The Feeder [Jay Nordlinger]
Iain Murray, I think, had a post here the other day — forgive me, I can’t find it. But it shouldn’t matter much. It was on science and entrepreneurship — and the importance of the latter to the former. It reminded me of something I recently read — in a speech by Norman Borlaug, the great agriculturalist whose techniques and determination fed so many.
The speech was given in Oslo on September 8, 2000. This was the 30th-anniversary year of Borlaug’s Nobel peace prize. He said,
Sadly, the twin organizational evils of bureaucracy and complacency have begun to invade many international and national research institutions today. I agree with the late Nobel economist T. W. Schultz that most working scientists are research entrepreneurs and that centralized control is an anathema to progress.
And he goes on in that vein. To read the whole speech — magnificent in wisdom and spirit — go here.
Yesterday on the Corner, Jeff Stier had an item in which he mentioned Borlaug and Borlaug’s distress over the attacks on high-yield agriculture — attacks from the enviro-Left, which have meant that people have gone hungry, needlessly. Borlaug addressed that in his 2000 lecture too:
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!
Elsewhere, his words were harsher. Let me give you just two choice quotes: “These people [environmentalist zealots] have never been around hungry people. They’re utopians. They sit and philosophize. They don’t live in the real world.” And this one:
“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny [the miserable] these things.”
Can I give you something else? Borlaug was asked what he had to say to advocates of organic farming. He replied,
“God bless you. Use all of the organic matter you want. But don’t deceive the world into believing that we can feed 6.2 billion people with organic matter alone. If we tried to do this, we would plow up all of these marginal lands, cut down much of our forests, and much of that would be productive for just a few years. Without chemical fertilizer, forget it.”
Amen. (By the way, I culled the first and third of these quotes from this article, and the second one from this.)
As I’ve mentioned, Borlaug won his peace prize in 1970. A good thing he did, too: because when high-yield agriculture became uncool — when the green zealots got on top — ain’t no way the Nobel committee would have given him the prize. Very, very seldom has a Nobel peace prize been out of fashion. Very seldom.
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Beaux Esprits [Jay Nordlinger]
Yesterday, I published some remarks from and about Norman Borlaug (go here). He was the Iowa farm boy who grew up to be the father of the “Green Revolution,” which had nothing to do with environmentalism, currently understood: The “Green Revolution” meant high-yield agriculture, the enormous increase in cereal-grain production that fed untold millions who otherwise would have gone hungry — possibly starved to death. Some people say, not without credibility, that Borlaug saved more lives than anyone else in the 20th century.
The Iowa farm boy won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. (He was of Norwegian background, by the way — which was just a bonus for the Norwegians who give the prize.) But later, he came under tremendous attack from the enviro-Left, who called him a wrecker of ecology, a poisoner of the soil, a toady of capitalism, blah, blah, blah: You know how these people talk. Charming bunch. All of Borlaug’s erstwhile backers — the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank — fell away. They couldn’t stand the pressure from the enviro lobby. Bastards.
Anyway, much mail came in, concerning the Borlaug post. One letter was from a man whose father had been an agronomist and had worked with Borlaug. At the end of his letter, our reader said, “Incidentally, my father had even less patience with organic-farming faddists than Dr. Borlaug. As he explained it: ‘Nitrogen is nitrogen. The plant doesn’t know or care where it came from.’”
And I have something extraordinary for you. Five years after Borlaug won the peace prize, Andrei Sakharov won it. He was not allowed to travel to collect it, of course. But he wrote a Nobel lecture, delivered by his wife, Yelena Bonner, who happened to be out of the country anyway: She was in Italy, for medical treatment. As you can imagine, Sakharov had a lot to say, about the Soviet Union, human rights, nuclear weapons, and geopolitics. But he also found time for the Green Revolution, and its attackers:
It is not so very long since men were unfamiliar with artificial fertilizers, mechanized farming, toxic chemicals, and intensive agricultural methods. There are voices calling for a return to more traditional and possibly less dangerous forms of agriculture. But can this be put into practice in a world in which hundreds of millions of people are suffering the pangs of hunger? On the contrary, there is no doubt that we need increasingly intensive methods of farming, and we need to spread modern methods all over the world, including the developing countries.
Isn’t that something? With all the rest that Sakharov had to think about . . . (For his complete lecture, go here.)
Let me add this, please: Because Sakharov was one of the greatest dissidents, resisters, and human-rights champions of all time — because he was one of the most noble human beings we have ever known — we tend to forget that he was one of the greatest scientists of his age: the Soviet Union’s leading nuclear physicist, the father of its thermonuclear weapons. He sacrificed his scientific career — his privileges, his dachas, his laboratories, all of it — to do what was most right. What a man.
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