By JOHN TIERNEY - THE NEW YORK TIMES
Added: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:00:00 UTC

Thanks to a number of people who have sent in links to the announcement of Norman Borlaug's death. This is one from today's New York Times which has a couple of good videos.

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/greatest-human-being-rip/

Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, was celebrated for performing “miracles” by President Bartlet and an African leader in “The West Wing” (see the video clip below). He was described as history’s “greatest human being” by Penn and Teller (in their program featuring Dr. Borlaug and some of his opponents, like Greenpeace). Since his death on Saturday night at the age of 95, tributes from world leaders have been flowing.

I wrote about Dr. Borlaug, who was crediting with saving hundreds of millions of lives, in a post last year about environmentalists’ role in exacerbating food shortages (and pressuring the Rockefeller and Ford foundations to reduce support for Dr. Borlaug’s agricultural research). In a lecture given on the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Borlaug told an audience in Oslo in 2000:

I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called “organic” methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low-income, food-deficit nations cannot.

It took some 10,000 years to expand food production to the current level of about 5 billion tons per year. By 2025, we will have to nearly double current production again. This cannot be done unless farmers across the world have access to current high-yielding crop-production methods as well as new biotechnological breakthroughs that can increase the yields, dependability, and nutritional quality of our basic food crops.

TAGGED: ANNOUNCEMENTS, BIOLOGY, GENETICS