
The Man Who Defused the ‘Population Bomb’ - ivankirigin
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574411382676924044.html
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warfangle
He also is, sort of directly, responsible for the patenting of plant genomes,
input-intensive farming that leads to soil depletion and algae bloom,
dangerous crop monocultures, and so on and so forth.

On the flip side, he directly helped countries like ethiopia implement modern
farming techniques that increased crop yields magnificently.

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biohacker42
The man achieved great things, specifically the way in which he solved the
problem is phenomenal. It reveals not a just a great mind, but a great
character. Not to be glib, but you'd look for something like that in a
founder. Except the he didn't create yet another web 2.0 site, he saved
billions of lives.

Having said that, lets keep in mind that the green revolution is not as often
described a low risk/high yield deal.

Low risk/high yield things often tend to be Utopian and are most often
revealed to not be at least one of those things.

The green revolutions is HIGH risk/high yield. It is high risk because it
relies on very few, very genetically similar varieties. And those are at high
risk for decimation due to disease.

They themselves might not be more susceptible to any one disease, but their
near universal use carries a high risk of unforeseen food shortages when some
fungus wipes out a sufficiently large percentage of the global wheat crop.

We should carry on Norman Borlaug's work and develop more genetically diverse
strains which maintain similarly high yields.

It would also be nice if we could find a way to fertilize without creating
hardpan soils or fertilizer runoff into rivers/lakes/oceans.

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zacechola
You misstate the arguments of some green farming techniques. For example,
rejecting monoculture on a patch of land is low risk/high yield. 15 different
crops (not 15 varieties of one crop) is much less susceptible to total failure
due to a single catastrophic event than a monoculture.

Secondly, is high yield even a good thing? Many crops produce more yield but
do not produce more (or produce very little more) nutritionally valuable
product. Corn being the exemplary plant in this case. Germ size has barely
increased, while starch has grown considerably. Which is great if you're
feeding cattle, but biomass from starch doesn't necessarily mean protein-rich
biomass, rather it becomes animal fat. Delicious animal fat, to be sure, but
not necessarily a good yield/nutrition trade-off.

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biohacker42
_is high yield even a good thing?_

It is if you want to feed more people, More people may not be a good thing,
but it often just is an inescapable reality and if you want to keep them from
death by starvation you need higher yield.

And I'm not sure rejecting monoculture on a patch of land is high yield. Not
if you want to harvest and distribute it all and do it before it spoils and
the "patch" is large enough. Then you need machines, huge machines, and those
demand monoculture.

Or you could go with human labor but then you'd need a whole other patch of
land, harvested with machines, to feed the laborers harvesting the first
patch.

Corn is a good example of high calorie/poor nutrition. But most other crops
are not that bad.

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zacechola
Methods of harvesting and distribution depend greatly on how far one wishes to
distribute the crop from the source. Which is entirely another prong in the
argument for green ag. I don't necessarily agree with the local food movement
on all accounts, but the question of feeding the world ultimately comes down
to how much total food is necessary to feed a population, not how many diverse
crops can feed a population. I know that sounds like an argument for
monoculture, but hear me out.

High yield is important if you want to feed people outside your locale. It
becomes less an issue of feeding the masses and more a vehicle for trade.
Through modern techniques and distribution, oranges from Florida can be sold
in North Dakota. However, I wonder if it's necessary that North Dakotan's need
many cheap oranges. There are many examples. What is the actual value of
Columbian asparagus in the fall vs. the residual costs of producing and
distributing that asparagus? Et cetera.

The labor issue you bring up is an important one, however, and it is a trade-
off that many proponents of green agriculture too easily overlook.

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biohacker42
Clearly there's no vital need for cheap asparagus. That's another problem. As
the Irish say: God gave us the potato blight, the British gave us the famine.

That is to say, whith great income disparity, even when millions of people
can't get enough calories, we can be throwing away moldy oranges.

Shortages of food will only make it more expensive for us, but people around
the world will starve.

And a lot of people are not eating specialty foods from far off, they are
barely getting enough calories from high yield starchy local crops like rice,
corn, wheat etc. I am not sure how you could provide a population center like
say Kinshasa with enough calories, never mind trace nutrients, without
machines. Manually harvesting wheat or corn is not a way to feed the world.

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fiplibs
Industrial farming is a product of economy. In our society oil is cheap and
labor is expensive, and our farming techniques reflect that.

As far as alternatives go, an instructive example is post-USSR Cuba. Before
1991 they were a satellite-state which sold sugar at above market prices to
the USSR and in exchange received oil and farm machinery. After the collapse
they had to, essentially overnight, switch over to subsistence farming. They
use low-input techniques by necessity due to the high price of fossil fuels.

In almost every Cuban town there is a microbiologist who will examine the soil
from your plot and recommend biological or chemical amendments. Open spaces in
Havana are populated with [collectively-run] urban gardens. They're the first
country applying permaculture techniques on a large scale.

Permaculture can actually be more productive per acre than industrial
agriculture, but it requires more (and more educated) labor to do so.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture>

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kingkongrevenge
They're also highly dependent on imports of US produced food, and so probably
not a great example of something to emulate.

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sireat
I don't follow Cuba-US relations too much, thus my ignorance, but how are they
importing US produced food? Through Canada or Mexico and gray market
intermediaries?

I am not doubting they get some US food, just questioning how much.

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m_eiman
He didn't defuse it, he just added a few more feet to the fuse. As long as
Earth's population grows exponentially (or even linearly), we'll hit a wall
sooner or later.

Malthus is still right: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe>

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gte910h
Omce birth control becomes free or affordable, and societites move out of
agrarian only production, that is untrue.

Reliable birth control pretty much leads to voluntary replacement only
reproduction

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mynameishere
For a few generations. Eventually, the survival of the fittest kicks in, and
those people who avoided birth control (from a stronger paternal feeling, etc)
will restock the population.

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fiplibs
This sounds like the same fallacy that the movie Idiocracy is based on – even
if you pass on your genes, that doesn't mean you pass on traits like
demographic fertility, or intelligence.

One of the best predictors of a woman's fertility rate is their level of
education. Higher education leads to fewer children on average. This is
largely independent of the fertility of their parents.

Also, if you look at the third world, there are actually some good economic
arguments for having more children, related to infant mortality. Your children
are your 'Social Security', so you want to ensure that some survive.
Paradoxically, reducing infant mortality can actually reduce fertility.
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5192204318056302269>

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kingkongrevenge
> that doesn't mean you pass on traits like demographic fertility, or
> intelligence.

IQ is well known to be highly heritable. I would be very surprised if proper
research came up with a null result on fertility heritability.

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RyanMcGreal
How much of the Green Revolution was due to improved technique and how much
was due to hydrocarbon inputs?

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tomjen2
He saved an estimated ONE BILLION people. That really puts things in
perspective.

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Periodic
I'd like to know the methods for estimating this number. Malnutrition deaths,
children that were able to be born because their parents felt secure enough to
have another child, food-shortage violence deaths, there are many indirect
factors when you're talking about affecting scarcity for a population.

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netsp
With something like this it is impossible to really estimate, even if you are
looking only at direct effects (starvation. etc.)

First when you have a chain of necessary companents: (Scientific Invention >
development of agricultural techniques > NGO Deploying of techniques > Rich
guy funding the deployment > ex politician who convinced the rich guy) , each
one can claim full credit for the process.

Then you have to guess what would have happened if this guy didn't do it?
Would Mexicans still be farming like 1824?

