Author : Borlaug, Norman E.

Summary : The world has the technology - either available or well advanced in the research pipeline - to feed a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology. Extreme environmental elitists seem to be doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks. Small, well-financed, vociferous, and anti-science groups are threatening the development and application of new technology, whether it be developed from biotechnology or more conventional methods of agricultural science. While the affluent nations can certainly afford to pay more for food produced by the so-called "organic" methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low-income, food-deficit nations cannot. Only through significant improvements in labor productivity can agricultural incomes improve and poverty reduced. Certainly, with increased income farmers will be able to afford to make more investments in environmental conservation. As archeologist Richard Leakey reminds his environmental supporters, "you have to have three square meal a day to be a conservationist." Still agricultural scientists and policy makers have a moral obligation to warn the political, educational, and religious leaders about the magnitude and seriousness of the arable land, food and population problems that lie ahead. If we fail to do so in a forthright manner, we will be negligent in our duty and inadvertently will be contributing to the pending chaos of incalculable millions of deaths by starvation. The problem will not vanish by itself; to continue to ignore it will make a future solution more difficult to achieve.