"The greatest human being who ever lived" has died
theglobeandmail.com
As far as where the title reference comes from - Norman Borlaug on Penn and Teller: BS - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8
theglobeandmail.com
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I'm honestly not sure why people are dazzled by this guy. Partly it was...his specific intention to increase yields, which make him seem like a humanitarian. The Fordson tractor did more for agriculture (and, much much much more for the economy and day-to-day existence) than this guy. Is Henry Ford the greatest human being who ever lived?
It seems that Europe's population is actually declining, so is japan's, and a lot of advanced countries.
If they keep feed themselves right now, they should be so even 100 years from now, given the same condition (unless we have some drastic global climatic change).
it is the poor countries, whose economies are based in subsistence agriculture, that are having a huge population increase.
So, the other question is, do you have to bring all these countries up to the level of western europe/japan/us in order to stop the population boom? if we have to, then there will certainly not be enough resources for everybody (especially if everybody has to live like american do)?
I have a good counter example for this. You don't have to be super developed in order to have a clear stabilization of the population. Even my country's Albania (which has about 6kUSD gpd), population growth has halted (from 2.2 children per woman in 1990, to 1.7 last year).
So, you don't have to get super developed to have a decline of 'overfertility'. It seems that bringing economies out of rural ones, and into more mixed (agriculture/services/technology), will help the population not to increase so much.
It seems that this is a noble goal to achieve for the rest of the world, and this guy helped on it.
And making crops more durable, and farmers more productive, will make people move out of villages and go to cities, and redirect economies to towards services/manufacturing/technologies, where education is more advantage, and having more kids is very expenvie.
I hardly know anything about Albania, but I suppose it's far more urbanised than China and its culture is vastly different.
So, pushing back the date of catastrophe far enough is exactly what's needed. Conditions are not static. Often buying more time is all that's necessary.
How do you live for ever? Don't die.
(P.S. "staved" by itself means "crushed inwards" ;-))
He wanted to increase yields in order to feed people - saw a global problem problem, figured out a solution, sold it and made it happen - thats why he's awesome.
I guess that's why Mexico has been a net wheat IMPORTER since the 70's , subsidized and even banned wheat imports to protect the agro industry. Relevant sources without the sensationalist tones:
The seeds may have been capable of increasing the Mexican wheat crop by a factor of six, but not capable of making Mexican wheat production price-competitive with producing it elsewhere and shipping it to Mexico. They may have been a net importer since the 1970s, but presumably that means they were in fact a net exporter in the 1960s.
Logical breakdown: 1) My critics are elitist who have not experienced hunger. 2) Therefore, they are wrong.
Relationship to actual argument: nonexistent.
As a note, I do think Norman Borlaug was a remarkable person. But there are lots of interesting questions to ask about his work, and it doesn't make someone an "elitist", or a bad person to ask them. Asking them doesn't mean they think Norman Borlaug was a bad person either. A few that spring to mind...
1) How many have died from malnutrition after crop yield booms resulted in rapidly expanding populations suddenly constrained when the next yield limit was hit?
2) If education expenditures for the third world matched those given for improving agriculture and food aid starting in the 1960's, what would the "third world" look like today? Better? Worse? What if expenditures had been divvied evenly between the two?
It didn't say anything to the contrary. Note the phrases "of his harshest critics" and "many of them." He claimed that many of his harshest critics were elitists - that does not mean he thought anyone who criticized his ideas was elitist. I would suggest that he believed his harshest critics to be those presenting no reasonable basis (from his POV, at least) for their claims.
As far as I know, ever since the discovery of agriculture we as a species have never really been at the point (except on local and temporary scales) where the population was limited by available food. Reaching that point would get extremely ugly.
I get why some human issues lead to catastrophe like, global warming, but I never get why all issues will lead to catastrophes rather than gradual equilibrium.
In practice, though, that's not the way it's gonna happen. For starters, we have a bunch of food stored up, so the population will overshoot the limit by eating stored food, maybe for a bunch of years, enabling the population to get way above what it should. (I'm not just talking about canned beans here -- living animals are "stored food" too). Secondly, food production varies from year to year -- in a good year we might be able to feed eleven billion, and in a bad year only nine... that's gonna cause some problems when a bad year rolls around. Finally, a world where everybody has _just_ enough food to not die is still a pretty miserable and malnourished world... plus you've got the whole "hungry people with guns vs hungry people without guns" problem which leads to a whole bunch of other bad stuff happening.
Anyway, I hope that has been enough to convince you that awful things happen anytime you get a population anywhere near the very fuzzy and variable limit which is the maximum agriculturally sustainable population.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ucs-statement.tx...
Genetically modified meat grown in vats, compact nutrition rich superfoods/tablets.. there are all sorts of technologically possible creations around the corner.
Global oil production has now peaked and will slide, sooner or later, into permanent and progressive decline year-over-year. When that happens, all the blue-sky technology in the world won't keep food production rates increasing.
Hydrocarbons aren't the only source of energy into the future. Your complaint is like noting that a shortage of horses in the 1880s would lead to a lack of future mobility. When resources fail, you change the rules of the game beyond what can be imagined at the time.
Technology has always and will always tackle our scaling problems. At least, if a few thousand years of such is good precedent.
Okay, so name a production-ready source of energy or combination of sources that broadly matches oil's density, portability, fungibility and diversity of uses.
We don't have decades to come up with something else: oil is already at its maximum production rate. As soon as this recession ends and demand for oil starts growing, we'll see triple-digit price spikes again and more economic volatility.
Your blithe mantra about "technology" ignores the crucial fact that the technology that powers our society runs on massive and ever-growing inputs of energy. Our one-time allotment of cheap, abundant energy is already more than half-consumed, and the awkward fact is that we're absolutely not ready to transition our economy over to something else.
I bet people were as cagey as this back when coal ruled supreme and oil was barely used. Solar, nuclear, geo-thermal, tidal, wind - sure, they all have cons compared to oil but they have pros too and technology will advance to a point where these cons are heavily reduced.
We don't have decades to come up with something else: oil is already at its maximum production rate.
That's not true. Just considering OPEC, they keep oil production below maximum to control prices. Further, this past year has been a bumper year for the oil industry with significant new field findings.
Our one-time allotment of cheap, abundant energy is already more than half-consumed
Oil's not a "one time" deal, so I assume you're talking about the Sun. The Sun is half way through its life cycle, granted, but that's a far bigger issue that we can deal with thousands of years down the line.
In particular: "Demographers, who had been watching the exponential rise with alarm, now forecast that the population will peak below ten billion—ten gigapeople—not long after 2050. Such a low forecast would have been unthinkable just two decades ago. Already, in developing countries, the number of children born per woman has fallen from six to three in 50 years. It will have reached replacement-level fertility (where deaths equal births) by 2035.
This is an extraordinary development, unexpected, undeserved—and apparently unnatural. Human beings may be the only creatures that have fewer babies when they are better fed. "
Couple this with improving sexual education (as tends to occur in wealthier countries) and you end up with population growth going through the floor, not up.
Here's one:
700 years ago there were two million people in my country, now 60,000,000+