Feeding the World in the 21st Century: The Role of Agricultural Science and Technology
(Speech given at Tuskegee University -- April, 2001)
By Norman E. Borlaug
1970 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
agbioworld.com
Excerpt:
The current backlash against agricultural science and technology evident in some industrialized countries is hard for me to comprehend. How quickly humankind becomes detached from the soil and agricultural production! Less than 4 percent of the population in the industrialized countries-and less than 2 percent in the USA-is directly engaged in agriculture.
With low-cost food supplies and urban bias, is it any wonder that affluent consumers don't understand the complexities of re-producing the world food supply each year in its entirety, and expanding it further for the nearly 80 million additional mouths that are born into this world each year? It is imperative that this serious "educational gap" in industrialized nations be addressed. One way to do so, I believe, is to make it compulsory in secondary schools and universities for students to take courses on biology and food and agricultural technology.
While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions toward new advances in agricultural science and technology, and pay more for food produced by the so-called "organic" methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low-income, food-deficit nations cannot.
Professor Robert Paarlberg, who teaches at Wellesley College and Harvard University, has sounded the alarm about the deadlock between agriculturalists and environmentalists over what constitutes "sustainable agriculture" in the Third World. This debate has confused-if not paralyzed-many in the international donor community who, afraid of antagonizing powerful environmental lobbying groups, have turned away from supporting science-based agricultural modernization still needed in much of smallholder Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.
This deadlock must be broken. We cannot lose sight of the enormous job before us to feed future generations, 90 percent of whom will begin life in a developing country, and probably in poverty. Only with dynamic agricultural development will there be any hope to alleviate poverty, improve human health and productivity, and avoid political and social chaos. Moreover, higher incomes will permit small-scale farmers to invest more in protecting their soil and water resources. As Kenyan archeologist Richard Leakey likes to reminds us, "you have to be well-fed to be a conservationist!" We need to bring common sense back into the debate on agricultural science and technology and the sooner the better!
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