"A waist is a terrible thing to mind." - Jane Caminos

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Crossing the offroad Rubicon

"Borlaug was an agronomist, the man who, with cross-breeding varieties of wheat, created something called semidwarf, high- yield, disease-resistant wheat...

As such, or course, he is much disliked by some environmentalists, who say monocultures are evil. Lefties also don’t like Borlaug very much. They claim the introduction of the technology into south Asia was just an imperialist Cold War plot to stop people from starving and then, as would have happened in an ideal world, embracing the communists. The left can be quite nasty sometimes...

The best bit is that for real environmentalists — that is, people concerned with preserving the environment where possible — the green revolution was green in the modern sense. Borlaug believed fervently that increased crop yields would reduce the need for deforestation .

Scientists reckon India’s use of Borlaug’s high-yield crops saved 100-million acres from being deforested and turned into farmland. Taking this into account, and environmental lobbying from the 1980s to stop Borlaug’s work in Africa because it dared to be inorganic, exposes nasty environmentalism for what it is: deeply misanthropic. Those who criticise Borlaug’s work would rather the hundreds of millions had died. They actively opposed the growing of food for poor people.

He did respond to his environmentalist critics : “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 fertiliser and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”"