Norman E. Borlaug passed away yesterday, the ‘Father of the Green Revolution’.
There’s really quite an extensive Wikipedia page on him and his work.
Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, as well as numerous other awards. He’s often credited for ‘saving over a billion people from starvation’.
His methods are also responsible for many people killed by cancers or otherwise sickened by agricultural chemicals, and for putting huge numbers of farmers deep in debt.
He’s responsible for an unsustainable system of high input agriculture, that by some accounts is the single largest contributor to global warming. It’s undeniably the source of major environmental contamination in many places, and the reason many places in the world are facing a crisis from the loss of topsoil.
Many influetial people assert the gains seen in agricultural productivity would have happened anyway (see highlighted box in the bottom of this link), without the need of all the energy and chemical inputs, and the current system of agriculture heavily dependent on intensively cultivated monocultures is the cause of many of the world’s most important crop pest and disease problems.
He’s certainly someone who will be remembered!
I think, based on my admittedly limited knowledge of the area, it would be tremendously harsh to label Borlaug anything other than a hero. At the end of the day, the immunity-carrying seed he produced saved millions. Whilst he may well have worked with industrial agriculture, its hard to see how else the Borlaug seeds could have been provided to the masses at the time in question.
I don’t know – at a gut level I come down on the villain side, though that may not be fair. Any mention of “the Green Revolution” always makes me cringe and reminds me of a Reagan-era story. As part of the “Green Revolution”, hybrid corn seed was distributed to indigenous farmers in Nicaragua, and at the same time their own land races collected and deposited in the US National Seed Storage Laboratory (USDA). By the time the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua, the farmers were quite disillusioned with the hybrid corn, and wanted to go back to their old varieties, but they had lost them. A request was made to the US to get samples of their varieties back so they could re-establish them. The request was denied because of Reagan’s trade embargo on Nicaragua…