Norman Borlaug, RIP 1914-2009
Nobel Peace-Prize winner Norman Borlaug moved around the world to its hungriest places, breeding new strains of wheat and rice. Depending how you count, his genetically modified food saved between two hundred million to ... get this ... one billion people from starvation. It is difficult to find any other person who has saved that many lives. Quadrupling productivity of fields also reduced deforestation for more fields. Now that he has died, there should be a Norman Borlaug day.
Where is the Norman Borlaug of Peak Oil? The Malthusians, the nineteen-sixties equivalent of today's Energy Decline movement, said he could never succeed and we would see mass die-offs. Some, perhaps, would have preferred mass die-offs for aesthetic, philosophical, or spiritual reasons. The ethical paradigm exclusive to the political far left is almost as concerned with the purity of food as the far right is concerned with the purity of sex.
To feed the next six billion, we must oppose patents on DNA to prevent genetically modified crops from being the property of corporations. Here is a riveting interview on this topic with Joe Jackson from the Network for Open Scientific Innovation, who some of you may have met at Penguicon. Maybe you will agree with him from an Open-Source standpoint of intellectual property. Maybe you won't. But I am surprised not to have heard his viewpoint more often!
Comments
le-bebna-kamni on Sep. 22, 2009 6:30 PM
From my understanding of Norman Borlaug's work, his genetic modifications were done the more old fashioned way: cross-polination and selective breeding, with a firm understanding of genotypes and phenotypes. It's very different from, for example, Monsanto, and their splices of unrelated plant species, or even animal and plant species together. Still, I agree with the importance that keeping crop foods -- whether modified through breeding or splicing -- out of patents is probably the only effective way to ensure that growing world populations are fed and deforestation is minimized.
This is because most of the major seed companies lack the motivation to, for example, quadruple the productivity of crop yields, because that would cut down on the amount of seed purchased, and therefore their profits. While some market forces may help in places like the U.S. (although correct me if someone is a U.S. farmer and this is not the case), in many third-world countries a single seed company (e.g. Monsanto) may come into a region and effectively monopolize it by using patents, EULA-like contracts where the farmer is not the sole owner of the seed or the resulting crop, and a payment system that creates a perpetual cycle of debt so that the farmer is unable to stop using that company's seeds.
Additionally, these companies may find legal ways to coerce non-buying farmers into becoming their customers: they might find a field where a non-customer farmer has a few plants "owned" by the company (due to wind blowing seeds from a neighboring field) then sue the farmer for possessing them and as a settlement force the farmer to purchase seeds.
Thank you for the interesting article! (BTW, is that the same Joe Jackson who was funding Open Source! The Boardgame?
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