FOOD FOR ALL: The UK government has issued a warning that Britain must produce more home grown food if it is to prevent a rapidly rising world population going hungry. The Government is to publish a detailed plan to boost production by 70 percent by 2050. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
In March, British PM Gordon Brown’s top green advisor warned that their population must be cut by 30 million in order to ensure a “sustainable society.” This summer, researchers at Oregon State University warned of the detrimental impact children have on one’s “carbon legacy,” and that not having children does more to curb climate change than everyday “green” techniques.
More apocalyptically, Britain’s Royal Society just published a series of papers written by “specialists in environmental science” claiming, among other things, that “unchecked population growth is speeding climate change,” and, “Unless birth rates are lowered sharply through voluntary family-planning . . . and easy access to contraceptives, the tally of humans on Earth could swell to an unsustainable 11 billion by 2050,” thus destroying “life-nurturing ecosystems and dooming many countries to poverty.”
Apparently, these “scientists” haven’t heard of Norman Borlaug.
Gregg Easterbrook has a tremendous piece about the life and accomplishments of Mr. Borlaug in the Sept. 16 Wall Street Journal. An agronomist and Nobel Prize winner, Borlaug’s work brought about the “Green Revolution” agricultural methods, of which we are still reaping the rewards today—literally. He helped develop hybrid crops, the “shuttle breeding” technique, and cereals that don’t need lots of sunlight to grow.
Mr. Borlaug took high-yield agriculture to the poverty-stricken parts of the world. Here are the highlights, as Easterbrook details:
* In 1950, 692 million tons of grain were produced worldwide for 2.2 billion people.
* By 1992, with Borlaug’s concepts in place for decades, production rose to 1.9 billion tons of grain for 5.6 billion people—2.8 times the food for 2.2 times the people.
* Between 1965 and 2005, global per capita food consumption rose to 2,798 calories a day from 2,063
* In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization announced that malnutrition stood “at the lowest level in human history,” even though global population tripled in one century.
Mr. Borlaug won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for solving the famine that gripped India and Pakistan in the 1960s—a condition Paul Ehrlich of The Population Bomb fame claimed was impossible to correct. Later in his life, Borlaug took his high-yield techniques to Africa. They worked there, too.
All told, Borlaug’s life work—which included agriculture-extension agents he trained and the crop-research facilities he founded in developing nations—saved the lives of roughly one billion people.
Unlike “real” environmentalists, the planet also benefited from Borlaug’s humanitarianism. “Without high-yield agriculture,” Borlaug said, “increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion.”
So how do we respond to the environmental doomsayers advocating not-so voluntary birth control? In their minds, the lives Borlaug saved through increased food supplies have resulted in horrific carbon legacies. Given the choice between an African community using fertilizers and tractors to produce food, and a world full of carbon-legacy-conscious, non-reproducing people, environmentalists will always go with the latter.
Why? Because as Borlaug put it, these environmentalists “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger.” They sit in their Western luxury determining who should and shouldn’t breed, and who should and shouldn’t get to use the latest agriculture techniques.
When Mankind reaches the point where we see ourselves as a weed in need of thinning out, we start down a chilling and destructive slope. Yet this is the face (new, old, always) of environmentalism. Human dignity is damned by the morally-anointed “experts” who tell us this is for the greater good.
Isn’t it always?
Trevor Sides is a Liberty Features Syndicated writer, www.libertyfeatures.com.
