Damning Us All With Too Much Praise

Let me begin by saying this: I appreciate all the sentiments expressed by the countless numbers of op-ed writers and bloggers praising the life of recently deceased Noble Laureate Norman Borlaug. (A particularly nice tribute can be found at Iowahawk.) Mr. Borlaug was genuinely concerned with the well being of poorer people around the world and spent much of his life living and working among them in an attempt to make their existence better.

However, many praising Borlaug have taken to crediting him with saving billions of lives by averting forecasted famines. As Nick Cullather notes:

Norman Borlaug never liked being called the father of the green revolution. It was “a miserable term,” he felt, for the modernization of global agriculture, and he knew no one scientist could claim all the credit. His obituaries this week repeated it anyway, along with another accomplishment he never disputed, that his work had saved “hundreds of millions of lives.”

It is a low estimate. Writers for The Atlantic and Reason magazines claim “billions” owe their lives to Borlaug. They cite no data or source. Rather, the claim is based on forecasts made in the 1960s that without a major jump in food output the world would be ravaged by famines. It began in 1966 with René Dumont’s Nous Allons á la Famine followed by William Paddock’s Famine 1975! “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb announced. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

The problem is there is no evidence that these forecast were anything other than Malthusian inspired fantasies. By crediting Borlaug with saving "billions" writers have been inadvertently validating these forecasts.

Now, this isn't to say Mr. Borlaug didn't do some good and important work, but by placing too much emphasis on his preventing of an "imaginary catastrophe" (to use Cullather's phrase) we open ourselves up to the new generation of Malthusians and Rousseauists who believe (as Iowahawk states) "...starvation by native methods [is] somehow beautiful and noble."