|
 Farmers and consumers in poor countries are now paying the price now
for decisions made by well-fed Westerners, as reported by my colleagues
Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin in their front-page article on cutbacks in financing for agricultural research.
They explain how the Green Revolution faltered after Western
governments and agencies slashed funds for agricultural research,
partly to shift money to other areas, like environmental projects, and
partly because of opposition to high-yield agriculture from advocacy
groups.
If you find it hard to imagine how anyone could be opposed to growing more food for poor people, read Gregg Easterbrook’s 1997 Atlantic Monthly article on Norman Borlaug, the agronomist whose achievements through the Green Revolution may have saved a billion lives. Mr. Easterbrook wrote:
The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the World Bank, once sponsors
of his work, have recently given Borlaug the cold shoulder. Funding
institutions have also cut support for the International Maize and
Wheat Center — located in Mexico and known by its Spanish acronym,
CIMMYT — where Borlaug helped to develop the high-yield, low-pesticide
dwarf wheat upon which a substantial portion of the world’s population
now depends for sustenance. And though Borlaug’s achievements are
arguably the greatest that Ford or Rockefeller has ever funded, both
foundations have retreated from the last effort of Borlaug’s long life:
the attempt to bring high-yield agriculture to Africa.
Pressure from environmentalists was the chief reason for these cutbacks, Mr. Easterbrook reported:
[By]the 1980s finding fault with high-yield agriculture
had become fashionable. Environmentalists began to tell the Ford and
Rockefeller Foundations and Western governments that high-yield
techniques would despoil the developing world. As Borlaug turned his
attention to high-yield projects for Africa, where mass starvation
still seemed a plausible threat, some green organizations became
determined to stop him there. “The environmental community in the 1980s
went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not
to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa,” says David
Seckler, the director of the International Irrigation Management
Institute.
Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World
Bank to back off from most African agriculture projects. The
Rockefeller Foundation largely backed away too — though it might have
in any case, because it was shifting toward an emphasis on
biotechnological agricultural research. “World Bank fear of green
political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to
feeding Africa,” Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europe
persuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to
Africa; an exception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation
that makes fertilizer and avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an
honored presence at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, became, he
says, “a tar baby to them politically, because all the ideas the
greenies couldn’t stand were sticking to me.”
Dr. Borlaug didn’t disguise his anger in summarizing his feelings about greens to Mr. Easterbrook:
“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western
nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists.
They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do
their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or
Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the
developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for
tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that
fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
This issue is timely today not just because of the current food
shortages but because greens are calling for vast sums of money to be
spent off future climate change. And just as money was diverted from
agricultural research for environmental projects in the 1980s, there’s
a danger that immediate problems in poor countries will be shortchanged
by pursuing the long-term agenda of wealthy Westerners, as Bjorn
Lomborg has been arguing. When I wrote about Dr. Lomborg’s proposal
to focus less on climate change and more on problems like malnutrition
and disease, he told me: “I don’t think our descendants will thank us
for leaving them poorer and less healthy just so we could do a little
bit to slow global warming. I’d rather we were remembered for solving
the other problems first.”
What do you think? Are we in danger of repeating the mistakes of the
1980s when it comes to financing research? And does the current
hostility in Europe to genetically modified crops seem reminiscent of
the 1980s opposition to high-yield agriculture — an ideological stance
that appeals to the wealthy but hurts the poor? Source
|
