What Norman Borlaug taught us about feeding the world

A great man died this past September.  Though he was one of the four living American recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize (including President Obama), most people in his native United States had never heard of him, but approximately one billion (yes, that's a b) people owe their lives to him.  The man's name was Norman Borlaug.  (See this Wall Street Journal article from September 16, 2009, and one from the Atlantic Monthly from January 1999.) How did he save so many lives?  By giving birth to the Green Revolution, which helped many societies in the developing world become self-sufficient, or nearly self-sufficient.  One of the major components of the Green Revolution was high-yield agriculture, which used the same amount of land as before, but also used pesticides and fertilizers.

And who opposed his techniques?  Environmentalists, who were upset that a) Africans were not farming in traditional ways, without tractors or modern farming techniques,  and b) as mentioned, high-yield agriculture required the use of pesticides and fertilizer.  In other words, they cared more about preserving classical farming techniques than in feeding hungry people, and they cared more about the possible impact of pesticides on some animal species than they did about the certain effects of no food on humans!  (Do I think they consciously decided this?  Of course not.  But we are concerned with results, not with intentions.  Had the environmentalists had their way, hundreds of millions would have starved.)

So what do we learn from Norman Borlaug and his efforts?

1. Don't rely on governments to solve the world's problems.  Turn to the private sector.  When even the  World Bank cut funding, Borlaug turned to Ryoichi Sasakawa, a Japanese investor, and also got the support of the Rockefeller- and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations.  Private enterprise will be more than willing to support an effort it thinks will succeed (read make them money).  Some will scoff at this notion - "One should want to do the right thing; you want to make money off of poor Central Americans and Africans?!"  I would answer in two ways: A) That is what anyone in a for-profit business is doing - making money off of those who want his product.  In effect, he is taking advantage of others' needs.  B) Why do you care?  Don't you want hungry people fed?  What difference does it make if someone makes money off of it?  If someone else can do it more efficiently for less money, the hungry will still get their food.
2. Environmentalists in general are much more concerned with saving plant- and animal life than with  saving human life.  Why else would they oppose Norman Borlaug?  Let us say that some animal species died as a direct result of Borlaug's agricultural efforts.  So what?  Is it more important to save an animal species, or to save hundreds of millions of human beings?  The same is true about the ban of DDT, which could have saved the lives of at least hundreds of thousands of Africans.  But since they care more about animals than about people, the environmentalists were willing to sacrifice the Africans on the altar of saving some birds.  Rachel Carson must be proud of the impact Silent Spring had.  Does anyone think that if asked, Africans would say, "Some birds might die due to DDT?  In that case, I'd be glad to let my children die of malaria.  Thanks for enlightening me"?  Yet to the environmentalists, the birds' value far outweighed the African villager's children's.
3. You need not be famous to be important.

If we imbue the lessons of Norman Borlaug, there is no telling how much actual (not theoretical) good we can do throughout the world.