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.