Battering Norman Borlaug PBS rewrites the history of the father of the Green Revolution.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/battering-norman-borlaug-11587769611?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
It seems to be an iron law of modern life: Be successful at what you do, and sooner or later you will be labeled an enemy of the people. The latest target of this treatment is the late Norman Borlaug, who is featured in a new PBS documentary called “The Man Who Tried to Feed the World: A Tale of Good Deeds and Unintended Consequences.”
Borlaug was an Iowa-born agronomist who is rightly regarded as the father of the Green Revolution. By producing disease-resistant strains of wheat, and later rice, Borlaug dramatically increased the yields that farmers—especially those in Third World nations—could extract from the land.
As the film does acknowledge, feeding the world without Borlaug’s innovations would be difficult. Readers of a certain age will recall the laments in the 1960s that humanity’s expanding population, especially in the developing world, would lead to mass starvation. Famines were not uncommon in those years in India, China and elsewhere, and Borlaug helped to make them rare and almost solely the result of bad governance. In 1970 Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now comes PBS to rewrite history, going light on the lives saved and heavy on the “unintended consequences.” These include everything from diminished water supplies and depleted soil to increased urbanization in Mexico and a “broken society” in India.
What these critics never say is what the alternative was, or answer whether their implicit message is that it might have been better if Borlaug had done nothing and let tens of millions of people starve. One alternative to urbanization is continuing to live as subsistence farmers, digging yams with sticks. Poor people move to cities, even though life is often hard, because they are seeking better opportunity.
Toward the end of the film, the narrator claims that though Borlaug remains lionized in some quarters, “the legacy of the Green Revolution is becoming ever more troubled.” This is a distorted portrait of a man who has likely saved the lives of more human beings than anyone who ever lived. Maybe someone should do a film about that.
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