the very fuzzy and variable limit which is the maximum agriculturally sustainable population.
