Borlaug's Revolution

Borlaug's Revolution July 17, 2007; Page A16

In 1944, when Norman Borlaug arrived in Mexico, the nation was in the grip of crop failure. Cereals like wheat are dietary staples. But in Mexico, an airborne fungus was causing an epidemic of "stem rust," and acreage once flush with golden wheat and maize yielded little more than sunbaked sallow weeds. Coupled with a population surge, famine seemed in the offing.

Dr. Borlaug left Mexico in 1963 with a harvest six times what it was when he arrived. From acres of arable land sprung a hyperactive strain of wheat engineered by the scientist in his laboratory, fertilized and nurtured according to his methods, and irrigated by systems he helped to design. Mexico's peasantry was not only fed -- it was selling wheat on the international market.

The reversal of the Mexican crop disaster was an early tiding of the Green Revolution. Over the next 30 years, Dr. Borlaug devoted himself to the undeveloped world, undoing crop failure in India and Pakistan, and rescuing rice in the Philippines, Indonesia and China. He has arguably saved more lives than anyone in history. Maybe one billion.

Dr. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, yet his name remains largely unknown. Today, at age 93, he receives the Congressional Gold Medal. Perhaps it will secure the fame he merits but never pursued. Then again, perhaps not. While Dr. Borlaug was expanding human possibility, his critics -- who held humanity to be profligate and the Earth's resources finite -- were receiving all the attention. They still are.

The most famous may be Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who declared in the 1960s that "the battle to feed all of humanity" was lost. "In the 1970s and 1980s," he claimed, "hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." In 1973, Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute and still widely quoted today, said the demand for food had "outrun the productive capacity of the world's farmers." The only solution? "We're going to have to restructure the global economy." Of course.

Greenpeace and other pessimists were scandalized at Dr. Borlaug's Green Revolution; it disproved their admonitions and, worst of all, led to industrial development. They even convinced the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations to stop funding Dr. Borlaug's efforts. We see these battle lines today in the energy wars. History has its share of tragedy, but Dr. Borlaug's life demonstrates that environmental doomsayers are almost always wrong because they overlook one variable: human ingenuity.

The late economist Julian Simon was in the habit of claiming that natural resources are basically infinite. His refrain: "A higher price represents an opportunity that leads inventors and businesspeople to seek new ways to satisfy the shortages. Some fail, at cost to themselves. A few succeed, and the final result is that we end up better off than if the original shortage problems had never arisen."

As anti-development environmentalists preach the gospel of limits and state coercion, here is a question worth asking: How many millions of people might have perished had Norman Borlaug heeded their teachings?

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