Borlaug has contributed to the idea the fossil fuelled party can go on for ever. Now crude oil is 50% depleted and concentrated phosphate is 70% depleted. Natural gas to make ammonia based fertilisers is in heavy demand for other uses. Imagine trying to grow wheat in the WA wheatbelt when diesel is $10 a litre and DAP is $500 for a 50 kg bag. Won't happen? Some say it will happen within a decade.

Now we will have to look at recycling human wastes for fertiliser, just like before the Green Revolution. Weeds are becoming herbicide resistant so we will have to go back to burning and physical weed control, just like before the Green Revolution. The problem is that now there are billions more mouths to feed. Perhaps we should have kept on doing things the old way and not allowed the population get so big.

The most authoritative source on the politics and consequences of the Green Revolution is Vandana Shiva who states that:

"Since the 1950s, the Green Revolution has been hailed for its success in expanding the global food supply, particularly in developing nations such as India and China. High-yield miracle seeds were promoted all over the developing world, and the Green Revolution was praised for preventing the starvation of millions of people. The ecological and social costs of the Green Revolution were largely ignored. Through its emphasis on high-yield seeds, this agricultural model replaced drought-resistant local crop varieties with water-guzzling crops. The Green Revolution led to water drawing down aquifers in water-scarce areas".

Further critical comment from someone with no coporate barrow to push is available at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/whose-water/turning-scarcity-into-abundance

This article assumes that it is good for people not to die of starvation, but we need to understand that there is a vocal and powerful bloc of people in all western societies who, strange as it may seem, regard mankind as a plague, and abhor the tendency for people to feed themselves and their children by making more productive use of natural resources. As they regard human use of natural resources as being ipso facto bad for "the environment", and the environment as having intrinsic value over and above its utility to human beings, this new belief system in effect is anti-human.

One of the most obvious ways to make agriculture more productive is to stop illegalising it and taxing it. Statists of course argue that taxation is necessary to fund activities with a higher social purpose, but seriously, what could be a higher purpose than supplying food to the world's hungry?

In law, a license is permission to something that would otherwise be illegal. So we need to understand that, to the extent that we need a licence to do something, the starting point is that government has actually made that activity illegal. Viewed from this perspective, we can that it has reached the stage that in Australia today, virtually all farming activities are illegal unless you first pay tribute to government.

The effect of such government interventions is to illegalise society's consensual means of satisfying the most urgent wants of the consumer. All such interventions necessarily shift production from areas of higher output per unit of input, to areas of lower output per unit of input.

All governments of the world are thus implicated in the global food shortage by their thousands of interventions of every kind in every kind of use of natural resources.

We need to recognise that the claims of the statists and environmentalists to stand for higher social values are false.

“While there are critics of the Green Revolution and the massive changes it has brought to the agricultural sector and the world economy, Dr Norman Borlaug was probably one of the greatest Americans - possibly one of the greatest humans - to have ever walked on the face of the earth.
The number of people across the globe who have escaped famine and are now alive and enjoying a robust diet due to his discoveries can be measured in the billions. For the vast majority of these people, the irony is his name and achievements will forever remain an unknown.”

There is more: the vast majority of people who comment on Borlaug neglect one of his most important credits – his acknowledgment that agricultural advancements did no more than give humanity ["a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation," a breathing space in which to deal with the "Population Monster" and the subsequent environmental and social ills that too often lead to conflict between men and between nations.]

Sadly Borlaug in the agricultural field, and others such as Frank Fenner in the battle against disease, acknowledged the fundamental problem of population pressure always. They would now look back in despair. Their great works in fostering human wellbeing have been isolated and misused to foster the very problem so evident to them. Especially despairing, when means for addressing that problem have been readily available for most of their working lives. Birth rates could have been adjusted, in concert with the wishes of women, to match death rates had it not been for the pressure of religious and social bigotry upon politicians and media.

The same pressures continue to foster population increase which stands at 1.2 per cent for the world and about 2.0 for Australia. It is past time that the troglodytes who foster these pressures were dragged out of their caves into the blinding light of reality. Agricultural experts working desperately to overcome the impossible challenges thrust upon them tread far too lightly on the cave-dwellers.

I agree with the above post by Jefferson in so far as there are misanthropic elements within the environment movement and these are ofter arrayed around the profoundly irrational concept of Gaia.

There is, however, a significant difference between misanthrope environmentalists and the work of someone like Vandana Shiva. Jefferson's comment seeks to tar all critical environmentally informed voices with the same brush which is the mark of the ideologue.

As to markets solving problems of food production - Shiva's work provides articulate and evidence based argument to show that the Green revolution has at least created as many problems as it has solved not the least of which is overpopulation and disruption of traditional technologies and social relations of production.

Now, Jefferson, to convince me that you are not a blind ideologue, why not actually read Shiva's article (and perhaps one of her numerous books) and then get back to the subject.

*As they regard human use of natural resources as being ipso facto bad for "the environment", and the environment as having intrinsic value over and above its utility to human beings, this new belief system in effect is anti-human.*

Jefferson, I've heard that argument before, from a well known
economist. The problem with that, is that he tried to value
biodiversity in $ terms. Given the biological reality that
without biodiversity you won't have a humanity to value
anything, an unsustainable environment means no humanity at
all.

So the value of a sustainable environment is in fact
extremely high, if you value the future sustainable existence
of our species. If its not sustainable, then it does not have
a long term future.