A man has passed away who profoundly impacted the food situation in Bangladesh, but no one on this site seemed to remember!!! Goebelsian Isha Khan and his reptilian clones are too busy like Don Quixote chasing imaginary windmills in the sky to look at the real world!!!
Two looks at Norman Borlaug the father of the Green Revolution, for those who are interested.
September 14, 2009
Norman Borlaug, Plant Scientist Who Fought Famine, Dies at 95
By JUSTIN GILLIS
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night. He was 95 and lived in
The cause was complications from cancer, said Kathleen Phillips, a spokeswoman for
Dr. Borlaug's advances in plant breeding led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin America and
He was widely described as the father of the broad agricultural movement called the Green Revolution, though decidedly reluctant to accept the title. "A miserable term," he said, characteristically shrugging off any air of self-importance.
Yet his work had a far-reaching impact on the lives of millions of people in developing countries. His breeding of high-yielding crop varieties helped to avert mass famines that were widely predicted in the 1960s, altering the course of history.
Largely because of his work, countries that had been food deficient, like
"More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world," the Nobel committee said in presenting him with the Peace Prize. "We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace."
The day the award was announced, Dr. Borlaug, vigorous and slender at 56, was working in a wheat field outside
Criticism of Techniques
The Green Revolution eventually came under attack from environmental and social critics who said it had created more difficulties than it had solved. Dr. Borlaug responded that the real problem was not his agricultural techniques, but the runaway population growth that had made them necessary.
"If the world population continues to increase at the same rate, we will destroy the species," he declared.
Traveling to
His Nobel Prize was the culmination of a storied life in agriculture that began when he was a boy growing up on a farm in
The job was part of an assault on hunger in
Indeed, on first seeing the situation in
"These places I've seen have clubbed my mind — they are so poor and depressing," he wrote to his wife after his first extended sojourn in the country. "I don't know what we can do to help these people, but we've got to do something." The next few years were ones of toil and privation as Dr. Borlaug and his colleagues, with scant funds or equipment, set to work improving yields in tropical crop varieties.
He spent countless hours hunched over in the blazing Mexican sun as he manipulated tiny wheat blossoms to cross different strains. To speed the work, he set up winter and summer operations in far-flung parts of
He was by then a trained scientist holding a doctoral degree in plant diseases. But as he sought to coax better performance from the wheats of
"When wheat is ripening properly, when the wind is blowing across the field, you can hear the beards of the wheat rubbing together," he told another biographer, Lennard Bickel. "They sound like the pine needles in a forest. It is a sweet, whispering music that once you hear, you never forget."
Norman Ernest Borlaug was born on March 25, 1914, in his grandfather's farmhouse near the tiny settlement of Saude, in northeastern
He was a high-spirited boy of boundless curiosity. His sister, Charlotte Culbert, recounted in an interview in 2008 in
At the time, most farm boys dropped out of school. But
Tackling a Problem
He first studied forestry, but fell under the influence of a legendary expert in plant diseases, Elvin C. Stakman, who encouraged him to switch to the broader field of plant pathology. After earning a doctorate in the field, he took a job with DuPont in 1942 and worked on chemical compounds useful in the war. But Professor Stakman helped persuade him to join the Rockefeller Foundation's Mexican hunger project in 1944.
Dr. Borlaug's initial goal was to create varieties of wheat adapted to
His insistence on breeding in two places, the Sonoran desert in winter and the central highlands in summer, imposed heavy burdens on him and his team, but it cut the time to accomplish his work in half. By luck, the strategy also produced wheat varieties that were insensitive to day length and thus capable of growing in many locales, a trait that would later prove of vital significance. The Rockefeller team gradually won the agreement of Mexican farmers to adopt the new varieties, and wheat output in that country began a remarkable climb. But these developments turned out to be a mere prelude to Dr. Borlaug's main achievements.
By the late 1940s, researchers knew they could induce huge yield gains in wheat by feeding the plants chemical fertilizer that supplied them with extra nitrogen, a shortage of which was the biggest constraint on plant growth. But the strategy had a severe limitation: beyond a certain level of fertilizer, the seed heads containing wheat grains would grow so large and heavy, the plant would fall over, ruining the crop.
In 1953, Dr. Borlaug began working with a wheat strain containing an unusual gene. It had the effect of shrinking the wheat plant, creating a stubby, compact variety. Yet crucially, the seed heads did not shrink, meaning a small plant could still produce a large amount of wheat.
Dr. Borlaug and his team transferred the gene into tropical wheats. When high fertilizer levels were applied to these new "semidwarf" plants, the results were nothing short of astonishing.
The plants would produce enormous heads of grain, yet their stiff, short bodies could support the weight without falling over. On the same amount of land, wheat output could be tripled or quadrupled. Later, the idea was applied to rice, the staple crop for nearly half the world's population, with yields jumping several-fold compared with some traditional varieties.
This strange principle of increasing yields by shrinking plants was the central insight of the Green Revolution, and its impact was enormous.
By the early 1960s, many farmers in
Attention Across Globe
Urgent queries began to pour in from other poor countries, for they were caught in a bind. After World War II, the introduction of basic sanitation in many developing countries caused death rates to plunge, but birth rates were slow to follow. As a result, the global population had exploded, putting immense strain on food supplies.
On the Indian subcontinent in particular, a crisis developed. The population was growing so much faster than farm output that it was not clear how the masses could be fed. In the mid-1960s, huge grain imports were required to avert starvation.
At the invitation of the Indian and Pakistani governments, Dr. Borlaug offered his advice. He met resistance at first from senior agricultural experts steeped in tradition, but as the food situation worsened, the objections faded. Soon,
One vital shipment through the
Indian and Pakistani farmers took up the new varieties, receiving fertilizer and other aid from their governments. Just as in
As with the Mexican effort, the Rockefeller Foundation and other donors set up a project in the
Confronting the Effects
Dr. Borlaug's later years were partly occupied by arguments over the social and environmental consequences of the Green Revolution. Many critics on the left attacked it, saying it displaced smaller farmers, encouraged overreliance on chemicals and paved the way for greater corporate control of agriculture.
In a characteristic complaint, Vandana Shiva, an Indian critic, wrote in 1991 that "in perceiving nature's limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable practices worldwide."
Dr. Borlaug declared that such arguments often came from "elitists" who were rich enough not to worry about where their next meal was coming from. But over time, he acknowledged the validity of some environmental concerns, and embraced more judicious use of fertilizers and pesticides. He was frustrated throughout his life that governments did not do more to tackle what he called "the population monster" by lowering birth rates.
He remained a vigorous man into his 90s, serving for many years on the faculty of Texas A&M and continuing to do vital agricultural work. In recent years, he marshaled efforts to tackle a new variety of rust that is threatening the world's wheat crop.
Dr. Borlaug's wife of 69 years, the former Margaret Gibson, died in 2007. He is survived by a sister, Charlotte Borlaug Culbert; a daughter, Jeanie Borlaug Laube; a son, William Borlaug; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Gary H. Toenniessen, director of agricultural programs for the Rockefeller Foundation, said in an interview that Dr. Borlaug's great achievement was to prove that intensive, modern agriculture could be made to work in the fast-growing developing countries where it was needed most, even on the small farms predominating there.
By Mr. Toenniessen's calculation, about half the world's population goes to bed every night after consuming grain descended from one of the high-yield varieties developed by Dr. Borlaug and his colleagues of the Green Revolution.
"He knew what it was they needed to do, and he didn't give up," Mr. Toenniessen said. "He could just see that this was the answer."
Gerald Jonas and Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting.
Against the grain on Norman Borlaug
The feted agronomist may have saved a billion from starvation, but critics say he planted the seed for future environmental woes
Leo Hickman
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 15 September 2009
Accolades don't come much more gushing than those expressed this week following the death of Norman Borlaug, the agronomist whose lifelong work developing high-yield crops played a major role in heralding the so-called "green revolution" and who has often been credited as the "man who saved a billion lives".
Throughout his life he was feted with awards and honours across the world: the Nobel Peace Prize, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom,
But despite the passionate humanitarian zeal that drove much of his work, he certainly had his critics. The criticism was not so much aimed at the man himself, but for the biotech legacy he played such a major role in creating. After all, this was the man who arguably did more than any other to nurture the era of monocrops, GM foods and the intensive use of petrochemical pesticides and fertilisers. He may well have saved a billion people from imminent starvation, but by doing so, say his critics, he also inadvertently helped to plant the seed for future environmental woes.
Has there ever been a person in human history whose legacy has pivoted so precariously on the fulcrum between good and bad? We will only know the complete answer in the decades to come once the full implications of the world being so reliant on what are now called "conventional" farming methods have been borne out in the context of overpopulation, peak oil, climate change, water depletion and all the other issues now so inextricably linked to modern farming.
Borlaug was not naive on these issues, though. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he recognised that "we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction":
There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. Fighting alone, they may win temporary skirmishes, but united they can win a decisive and lasting victory to provide food and other amenities of a progressive civilization for the benefit of all mankind.
Borlaug said this in 1970 when the global human population stood at 3.7 billion. Today, it is fast approaching seven billion. Modern farming has won the "battle" with population control convincingly.
Borlaug also dismissed the sometimes barbed attack of the environmentalists by arguing that his high-yield crops helped protect rainforests because they allowed farmers to continue exploiting existing farmland, therefore avoiding the need to stray into neighbouring forests with their chainsaws and firesticks.
As he grew older, though, he became an increasingly fervent supporter of GM technology, arguing that without it the booming human population would face widespread famine.
It was another subject for which he often came into combat with some environmentalists. But he saved much of his disdain for the organic farming movement. This is what he told Reason magazine in 2000 when asked what he thought of organic farming:
Don't tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertiliser. That's when this misinformation [about the merits of organic farming] becomes destructive.
Borlaug's vision and subsequent success was underpinned by the widespread availability of cheap oil. His solution for feeding the world was one that could only have ever been dreamed up in that post-war era when the energy source was obvious and unquestioned. But times have changed: with Borlaug's passing we are reminded how impatiently we await a successor to dream up the answer to our battle between rising population levels and sustainable food production.
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