Thank you for this wonderful tribute to the man Penn Jillette dubbed, with good reason, "the greatest human in history".

At www.theoildrum.com, "Big Gav" has written an interesting article on Borlaug. A quote,

"While Borlaug became ever more optimistic about further increasing crop yields, he did occasionally sound Malthusian style warnings about population growth, particularly in the 1970's - "future food-production increases will have to come from higher yields. And though I have no doubt yields will keep going up, whether they can go up enough to feed the population monster is another matter. Unless progress with agricultural yields remains very strong, the next century will experience sheer human misery that, on a numerical scale, will exceed the worst of everything that has come before"."

The article then goes on to say how Borlaug was optimistic we could feed 10 billion people. However, as evident to all readers of the oildrum, Borlaug's optimism was based on the continued use of fossil fuels in agriculture. We should not condemn Borlaug for allowing the world's population to increase unsustainably but condemn ourselves for not taking advantage of the opportunity he provided to stabilize our population at a sustainable level.

[He had no illusions about the huge task of feeding the world in the face of an unconquered “population monster”, against which he advocated economic development, education and family planning.]

He knew that we do not live by bread alone. What a pity that fundamentalist thinking has had sufficient influence to be able to deny implementation of these other aspects that Borlaug was prepared to publicly acknowledge.

Homo sapiens – the big-brained mammal; with the knowledge, but not the acumen, to address the challenge of its own excess fertility. That is so similar to the general attitude to rabbits in Australia where breathing-space has been provided by myxo and calici virus, not final answers, to plague infestation.

Borlaug was tireless in his belief in technology, devoted to intensive, corporate agriculture without the capacity or skill to see the long term impacts or shortcomings. He described Rachel Carson as an 'evil force' because of her opposition to DDT. Vandana Shiva described the real impacts of his green revolution in the Punjab; "The experience of the Green Revolution in Punjab is an illustration of how contemporary scientific expertise is politically and socially created, how it builds its immunity and blocks its social evaluation. It is an example of how science takes credit for successes and absolves itself from all responsibility for failures. The tragic story of Punjab is a tale of the exaggerated sense of modern science's power to control nature and society, and the total absence of a sense of responsibility for creating natural and social situations which are totally out of control" Late in his life he became an advocate for GE - claiming benefits that still have not been found and are unlikely to be. It's time to rethink the mythologising of Borlaug.

The crops that Borlaug developed helped to double the productivity of the major crops. His genetic methods were the pre cursor for modern GM techniques which are increasing these yields further.

If you think of it we have been eating GM food since the 60s

How many people did Rachel Carson condemn to death from malaria with "Silent Spring"?

How many people have enough food to eat thanks to Vandana Shiva?

Oddly enough, some people think human life has value.

Clownfish, they are still finding DDT in Antarctic penguins despite a fairly widespread ban on the environmental use of it over three decades ago.

I must say that the growing counter-culture that thinks the widespread environmental use of highly residual neurotoxins was a terrific idea and should never have been stopped is disturbing. The fact is, that they were only ever a temporary measure because resistance in insect species tends to make their widespread use somewhat self-defeating eventually. That's what happened to DDT. Rachel Carson didn't condemn anyone to death.

There is ZERO evidence that GE increases yields - in fact, there is more evidence to the contrary. The notion that GE will feed the world has been dismissed by that radical environment group - The World Bank in their 4 year study of global agriculture. To Clownfish: If Borlaug is going to get credit for saving lives through the green revolution then surely he is also responsible for the over 1 billion people who currently go hungry because they don't benefit from that revolution. As Vandana Shiva says - you can't have it just one way.

next, your logic defeats me.

I assume therefore that I am personally responsible for the suffering of everyone in Samoa, because I didn't donate *enough* money to house and feed them all?

Clownfish, the logic is clear: scientists of the green revolution claimed to save millions of lives through increased production. As Shiva points they also construct their own immunity from the impacts of those increases. Starvation and malnutrition are intimately related to the political systems that created the corporate agricultural model in which the green revolution sat. Your analogy isn't.

Next,

That food yields nearly doubled are not in dispute, neither is the fact that from WW2 to now the % of people threatened with starvation has dropped from about 40% to 20%, and where there is still food insecurity it is almost always due to political kleptocracy and corruption.

How you can tag the scientists with the responsibility for corrupt 3rd world politicians astounds me.

Vandana Shiva’s point is that scientists cannot absolve themselves from the failures of the technologies they produce nor the systems that produce them. This isn’t absurd – this is obvious. Scientists operate in the political sphere. When CSIRO Plant Industries beds with Monsanto in the development of GE crops, they make political choices that have impacts throughout the food chain. They work on behalf of multinationals with patents on food , rather than on developing local farming systems. They research GE, not organics (in fact, they fired their one organic scientist); they become open advocates for the biotech industry. The green revolution was a rapid expansion of industrial and corporate farming. That increased food production but also caused and increased a variety of other problems (everything from chemical deaths, soil depletion, water depIetion and contamination, dependence on machinery and fossil fuels, acquisition of corrupt governments by megacorporations, commodifying of food, growing of food for export rather that local food consumption, destruction of communities, ownership over the commons)…These are real problems in agricultural areas - and are not solely, not even primarily, the result of corrupt 3rd world governments. The corruption is endemic - and it begins here - and scientists, along with all who support the current system of food production must take responsibility for its realities. At the moment those realities are mainly ugly - and avoidable.

Next,

Your anti technology crusade is pure fantasy.

Very few scientists are political. They are simply looking for solutions to problems.

CSIRO has never aligned itself with Monsanto, (which is an industrial corporation), but has been involved in assessing the benefits and risks of various technologies on behalf of the government, and once trying to develop its own products in competition with Monsanto.

The CSIRO is involved in developing farming techniques, to improve yields and reduce soil damage which apply to organics as well as non organics. However, the low yields and nil nutritional benefits of organic food means that it is likely to remain the premium priced food source of the indulged.

Areas where commercial modern agriculture has been replaced with "local" production is Zimbabwe and other African countries where food production has plummeted, and starvation is rampant.

If you can show a country where the population generally has suffered from high tech agriculture and not the goverment coruption I would be most interested, as I could not find any.

Shadow Minister, your response is rubbish in almost every respect. Firstly, I'm not anti-technology - I am against corporate technologies commercialised, imposed and dumped on a population with the complicity of government - GE is a fine example. Secondly, CSIRO Plant Industries is in a contractual relationship with both Monsanto and Bayer (try and get a copy of the contracts/agreement - protected from public scrutiny by a narrow reading of the FOI act). If you think that financial relationships with corporations don't affect science-research priorities and research results, have a quick look at the peer reviewed literature - it's unequivocal. Finally, scientists working in many areas of technology are in a political sphere whether they want to be or not. I agree, many simply want to do their science - that doesn't mean they aren't inadvertently or through willful ignorance - supporting political decisions that impact on many of us. If you look at the history of the development of GE and nanotechnology, the story is far less benign. Many scientists have been actively complicit in avoiding public scrutiny, regulation before commercialisation and informed consent from communities. Science/technology is probably more politicised (at least in several major sectors) than at any time since the Catholics ran the university systems in Europe.