Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug dies at 95

[Newsjock]

Source: Associated Press

Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the "green revolution" who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday in Texas, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said. He was 95.

Borlaug died just before 11 p.m. Saturday at his home in Dallas from complications of cancer, said school spokeswoman Kathleen Phillips. Phillips said Borlaug's granddaughter told her about his death. Borlaug was a distinguished professor at the university in College Station.

The Nobel committee honored Borlaug in 1970 for his contributions to high-yield crop varieties and bringing other agricultural innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.

... "He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much," said Dr. Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M University's Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and a close friend who persuaded Borlaug teach at the school. "He made the world a better place — a much better place. He had people helping him, but he was the driving force."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/09/12/national/a212832D68.DTL&tsp=1

[lapfog_1]

1. Wasn't he the guy that developed the

wheat hybrid that allowed for a much heavier "head" on a sturdier wheat stalk? Credited with increasing wheat crop yields by a factor of 2 or 3 in the same acreage?

I think the "West Wing" mentioned him in some episode or other.

[Posteritatis]

18. The very same, yep. (nt)

[Odin2005]

2. Deleted.

RIP. :(

[omega minimo]

3. wtf

:wtf:

be part of the solution, Odin, not the problem.

That's it for you.

[Odin2005]

5. Sorry, I've been in a cranky mood all day because of the tea-baggers.

:blush:

[Liberal_in_LA]

6. we missed out

[Odin2005]

14. I was in a bad mood and quipped that certain posters would be bashing him.

[Strelnikov_]

4. ??

??

[rayofreason]

7. Borlaug was a great man.

An unsung hero, he is responsible for saving a billion lives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
http://www.worldfoodprize.org/about/Borlaug.htm

Most people have never heard of him.

[rayofreason]

15. Here is a nice piece on Borlaug...

...though a bit dated

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97jan/borlaug/borlaug.htm

[Vidar]

8. RIP Mr. Borlaug. Thank you for the millions of lives you saved.

[bananas]

9. k&r nt

[dccrossman]

10. K&R

:kick:

[HamdenRice]

11. He also inspired the other crop "research institutes" to collect "land race" heritage seeds

With funding from foundations and governments, crop research institutes were set up to collect hundreds of thousands of seeds used by indigenous farmers and seed savers -- a potato institute in the Andes, a rice institute in the philippines, and so on.

These seeds were studied and crossed to make ever more hardy, productive kinds of seeds and plants -- and unlike Monsanto, they were made available free or at cost, without the awful "intellectual property" thievery claims of big pharma.

[Faygo Kid]

12. He was a truly great man. Saved millions. One of Nobel's best selections.

RIP, and thanks.

[JonQ]

13. So sad

I actually work about 100 ft from the Norman Borlaug building. He is very well respected here.

He had a good long life, and left the world better off than it was before him, all in all, not a bad way to go out.

[wellst0nev0ter]

19. One Small Fact: Borlaug Was Enrolled In The Old General College

And now it's gone. There might be some didacticism in that tale, but now I'm too tired and grumpy to suss it out.

[LeftishBrit]

16. A great man. RIP.

[Posteritatis]

17. "...saving hundreds of millions of lives..."

Just contemplate that line for a few minutes, people. Roll around in your head the implications of one person being able to, in large part, get credited with that.

There are a couple of people who can scrabble around the base of that kind of accomplishment - Edward Jenner, Frederick Banting - but this guy's the apogee.

Borlaug's one of the most underrated people ever to walk this planet - and I actually got the impression he liked it that way!

We lost a very good one here.

[Posteritatis]

20. kick (nt)

[hyphenate]

21. Someone mentioned him to me

not long ago, so my knowledge of him and his work is scarce. But he's the kind of person we should all aspire to be, no matter what their specialty. It takes a certain amount of courage to forge their way through uncharted waters, especially when there are perils along the way. Rather than turning back, they are heroes just for making advances.

We seem to have lost our way, folks, when we pay athletes and entertainers exorbitant amounts of money and let the true heroes slide (often) into complete obscurity.

[Irreverend IX]

22. A great discovery?

His wheat hybrid allowed the nations of the world to ignore overpopulation for a few more decades. Today, the world food supply is completely dependent on synthetic petroleum-based fertilizers, and the exploding population is one of the main factors driving climate change. Modern farming techniques can only be sustained for so long before the soil is rendered permanently barren, and it appears it's already too late to stop global warming. Agriculture today is all about increased yields at the expense of sustainability, adding more stories to a house of cards that will be all the more devastating when it collapses. Who knows how many billions will die when the icecaps melt and most arable land is gone?

[LeftishBrit]

delete (dupe)

[LeftishBrit]

23. Overpopulation hasn't been 'ignored'; it has been neglected

And the main reasons have been (1) high infant mortality making parents want large numbers of children in case some die; (2) poverty restricting access to birth control; (3) religious groups interfering with access to birth control. I wouldn't blame Borlaug for any of these things.

[Posteritatis]

24. He took a chip out of some of them though

Improve your food situation, infant mortality drops like a rock, and generally speaking the birthrate does afterwards (if with about a generation of lag, as we've seen). Farmers are secure and more productive? That starts chipping away at poverty, leaves people better off, less incentive to get all Duggar on the world and they can afford birth control or medical services or the like anyway.

The birthrate globally's gone down a lot more than most people are willing to accept lately; anyone who takes a look at Hans Rosling's talks (or Gapminder in general) can see how dramatic that change is too.

So yeah, I pretty much utterly refuse to castigate Borlaug for the population problem. (Really, I notice most of those who lament the fact that he saved hundreds of millions tend to be in very, let's say, comfortable parts of the world.)

[JonQ]

25. Penicillin did a lot to "ignore overpopulation"

as do efforts to contain HIV, Polio, malaria and any other infectious disease.

Just think how fewer people there could have been if Hitler had been just a bit more successful, the allies were world hating monsters.

And kennedy, the bastard worked to prevent WWIII, just imagine if we'd had it out back then we'd definitely have fewer than a billion people today.

[Canuckistanian]

33. Modern sanitation and water systems also "ignored overpopulation"

These people who save the world are monsters.

[Critters2]

27. So, your solution to overpopulation is starving people to death?

Yeah, that's a good idea. :eyes:

[JonQ]

28. A plague would be more kind

or an organized genocide effort. Quicker, less suffering.

Unless you can sweet talk several billion people in to committing suicide.

[Odin2005]

34. Oh, look, a stupid Malthusian.

:eyes:

[Codeine]

44. Yes, much better that millions starve.

You'll be volunteering your family to die first, right? Or should it only be those inconvenient foreign brown people whose lives were immeasurably improved by this man's developments?

[WriteDown]

47. See post 46. nt

[tama]

26. Green revolution

is the biggest crime of our time.

[JonQ]

29. I'm sure the billions of people who did not starve to death

or face serious malnutrition would disagree with you.

It's easy to complain about the easy access of food for brown people when you yourself are not facing famine.

[tama]

30. What is Green Revolution?

To put it short, Green Revolution means mining and killing the soil for short term gain but long term utter catastrophy. Poisoning soil with artificial fertilizers and pesticides, dependent from fossile fuels, using up ground water, etc. etc. etc.

Mother Nature is bountifull and we certainly don't need Industrial Agriculture to "feed" us by destroying the soil and life in blind greed. We are natural gardeners and a multilayerd garden forest gives humans more to eat per acre (plus clothes, medicin, heating etc.) than any industrial method ever. The only "problem" with garden forests is that they cannot be mechanized and capitalized for profit making.

[JonQ]

31. Tell you what

how about next time you see someone from one of these countries, ask if they'd be happier living in your garden forests (which actually can't work) and starving to death, or not starving to death through agriculture.

The reason we have to do these things to produce food is that the world is not naturally set up to provide us with food, we evolved to barely scrape by in the environment, not thrive with 6 + billion people in it. The world was not made for us, it's foolish to assume a natural world would provide plenty, especially as there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

[tama]

32. Delusional

Of course the planet is "naturally set up to provide" humans food, we are part of this planet just like the rest of biosphere. That's not the problem, the problem is the "thriving" alienated diet of the "civilized" people.

As for workability of forest gardens see for example Kerala Home Gardens: http://www.unu.edu/unupress/food/8F163e/8F163E07.htm. BTW, Kerala has one of the densest populations on Earth. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta for a good starter.

And yes, I prefer to ask people from "one of these countries" about how they would like to live instead of letting you speak for them. I'm currently reading a book about forests, industrial destruction of forests, forest gardening, spiritual meaning of forest etc., with voices from North and South. I'm familiar with voices from Brazilian landless movement and their struggle for sustainable agriculture, in opposition to corporate-colonialist "Green Revolution" sugar, soyabean and eucalyptus plantations. I just had the honor to have good discussions and silences with a Mexican wise man who came here to guide a swet seremony at a local ecocommunity.

I am a gardener and growing season by season into better gardener, doing what I can to help my brothers and sisters to survive the Peak Oil, Climate Change and the damage done by technocratic industrial farming and corporate-imperialist fascism. I am a free man, not a mere cog in the machine and I like myself.

[JonQ]

38. This is as much a religion as ny orthodoxy

and it was pointless to question your dogma.

[tama]

40. Why?

I offer links to empirical facts to counter your claims, you resort to personal slander. Who is being dogmatic here?

[question everything]

48. The Green Revolution has kept more forests on the globe

by allowing higher yield on the same amount of cultivated land.

And, I suppose, you've never felt the real pang of hunger to just, oh sit in the comfort of your desk clicking away, secure in your next meal, or even snack.

[tama]

52. Not true

A forest garden gives much higher yield of nourishment per acre than industrially cultivated field. The main difference is that agroforestry cannot be mechanized and capitalized for big profits.

[question everything]

70. You cannot plant wheat in the forest

you will have to clear it to plant. Wheat is the basic staple of diet for most people of the world.

[tama]

74. For peoples of forest

forest does not mean just trees. Forest is living organism of which also people and clearings are organic part of.

My ancestors slashed and burned clearings, cultivated barley, rye and veggies for few years and then let the next successions follow at that place and made a new clearing in other place. There are peoples who have lived like that for millennia and not destroyed the forest their live depend from, but made the forest more rich.

We are nowhere near to the limits of our gardening skills. The problem is our dietary habits, destroying forests and soil to grow soy beans to fead cattle so that we can eat meat every day so that we get sick from too much meat and need to feed doctors and insurance companies who remove the fat from us. This is insanity. We must change our dietary habits or perish - or do you want to just keep your dietary habits and let "them others" perish?

We are nowhere near to the limits of our gardening skills. If we want better - much, much, better - yield from our existing fields we should turn them into multilayered agroforests, with all kinds of edible trees, bushes and veggies and roots and mushroom, with game. With fibres and medicines etc. With plants that fertilize the soil naturally instead of using fossile fuels. We know how to do this, how to learn. Do we choose to?

***

Edit to add: that's just the larger frame. Even more important is the transition process and drawing roadmaps that help to make it feel possible, to begin with. A climax state forest garden takes a long time to grow - even many generations - and of course it would be stupid to try to make it happen at once. To survive this food crisis as best as we can, we can start from eating less meat and preferably only organic or hunted meat, small home gardens to provide at least some of our diet and similar small steps, they will help immensly, while we start planting forest gardens for our children.

[Odin2005]

35. You Malthusians are the evil ones.

[tama]

39. I'm not malthusian

nor evil.

What I'm saying is not even controversial but empirical fact: industrial agriculture is not sustainable, yes it gives a short term gain but in the long run destroys the fertility of soil besides being fully dependent from fossile energy. From the viewpoint of feeding our children I consider that a heinous crime.

[Posteritatis]

45. Ahh, so you just think that feeding *their* children is a heinous crime. (nt)

[tama]

51. No,

but obviously that's what you think: Us and Them Others. When I use words "us" and "our" I use them inclusively, not exclusively. It saddens me that I have to explain this.

[Odin2005]

58. You are ignoring technological advance as a force.

You are making the Doomerist mistake of believing the answer is to go backwards and not forwards technologically.

[tama]

60. Nope

I've given it a lot of thought and study and came to conclusion that each new technofix to a problem just creates two more problems that need fixing.

What is important is not fixing problems but stopping causing them.

That said, I'm certainly not anti-technology. We can adapt or refuse technologies given full considerations. What I'm against is technocracy that forces us into parts of machine. That's totalitarianism, not freedom.

[Odin2005]

62. The problem is that your "solution" leads to mass starvation.

I have also given it a lot of thought and have come to the conclusion that denying that all these people can be fed while at the same time not damaging the environment is essentially defeatist nonsense and is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

[tama]

66. Huh?

That's what I've said. Earth is still bountifull and can feed all of humans and then some, but only if we stop destroying her carrying capacity.

What guarantees mass starvation and die-off is your "more of the same old" that brought us to this brink.

[AngryAmish]

36. You think it is a crime all those damn brown and black people lived

Sick.

[tama]

41. Please

read what I say before jumping to such ugly conclusions.

[tama]

43. Let me ask you in return

how much of the food you eat is grown by you, how much picked by brown and black people working (in deplorable conditions) for some big agroindustry corporation? How Amish are you?

[LeftishBrit]

37. Not for the people who were saved from starvation by it.

A few of the posts here remind me of 'Let them eat cake'.

[tama]

42. The point is

we are not saved. Industrial agriculture does not save us from starvation, it just makes things much worse.

Yes, this planet can feed all of us and then some, it's a simple calculation and the numbers are available to all. But only if we stop destroying the carrying capacity of Earth by industrial agriculture and other "civilized" suicidal practices. Only if instead of trying to control we start to cooperate with natural processes. Yes, adapting to sustainable way of life means huge social transformation. But that is the only choise evolution offers: adapt or perish.

I could try to retort back to these comments accusing me of murderous racism in kind and accuse all believers in industrial aggriculture of being child murderers. But I choose not because that would be counterproductive. We are in this together and need to learn fast.

[WriteDown]

46. There should be a committee set up to determine..

if people are good genetic stock, then they can be allowed to breed and have access to the food supply. That should take care of overpopulation and industrial agriculture quickly.

[JackRiddler]

49. There should be a committee set up to determine...

if arguments are obvious strawmen. These should be tossed overboard and that should help us cope with bandwidth bottlenecks and sensory overload due to bullshit.

[WriteDown]

50. How is the enhancement of society a strawman...

I can't believe you'd defend monsters who create things like wheat hybrids.

[tama]

55. Exactly

"Hybrid seed cannot be saved, as the seed from the first generation of hybrid plants does not reliably produce true copies, therefore, new seed must be purchased for each planting."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed

How are hybrid seeds different from Monsanto seeds in this respect? Using hybrid seeds makes peasant dependant from the Big Hybrid Seed Corporation where he must buy new seeds every year, and in order to buy seeds the peasant must sell his crop to international market and when the money is not enough he must loan money from some bank and pay interest to the banksters and the stockholders - so that rich white people in the North can get richer.

[WriteDown]

56. If only...

we had had that world famine. Things would have been a lot better today.

"He was known as the father of the "green revolution," which transformed agriculture through high-yield crop varieties and other innovations, helping to more than double world food production between 1960 and 1990. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives"

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/09/12/national/a212832D68.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0RORPFFU6

[tama]

59. Don't know

I don't believe "experts" just because they claim to be "experts". I don't know if green revolution and hybrid seeds saved any lives or saved more lives than they destroyed, are destroying or will destroy. Frankly, I'm not even interested.

What interests me is learning to live sustainably and free, what interests me is learning from experience of others, experience that can help us in this food crisis and those to come. I know that when Cuba collapsed they didn't survive because of industrial farming but because of learning organic gardening in cities and rural co-ops. I know that before, when and after Russia/SU collapsed people didn't survive because of industrial farming and hybrid seed. They survived with home gardens and keep surviving with home gardens.

The powers that be are not interested in gardening and gardening ourselves through Peak Oil and Peak Everything, gardening ourselves into freedom. The powers that be are interested in power and profit.

When gardeners of the world united and asked president Obama to start a home garden he listened and did so. For that I respect him, he shows a good example. Are you following his lead?

[WriteDown]

71. There are a few problems....

Industrial farming is the least of it. What really led to the population explosion were things like the majority of women surviving child-birth and antibiotics. Modern medicine and not so much food supply is the real culprit. My people never invented metal or the wheel for that matter. Their lives were unbelievably harsh and brutal. Mortality was ridiculously high. Is that a better way? Not sure about that.

[tama]

73. Simplest explanation

would seem to be energy-economics, namely that latest phase of population explosion has been possible because of oil.

I don't know what tribe you descend from. It's not wise to over-generalize how peoples lived before Europeans came, there were many ways of life in many kinds of environments. Some easier, some harder. But all ways of life were possible only by adapting to environment and that has not changed - though many Europeans believe otherwise.

Pre-European peoples were not given choise, many refused to get modernized, many were wiped out. The same process is still going on in forests around the world, peoples get modernized and dislocated against their will, traditions lost, ways of lives forgotten, much knowledge and beauty disappearing - so that consumers could keep on consuming more and more. This saddens my heart.

No, there is no going back in time. Learning from our ancestors, remembering and reinventing pre-European traditions and ways of life and fusing them together with what is good in modern ways does not mean going back in time. It is the way of future, perhaps the only way.

[WriteDown]

75. And that's where I would disagree...

I would say antibiotics/vaccines is the simplest explanation. Oil has had little effect on natural population limiters such as disease. Just a 100 years ago, there was a good chance you would die from a deep cut if it became infected. Think of the childhood diseases that ran rampant: measles, mumps, rubella, etc. Also, about 50% of women died in labor. If that isn't a population limiter, then I don't know what is. I am Akwesasne or Mohawk.

[tama]

76. I don't disagree

I'm saying that manufactoring and distributing antibiotics/vaccines and all other causes and causal chains of population expansion requires energy.

Hope you don't mind me asking, what are your thoughs and feelings and experience about Ganienkeh independence, the warrior societies etc., or generally the struggle of your people? Is it really a lost cause (as could be deciphered from your earlier comment)? Or even more generally, the current uprising and revival of native tribes both south and nort America and the meeting of condor and eagle?

[tama]

53. You tried and done that allready

having been convinced by your scientific committees that good genetic stock means white (with pinkish hue) and bad and to be exterminated means black, brown, yellow and red.

Sorry, but I have hard time believing that your "superior race" has really changed from the good old days of scientific eugenics. When you want to "protect" a forest in the South you forbid and drive away the forest people who have lived in the forest for millennia as organic part of the forest ecosystem - thus destroying the ecosystem. THEN your corporations bring the bulldozers, poisons and monoculture plantations to produce fuel for your cars.

[WriteDown]

54. Since industrialized farming sustains the only continent

with a major expanding population (Africa). Taking that away seems to be a direct assault on brown people.

My race is Red and we are soon to be no more. I imagine that we were not the superior race.

If you really want to help overpopulation, demand that the US end ALL aid to all countries with an expanding population so they may learn to fend for themselves. Sure it may be painful, but its for the greater good.

[tama]

57. Sorry for the mistake

at first reading you sounded like the rest of these white men worshipping industrialized farming (and its corporate profits) and pretending to care about lesser races. The "white man's burden" and "manifest destiny" are alive and strong.

FIY, I'm not European nor American, my tribal (non-indoeuropean) ancestors were slash and burn forest gardeners, hunters and gatherers and lived like that not so long ago. My skin is pale in the winter and brown in the summer. For living I do manual work in the garden and I enjoy it. I don't destroy the soil, I make the soil more fertile. I feed people with food I can be proud of.

My tribe has been conquered and homogenized by European peoples just like American tribes. I've talked with red men and participated in swet seremony and I don't believe that you "are soon to be no more". From what I hear and see American tribes are now refinding their power and dignity.

***

I don't believe that industrial farming sustains Africa. I hear that African peasants are forced to produce food, flowers and what not for European and American consumers, instead of food for themselves, so that the African governements could keep on paying interests for the "development-loans" to Euro-American capitalists. I hear Chinese buying land in Africa and sending their farmers there because they are destroying their own land and cannot feed their people. I see many Africans, dislocated by (neo)colonialist structures, coming also here and I wellcome them.

I don't believe in overpopulation when the real problem is overconsumption.

Yeas, I do believe it would be better if all governemental "development aid" would stop. I don't trust any governement and least of all these corrupt corporate governements.

[Odin2005]

63. You attitude is disgusting.

Wow, feeding people is racism? :eyes:

You are a deluded archaistic romantic.

[tama]

65. Huh?

Non comprendo. Who are You feeding and how?

[tama]

67. I don't know you

But I get the impression that you are a sorry-ass urban technocrat who is horrified to his guts that the peasants won't feed him if given freedom from techno-corporate control. Just impression but if there's any truth to it, don't worry so much. The example of what happened during Makhno's anarchist Ukraine 1918-1929 shows that free peasants do feed starving urban folks out of compassion, also when urban folks have nothing for barter.

[Odin2005]

68. I'm a college student who grew up in a poor rural Minnesota small town.

I know farmers, half of my classmates were farm kids.

[tama]

69. A college student!

That explains, to some extent, the rudeness and the big words. Oh to be young again... :)

[WriteDown]

72. See post 71. nt

[Odin2005]

61. The answer is to use technology in order to use resources more efficiently.

For example, cities could grow their own fruits and vegetables with high-tech, very efficient hydroponic farming. The problem is not with "industrial agriculture", the problem is that there is no economic incentives to minimize environmental damage. You have fallen for the romantic delusion that pre-modern farmers were paragons of environmental virtue. Over-using the land lead to the collapse of Classical Mayan society. Many parts of Mesopotamia are infertile because of the buildup of salt in the soil from irrigation. what is needed is not romantic delusions, what is needed is sound, scientifically-based management of our agricultural land, and the use of SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY to increase the fertility in environmentally friendly ways. Large-scale farming is not to blame, it is corporatist "maximize profit" thinking that is to blame.

[tama]

64. Sure

go on and try it. How many photosynthesis-powered manual workhours to mine all the materials and building for the windmills and high-tech hydroponics and all the other needed infrastructure, maintenance and all other necessari work, and how many people can be fed? Calculate.

Then calculate that if those same manual workhours were used for traditional "low-tech" gardening - e.g. urban guerilla gardening ;) - improving the soil with mulch, seeding and planting and harvesting, how many people could have been fed... :)

I believe that a careful comparison in terms of scientific energy-economy would show that your high-tech is actually extremely inefficient energy sink. But don't take my word, try it and prove otherwise if you are able. I wish you all success, sincerely, and offer this link to likeminded vision if you are interested: http://www.thevenusproject.com/

But please, what really helps is walk the walk and not just talk the talk. And if your high-tech project fails, as it may, you are wellcome to come and pick fruits from the edible forest started by me and fellow hippie gardeners, with one caveat: if the building of the high-tech hydroponic city and all the jazz that goes with it means enslaving also us hippie-gardeners to your construction work, there will be no edible forest to go picking fruits from and we all starve.