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.

Okay anthonykn
The question in practice is always the economic one, however called, of how best to satisfy human wants involving scarce resources including time, labour, water and capital.

There is a real issue of scarcity that cannot be conjured away by appeal to government (otherwise why not put all food production under central planning?).

The fundamental question is how best to rationalise the use of scarce resources; by voluntary means through the market, or coerced means through the state. But it is not clear that Shiva is, in the final analysis, vindicating the political means.

The whole purpose of the Green Revolution was to feed people, which it did. Those who allege over-population seem to be saying: “Just enough of me, far too much of you.”

As to disrupting social relations of production, so what? So did the invention of the wheel; the car put wagon-wheel makers out of work; and so on. The desideratum is the satisfaction of human wants, not the preservation of social relations of production per se.

If the disruption of traditional technologies has the result that more people go hungry, *that* is a valid argument against such disruption. The issue remains the economic one of how best to use scarce resources, not the preservation of traditional technologies per se.

The voluntarism and group management that Shiva mentions stand on their own merits. They are not an argument in favour of political decision-making, since their success is all the argument they need. To the extent that political decision-making is required to make them work, it is because of the underlying lack of private property rights in water.

The World Bank is a political organisation, created by governments for redistributionist reasons: foreign aid handouts, by forcing taxpayers to fund junkets for vested interests. The planned chaos resulting from its interventions that Shiva notes is the characteristic of all central planning. Shiva’s vague understanding of economics miscalls this interventionism ‘privatisation’, which ideology the bank preaches, but rejects and contradicts in its very nature. It is an argument against political interventions, not in favour of them.

... waiting for the usual suspects to: weigh in against those evil women; blame it all on the wicked mining companies; blame Al Gore; blame Ian Plimer; blame Tim Flannery; blame James Hansen; claim that it's all because we've abandoned Biblical teaching; make some really bizarre long-winded rant about Jesus, Jews, the Vatican and the UN; implore us all to return to simple subsistence-based agriculture; and predict the extinction of the human race, nay every living species on the planet. Oh, and something about polar bears. Can't forget them.

Very interesting Colinsett! It would be great if you could post some sources on these less acknowedged comments by Borlaug and Fenner so I could do some reading on it.

Michael-in-Adelaide, Borlaug’s take on population pressure can be assessed from, for one instance, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech which should be available on the web. Frank Fenner’s book Nature Nurture and Chance, provides just one window out of many on this human treasure’s acceptance of the reality of humanity’s problem from population pressure.

Actually, I don't think Borlaug would be in despair so much, as consider it a work in progress.

This passage from wikipedia is most apposite (and would apply to many of the most vehemently green misanthropists on these forums):

'Borlaug dismissed most claims of critics, but did take certain concerns seriously. He stated that his work has been "a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia".

Of environmental lobbyists he stated, "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations 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".'

There is also an excellent interview with Borlaug on "Penn & Teller's Bullsh!t: Eat This!", in which Penn Jillette also offers this sage advice: "Unless you and yours are starving, YOU need to SHUT - THE F*K - UP!"

*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".*

They probably would. But then Borlaug was also fortunate enough
as are you Clownfish, that he could sleep with his wife with
impunity. They would be outraged that you are so lucky, whilst
they are meant to cross their legs for the pope, or be forced
to feed far more kids then they ever wanted, just because
they enjoy a pit of hanky panky and cannot afford your options.

The fact that this great man was little known is no surprise.

Americans are too willing to lap up the last serving of culture,from Polliwood. Sports stars & celebrities receive notarity far in excess of their social contribution.

In addition the majority of journalists aid and abet the dumbing down of the news while they continue their slobering love affair for the Change Messiah whose brand of Change masquerades as a Socialistic redistribution of wealth cum Emission Trading. Of course they would not educate us about a scientist who wouldn't think of unethically using science as a scam to undermine the free market.

We cannot eat any of the foods mentioned in the article, corn,rice,wheat, due to allergies and diabetes. But I know that they use grains as feed for cattle, so it is still needed.

Yabby
What you say is true, and yes it is nonsense to talk of ‘biodiversity’ in dollar terms. Economic calculation works only on what is exchanged against money. First-order values, ends in themselves, must be valued directly in their own right; no need to use the means of economic calculation.

However this does not advance the argument past the original problem.

The issues of sustainability cast the environmentalist argument in terms of human utility. But it must be resolved in those terms. It must not be permitted to slide back into the mystic appeal to alleged values higher than human values, which, as seen, only resolve into misanthropy and desire for power.

The original problem of human utility is how to use resources so as not to waste them in satisfying human wants in order of urgency. The environmentalists’ sustainability argument is valid but not sound. We should not waste resources. But this does not mean that centralized coercion-based decision-making is less wasteful than voluntary decentralised decisions based on liberty and property.

There are two major flaws in the environmentalist method of presuming to decide at the species level, from a God’s-eye point of view as it were.

First, this is not the level at which the relevant values, decisions, and actions are in fact taking place. All the relevant decisions, including by corporations such as governments, NGOs and private companies, are taking place by and through individuals. All human action is decided by individuals subjectively judging the marginal utility of individual actions. No-one is given to decide for the whole of mankind – especially if others don’t agree with them!

Secondly, it is a universal fact of human action that people prefer a given satisfaction sooner rather than later; otherwise we would never eat. To value the human utility of a given resource for an unknown hypothetical stranger a million generations hence, equally as for a hungry person now, is just as economically incoherent, as pitiless and unconcerned about real human values and real human action, and just as messianic as the misanthropes.

“But” the environmentalists might say, “We’re not talking about sustainability *indefinitely*”.

But of course that’s exactly what they are talking about, otherwise the same objection would apply to their solution.

“No” they might say, “We only mean what every sensible person must agree, that resources shouldn’t be wasted so our foreseeable posterity will miss out.”

But this is to do no more than re-affirm the importance of the economic concept of profit, namely, the quantity of product that can be consumed without impairing the capacity of the original productive resource, the capital, to provide product so as to satisfy human wants later.

Welcome to the real world! Flattering themselves that they are path-finding a new economic system, environmentalists are merely flailing, and failing, to re-invent the wheel.

Certainly a world in which the economic problem of scarcity were permanently solved would be wonderful. But this is essentially the same mystic concept as the Christian belief in Paradise. Our world is one of permanent change, and natural scarcity. Such a stasis is not of this world. Gibbon famously said the Christians ‘defended nonsense with cruelty’; and the environmentalists’ attempt to attain their nonsensical mystic stasis by coercion is evil.

It is not an argument against liberty and property that people are imperfect, and knowledge progresses by making mistakes. Perfection is not an option either way.

There is no evidence or reason to think that vesting decision-making instead in bureaucratic powers motivated by rules and regulations, who pay no price for getting it wrong, and lack even the faculty of economic calculation, will produce anything other than a worse result both economically and ecologically.

*There is no evidence or reason to think that vesting decision-making instead in bureaucratic powers motivated by rules and regulations, who pay no price for getting it wrong, and lack even the faculty of economic calculation, will produce anything other than a worse result both economically and ecologically.*

Peter I actually agree with you on that one. Most Govt officials,
if given the power, do little but feather their own nests.

So I seek win-win solutions for all. Thus my promotion of the concept
that all women in the third world, should have access to family
planning, as first world women do.

The rest of your 2 posts really seems to agree that the well known
"tragedy of the commons" is correct. I certainly agree with it,
that is why I think nature will have to sort it out in the end,
we humans are too stupid to do it wisely or fairly.

I won't be around to care, but if we trash the place completely,
I still think that it will have been a shame. "Quaint planet,
pity about those humans" The earth will keep spinning with
ants and cockroaches on board, whether we are here or not.

Jefferson - to address what you've written:

I agree generally with your criticism of those who experience a moral panic at what they think is global over population and have frequently suggested that if they feel the world has too many people then their only ethical choice is to do the right thing and reduce the population by one - themselves. Oddly enough, they find this suggestion shocking.

Centralised production and distribution of food as we know is a disaster. The Russians always had a fine line in food queue jokes.

I thought the point of Shiva's article was that high(petroleum based) energy farming technologies displaced ecologically appropriate technologies with consequent flow on effects. The disruption or dislocation of the social relations of production has knock on ecological effects that she outlines.

As to the absence of private property rights in water resources being at the root of the problem: the idea that individual rights ought to prevail over communal rights in part derives from Hardin's thesis of the 'tragedy of the commons' which theory is ahistorical. The fate of the commons, in England initially and elsewhere since, is that it has been enclosed by individual interests and communal access has been denied. It is not that commons are over used but that individual interests prevail over common interests and the issuing of individualised water rights is but one step in that process.

There is no generalised scarcity. The world is wealthier now than ever. Distribution of wealth and equity are at the root of the problem.

Greater production in a world where particular groups think they are entitled to live like Pharaohs will only lead to the further engrossment those groups. India, like China, is not short of those whose desire for wealth, luxury and privilege is unending.

Cheers.

While centralised food production and distribution certainly did not work in the Soviet Union, we are seeing the other extreme occurring now - the consolidation of the ownership of food in the hands of a few mega-corporations - such as Monsanto, Cargill, ADM. This ownership extends from the seed to the store and ensures that starvation will continue and that food security and food cultures, and communities will always come second to private profits. The energy intensive (read wasteful) nature of food production means that current practices simply cannot continue. There are certainly alternative to command and control systems of food production - regardless of whether it is large government or large corporations doing the commanding.

IMHO many of the resented argument have merit but share common flaws.
Yabby is undoubtedly right IF one subscribes to his underlying set of fatalistic and or deterministic assumptions.
1.Human nature is fixed, static, immutable. This ignores all the scientific proof that exists giving credence to the effects of 'other factors'
2.Human nature even if the above is true that this mandates one possible manifestation. This ignores the impact of several other instincts and 'enlightened self interest' or 'self interested altruism'.
3.While he concluded that there's nothing we can do .

The same sentiments/reasoning were echoed in the futility/folly of try to instil morals ethics beyond those of human ones (human nature).

I would argue that change is inevitable as time and vise versa i.e. all things are evolutionary including human nature, culture as are is the holy trinity of conservative (non political context) thinking, our sense of values (what constitutes self interest) , expedience
(aka efficiency) and god its self 'economics'.

The other perception is equally flawed in that Corporations are demonised and seen as the primary reason for our tortured state.

This is only partly and superficially true.

I say this on two grounds the first is that Corporations of any size are tools of PEOPLE,

The other is the nature of the beast's unlimited and therefore flawed genetic blue print.

Like all organisations without a preset limitation on short term longevity and size , their primary aim changes from the purpose of their creation (to provide capital, further a specific ) to one of its own longevity and growth In so doing the need for it to produce profit regardless of any inherent moral constraints. Rather the moral emphasis becomes right is anything that doesn't get caught.

In the final analysis humanity does become the captive of the corporation rather than it's beneficiary either as a servant or a hapless consumer. However the fault is in the design not the tool per se.

What is needed is lateral thinking of how to control/adapt to the looming change

Crikey! You've got a strange obsession with other peoples' sex lives there, yabby. You and KAEP ought to get together!

If you're inferring that I'm some sort of religious procreation crank, I can only assume you haven't read any of my posts about religion. Suffice it to say that I'll be whooping it up in Hell with Dawkins and Hitchens if the Believers are somehow right.

I'm all for giving people reproductive choice, especially that tried-and-true recipe for lowering birthrates: giving women access to education and economic liberation.

*Crikey! You've got a strange obsession with other peoples' sex lives there, yabby*

Not so Clowny, your sexlife is simply another part of biology.

Fact is that if you do your homework, hundreds of millions of women
don't use contraception because its not available or they can't
afford it. Things are a little different in the third world, then
in your city.

Its fairly pointess sending boatloads of food to the third world,
without adressing family planning, or as Bob Geldorf found out,
next time you simply have twice as many to feed.

"Of course they would not educate us about a scientist who wouldn't think of unethically using science as a scam to undermine the free market."

Yeah. The free market needs help to undermine itself.