The Green Revolutionary
MIller, Henry I.
The Green Revolutionary The Gates Foundation could learn a thing or two from Norman Borlaug. by Henry I. Miller On July 17, the Congressional Gold Medal (the nation's highest civilian award) was...
...waged war on the most precise, predictable, and effective techniques to advance agriculture...
...Products in development offer the possibility of even higher yields, lower inputs of agricultural chemicals and water, enhanced nutrition, and even plant-derived, orally active vaccines...
...If our new varieties had been subjected to the kinds of regulatory strictures and requirements that are being inflicted upon the new biotechnology, they would never have become available [emphasis in original...
...Many U.N...
...We shall work with farmers using traditional seeds...
...Both the need for additional agricultural production and the obstacles to innovation remain, and in recent years, Borlaug has applied himself to ensuring the success of this century's equivalent of the Green Revolution: the application of gene-splicing, or "genetic modification," to agriculture...
...Borlaug sees history repeating itself: At the time [of the Green Revolution], Forrest Frank Hill, a Ford Foundation vice president, told me, "Enjoy this now, because nothing like it will ever happen to you again...
...Third, he devised an ingenious technique called "shuttle breeding"— growing two successive plantings each year, instead of the usual one, in different regions of Mexico...
...Second, in order to achieve maximum yields, he crafted so-called dwarf wheat varieties that, when aggressively fertilized, would not fall over in the field...
...The contrast between Borlaug and Annan could hardly be greater...
...Development Program funds to the government of Burma...
...The result is vastly inflated R&D costs, less innovation, and diminished exploitation of superior techniques and products—espe-cially in poorer countries...
...Alas, Annan's group is being handsomely bankrolled by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates's $30 billion foundation...
...These statements are tantamount to suggesting that instead of modern vaccines and hygienic practices in Africa, witch doctors should cast spells to prevent infectious diseases...
...Borlaug's greatest achievement may have been overcoming what he called the "bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers' customs, habits, and superstitions," in order to get his innovations adopted...
...In the early days of Annan's new position with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, established with an initial $150 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, he left no doubt about his technophobic antagonism to modern crop science: "Africa should rely on African solutions—local labor, seeds, and markets—without seeking imported biotech 'magic bullets' or the promise of more open foreign markets...
...He is the author, most recently, of The Franken-food Myth...
...Eventually the naysayers and the bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won't be able to get permission for more of these efforts...
...The availability of two test generations of wheat each year cut by half the time required for breeding new varieties...
...Judged by integrity, managerial competence, or acumen, Annan is eminently unqualified for his new position...
...How successful were Borlaug's efforts...
...Similar to resolving a glitch with Windows, the Gates Foundation should reboot—or, more precisely, give Kofi Annan the boot...
...Genetically improved seeds can spell the difference between subsistence farmers being able to sell part of their harvest and their families dying of starvation...
...Hill was right...
...Bill Gates might ask himself how he would feel if Annan tried to deny computers to Africans— and called instead for relying on tally sticks and other traditional calculating tools...
...Borlaug worked miracles of several kinds...
...attempts to alleviate poverty and enhance human rights...
...He presided over the Oil-for-Food debacle in Iraq, the cover-up of the investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, diversion of dual-use technology (GPS equipment, a portable high-end spectrometer, and a large quantity of high-specification computer hardware) to North Korea, and inappropriate diversion of U.N...
...Barely a month before, former U.N...
...Henry I. Miller, a physician and fellow at the Hoover Institution, headed the FDA's Office of Biotechnology from 1989 to 1993...
...The naysayers and bureaucrats have now come into their own...
...Without high-yield agriculture, either millions would have starved or increases in food output would have been realized only through huge increases in the acreage of land under cultiva-tion—with losses of pristine wilderness far greater than all the losses to urban, suburban, and commercial expansion...
...We in the alliance will not incorporate [gene-spliced organisms] in our programs...
...As gratifying as it is to see Borlaug's great humanitarian achievement receive such well-deserved recognition, the sad fact is his ideas are under assault as never before...
...agencies and programs—including the U.N...
...secretary general Kofi Annan was picked to head a new group that pledges to achieve a "green revolution" in Africa...
...was execrable, and his own behavior deplorable...
...First, he and his colleagues laboriously crossbred thousands of wheat varieties from around the world to produce some new ones with resistance to rust, a destructive plant pest...
...This wide adaptability, which flew in the face of agricultural orthodoxy, proved invaluable, and Mexican wheat yields skyrocketed...
...Corruption and malfeasance were business-as-usual for Annan's U.N...
...This raised yields 20 to 40 percent...
...Borlaug's work, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, averted malnutrition, famine, and death for many millions...
...Moreover, because the two regions possessed distinctly different climatic conditions, the resulting varieties were broadly adapted to many latitudes, altitudes, and soil types...
...by Henry I. Miller On July 17, the Congressional Gold Medal (the nation's highest civilian award) was bestowed on Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that brought modern agricultural methods to much of the developing world...
...Environment Program, World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, and Convention on Biological Diversity—have been complicit in the unscientific, highly politicized, and excessive regulation of biotechnology, which has prevented critical advances in agricultural and pharmaceutical research and development...
...Biotechnology regulation is a growth industry at the U.N., one that regularly defies scientific consensus and common sense...
...Such technophobia should come as no surprise...
...During Annan's tenure, the U.N...
...and made a mockery of U.N...
...During Annan's tenure, the U.N...
...Borlaug is modest, earnest, and self-effacing, while Annan is arrogant and hubristic...
...conducted a virtual war on gene-splicing, and the results were catastrophic, especially for poor nations...
...And for its African agricultural initiative, it should seek a Norman Borlaug...
...However, extremists in the environmental movement are doing everything they can to stop such progress, and their allies in national and United Nations-based regulatory agencies are more than eager to help...
...By any criteria, Kofi Annan's performance at the U.N...
...From 1950 to 1992, the world's grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.7 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland—an extraordinary increase in yield of more than 150 percent...
...His prediction anticipated the gene-splicing era that would arrive decades later...
...In his leadership of the U.N., Kofi Annan was precisely the kind of nay-sayer and bureaucrat feared by Bor-laug and Hill...
...If past performance is any indication, the only things likely to become greener are the numbered bank accounts of Kofi Annan and his cronies...
...Or how Africans would like it if Annan decreed that they should farm without tractors...
...Annan is perpetrating a grotesque and potentially lethal fraud against African farmers...
...Despite its name, though, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa rejects proven and pivotal approaches to crop science...
...Similar successes followed when the Mexican wheat varieties were planted in Pakistan and India, but only after Borlaug convinced politicians in those countries to change national policies in order to provide the large amounts of fertilizer needed for wheat cultivation...
Vol. 12 • August 2007 • No. 44
