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This is the story of Dr. Norman Borlaug who was trying to breed wheat, in 1945, which could resist stem rust, a disease that ruined many crops.
In, 1968, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne (who is uncredited) published an explosive book. In The Population Bomb, they noted that in poor countries such as India and Pakistan, populations were growing more quickly than food supplies. In the 1970s, they predicted: "Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death".
Thankfully, Ehrlich was wrong, because he didn't know what Norman Borlaug had been doing. Borlaug would later be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the years he had spent shuttling between Mexico City and the Yaqui Valley, growing thousands upon thousands of kinds of wheat, and carefully noting their traits: this kind resisted one type of stem rust, but not another; this kind produced good yields, but made bad bread; and so on.
[...] Borlaug produced new kinds of "dwarf" wheat that resisted rust, yielded well, and - crucially - had short stems, so they didn't topple over in the wind. By the 1960s, Borlaug was travelling the world to spread the news. It wasn't easy.
[...] Progress has slowed, and problems are mounting: climate change, water shortages, pollution from fertilisers and pesticides. These are problems the green revolution itself has made worse. Some say it even perpetuated the poverty that keeps the population growing: fertilisers and irrigation cost money which many peasant farmers can't get. Paul Ehrlich, now in his 80s, maintains that he wasn't so much wrong, as ahead of his time. Perhaps if Malthus were still alive, in his 250s, he'd say the same. But could more human ingenuity be the answer?
[...] Since genetic modification became possible, it's mostly been about resistance to diseases, insects and herbicides. While that does increase yields, it hasn't been the direct aim. That's starting to change. And agronomists are only just beginning to explore the gene editing tool CRISPR, which can do what Norman Borlaug did much more quickly. As for Borlaug, he saw that his work had caused problems that weren't handled well, but asked a simple question - would you rather have imperfect ways to grow more food, or let people starve? It's a question we may have to keep asking in the decades to come.
The man who helped feed the world
[Related]: An Essay on the Principle of Population
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 13 2019, @01:00PM (1 child)
Hey, because $694 per year is totally adequate to provide food, shelter, and the occasional medical care, all over the world.
Last I checked, my non-management track corporate drone cube dwelling daily grind compensates me (in total) somewhere slightly above $694 per day, and I get pissed when I ask contractors for quotes to do stuff like cleaning the roof of my house and they ask for a bit over $694 per hour to do it ($3000 to pressure-wash a metal roof on a 2000 sq ft house? In your dreams, EZ clean.)
1960 was chosen because there are plenty of people alive, and even still in the active workforce, today who were born then, or before. A few of their parents are even still alive, and 3B is a nice round number.
Poverty is not suffering, and suffering is more relative than absolute so it's a virtually impossible statistic to collect, however - even though money cannot buy happiness (sorry, Paul, I do believe it can buy love, or at least rent it), the poverty statistic is the closest thing to an impartial measure which approximates human suffering: lack of food and shelter correlate pretty well with lack of wealth - whether that be land to work or cash income, and as we all migrate into the cities cash has become king.
My personal moral compass would never point toward killing the living - though crushing poverty effectively does that (which is a big part of why I find it... undesirable to perpetuate). I do think that birth prevention is a morally acceptable, even superior, alternative to intentional genocide, and implicit genocide via wars and death by poverty.
100 years ago, many communities that I have lived in since were divided between a few hundred wealthy homes on the desirable real-estate, and a few thousand poor homes on the nearby less desirable real-estate where the wealthy's servants lived. As servitude fell out of fashion, the rich/poor real-estate mostly did not move and that wealth disparity was the source of a lot of violence and fear, on both sides, even through the 1990s.
Gentrification of those servants' quarters has ensued in the last 20 years, and the lack of wealth disparity in close proximity has contributed to a lot more confidence walking the streets at night, lower crime statistics, and a general blossoming of the communities so gentrified.
The problem with gentrification is the displacement of the poor to other poor places, said displacement often disrupting social support networks and generally making a hard life harder. The world is shrinking, ever faster throughout my life (started in the 1960s) - it's getting ever harder to displace the poor out of sight, out of mind. Just giving them bread to eat isn't helping much.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 15 2019, @05:22AM
Well, Sherlock, that level apparently was chosen at some point in the past because it represented a lot of extremely poor people, a bit over 2 billion in 1970, not because it somehow represented an ideal level of income. Only about a third of that, maybe less, are that poor now.
So what? 3B is less than 7B, meaning the statistical games I describe can go on.
So when are you going to measure poverty rather than merely quote bullshit statistics? You have yet to touch on "the poverty statistic".
So what of the morality of viewpoints that don't illuminate the problems of our world?
Aside from such things as the massive shift of US population to the suburbs.
Gentrification has been going on for more than a century. You just noticed it because it affected some neighborhoods near you. Florida was notorious for being a late comer to the gentrification party. It didn't start until electricity and AC became widespread in the state. The more recent gentrification is due to the shift in so many peoples' wealth to home ownership over the past seventy years. It results in natural, but self-serving decisions on preserving property values.
Fortunately, you can help by employing social policies that are known to make the problem worse, right? I'll just note that despite our many feeble or even harmful efforts to make the poor less so, they have managed to not only survive, but grow wealthier, all the way down to the squatters in shanty towns. Maybe it's time to pay attention to what works rather than quote bad statistics that don't say anything.