Norman Borlaug

Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity? So says a 1997 Atlantic article, and he's a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1970) and the Medal of Freedom, among many honors. Surely an unambiguous case of a Saint, don't you think?

See a collection of material on Borlaug from Feb 2004, starting about 1/4 of the way down the page.

sez Ron:

I met Borlaug at Williams and had lunch with him. We talked for an hour about the importance of smallholder agriculture to future food security. Damn hypocrit didn't even have the guts to say he saw it differently

This 'protecting the environment through intensive (ie chemical intensive) agriculture' is straight out of Hudson Insitute/Dennis Avery corporate propaganda, There is a response to Avery at the Henry Wallace Foundation site called "Intensive Agriculture and Environmental Quality: Examining the newest Agricultureal Myth" (http://www.winrock.org/wallacecenter/documents/iaeq.pdf) there are other responses as well. I guess its time to update on this.

This is old but still right on:
Matson, P. A., W. J. Parton, A. G. Power, and M. J. Swift. 1997.
Agricultural Intensification and Ecosystem Properties. Science 277:504?509.

Says Borlaug:
" Mexico, where I have done much of my high?yield research, is nevertheless losing nearly 3 million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farms. "
This is patently false on all counts. Totally off the wall.