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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 12 2019, @08:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-loafing-around dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Thursday June 13 2019, @06:02PM (6 children)

    by Osamabobama (5842) on Thursday June 13 2019, @06:02PM (#855224)

    If you keep normalizing for total population, you have to account for the fact that the Earth is shrinking - in relative terms.

    How about 'arable land per capita'? That seems like a good place to start, as overpopulation discussions often center around food supplies. Overall, if we want to know what population growth changes for people, you need to look at the effects on a person. Maybe it's the median person in a category, or the bottom quintile. But knowing that there are more poor people now than there were people then doesn't give me any insight into whether it's more likely for a random person to be poor today than 60 years ago.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 13 2019, @08:24PM (5 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday June 13 2019, @08:24PM (#855271)

    How about 'arable land per capita'?

    A traditionally squishy metric... is that with or without phosphate fertilizer (the variable that screwed Malthus' calculations). Powered irrigation? GMOs? Vertical farms? Is your population Vegetarian, or Texan?

    knowing that there are more poor people now than there were people then doesn't give me any insight into whether it's more likely for a random person to be poor today than 60 years ago.

    Again, is that the right question? Do we care more about average suffering, or total suffering? If every life is sacred, isn't every suffering life important?

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    • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Thursday June 13 2019, @11:28PM (4 children)

      by Osamabobama (5842) on Thursday June 13 2019, @11:28PM (#855347)

      A traditionally squishy metric... is that with or without phosphate fertilizer

      That's why it's interesting; technology changes the definition of arable land, along with the yield. Diet determines the food requirements. Maybe a cyclone destroyed the local crops while global production was bountiful. Such a problem could lead to an increase in suffering but not be reflected in global totals.

      Maybe every suffering life is important if you want to shed a tear over their pain. But if you want to do something about it, poverty is solved in groups. The people of North Korea are famously poor, but fixing that problem is going to require nationwide economic reforms. China is alleviating poverty via commerce and urbanization (they have plenty of other problems, too, and I'm sure some of those are persistent). Several Central American countries are impoverished because of corrupt governments and crime.

      The causes of poverty don't scale with population; they are attached to countries, regions, or cities. Detroit has poverty because their auto industry moved away and because they are an American city (this is not a root cause analysis, but a common symptom of US cities). It's not because they have so many poor people.

      I don't have answers to these problems that I've described in vague terms, but knowing the progression of the global population of impoverished people won't get me any.

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      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 14 2019, @12:05AM (3 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday June 14 2019, @12:05AM (#855356)

        The causes of poverty don't scale with population

        Think about that for half a second and consider whether you still believe it.

        Which is worse, murder or a lifetime of suffering? The US criminal justice system seems to mostly think that lifetime imprisonment is a harsher punishment and worth the extremely elevated cost as compared to capital punishment (of course this is a complex issue...)

        If you can agree that a lifetime of suffering is worse than being killed outright, that would make unending grinding poverty for large swaths of the population worse than genocide...

        I have plenty of answers to these problems, but no power to implement them, and no desire to even approach the level of power required to do so - I value my quality of life and would not want the burdens that accompany that level of power. I also enjoy too much doing other things rather than political campaigning for dubious impacts. Far easier and more enjoyable to grumble impotently and council my children to not have children themselves, lest they bring more suffering lives into the dark future that we appear to be headed for. Whether or not my children listen is up to them and well beyond my control - unless you think that parental sterilization is O.K., which I don't.

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        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 15 2019, @06:33AM (2 children)

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 15 2019, @06:33AM (#855929) Journal

          If you can agree that a lifetime of suffering is worse than being killed outright, that would make unending grinding poverty for large swaths of the population worse than genocide...

          Unless, of course, there's more to genocide than merely killing people. And what level of wealth is better than genocide? Even the billionaires suffer for a lifetime after all.

          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 15 2019, @12:53PM (1 child)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday June 15 2019, @12:53PM (#855965)

            And what level of wealth is better than genocide?

            I'd put it instead: what level of wealth is worse than genocide? That level of wealth where you're trapped in conditions equivalent to a refugee camp: not really adequate protection from weather or vermin, unreliable sources of food and medical care, essentially for a lifetime. When multiple generations are stuck in these conditions, and want to get to a better place but are unable to buy or work their way out but cannot because they don't have the money to buy their way into "the system."

            Like everything, there's a lot of relativity to it - if the whole human race is brought back to these conditions, then nobody is in a position to make it better. But, when the means are readily available, but our system of laws and economics force people into those conditions due to their lack of wealth, and hold them there for lifetimes... just because they're not being obviously directly exploited by "owners" doesn't mean they've got a life better than slaves.

            And, you're right - even billionaires suffer for a lifetime, it's part of existence. I'm not sure we're all up to the Llama's purpose of using our lives and possessions to help other people, but the part about "at least try to not hurt them" should be exercised by those in power (including the possession of wealth) whenever possible.

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            • (Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Saturday June 15 2019, @02:10PM

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 15 2019, @02:10PM (#855989) Journal

              I'd put it instead: what level of wealth is worse than genocide? That level of wealth where you're trapped in conditions equivalent to a refugee camp: not really adequate protection from weather or vermin, unreliable sources of food and medical care, essentially for a lifetime. When multiple generations are stuck in these conditions, and want to get to a better place but are unable to buy or work their way out but cannot because they don't have the money to buy their way into "the system."

              Then it's good news that such levels of poverty are decreasing, right? Or does the narrative not depend on what's actually going on in the world?

              Like everything, there's a lot of relativity to it - if the whole human race is brought back to these conditions, then nobody is in a position to make it better. But, when the means are readily available, but our system of laws and economics force people into those conditions due to their lack of wealth, and hold them there for lifetimes... just because they're not being obviously directly exploited by "owners" doesn't mean they've got a life better than slaves.

              That works against you as well. If you have the wealth to get adequate protection from weather and vermin, reliable food and medical care, etc, then you're not at the above level of poverty no matter how much you spin relative privation. And the developed world is a great example of how systems of laws and economics can free people rather than force them into such conditions.

              And, you're right - even billionaires suffer for a lifetime, it's part of existence. I'm not sure we're all up to the Llama's purpose of using our lives and possessions to help other people, but the part about "at least try to not hurt them" should be exercised by those in power (including the possession of wealth) whenever possible.

              Unless, of course, the parts where the "trying" hurts those poor worse than not trying.

              My take, of course, is that we are currently in the greatest elevation of people out of poverty and ignorance in out thousands of years of human history. It wasn't because some do-gooders made the world better, but because of the systems of laws and economics you decry together with massive technology development and the empowerment of women. What is remarkable throughout this discussion is how many people believe they are entitled to an ever improving world, combined with a near blind view of what that improvement should entail - and yet often combine this utopian expectation with an incredibly pessimistic view of the world that ignores the many positive things we've already done and will do.

              Well, Virginia, if the world sucks as much as you claim, then no wonder it doesn't meet your expectations!