His name was Norman Borlaug.

He was an uncritical proponent of GM crops, herbicides and pesticides.

The "green revolution" began in 1945, not to feed the world, but because the arms industry turned its chemical production system away from making explosives and into making chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.

Before 1945 virtually all agriculture was organic. Now, we are returning to organic agriculture because we realise the madness of pouring tons of poisons onto the land!

He is hailed by some as a "hero" but only because he advocated methods of production which required expensive inputs (hybrid seeds, herbicides, pesticides, fertilisers) which benefitted large corporations. Small farmers, as usual, got very little out of the so-called "green revolution"...

for a large number of reasons, but mainly because

1. mechanisation of food producion leading to reliance on fossil fuels and increased abstraction of water from unreplaceable sources.

2. massive increase in alienation of people from food production.

3. de-emphasising the importance of eco-systems in food production and thus devaluation of the environment (eg. ripping out of hedgerows)

4. placing huge amounts of power in a few companies which controllled the tools of "productivity" (Cargill/Monsanto/ADM/Syngetia/Ford/CNH)

5. break down of rural society in all parts of the globe where it infected.

6. increased government oversight of rural affairs, red tape and a subsidy culture.

7. factory farming and increased commodification of animals

8. pesticides and chemicals as the answers for all problems, so leading to denuded land relying on outside aids for productions.

and so on.

Basically there was nothing "green" about it.

the GR was also built on the premise that people are hungry because they there isn't enough food. Sen (1981) who won a Nobel Peace Prize for Economics showed that hunger and famine is the result of people simply being too poor to buy food on a commodity market that only provides basic human rights to those who can pay. the GR massively increased output, that is not in doubt, but the GR didn't make much of an errosion into hunger because the GR doesn't tackle poverty, infact GR in some cases made it worse - as the oil price is only going in one direction, and many small farmers lost their land and became surfdom labourers on big farms.

His claim to fame (the thing for which he won a Nobel) was for breeding wheat resistant to the fungal disease "wheat rust" which indeed threatened massive famine (especially in China). This would be standard plant breeding adapted to populations -- you don't work with wheat one plant at a time. Also important with wheat breeding was "dwarfing" -- shorter wheat stalks are less likely to be knocked down by an unseasonal late storm in the late stages of ripening when the wheat heads are heavy.

This might come as a shock to you, but going back a hundred years and seeing the human population of the planet fed without the "green revolution" does NOT mean that we could feed the CURRENT population -- which is SEVERAL TIMES larger!

There is a simple choice. We do NOT need the "green revolution" to feed us provided we are willing to see the human population reduced to say a quarter of its current size. On the other hand, if we want to insist on the current or an even greater human population, can't be done, however much our "religious dogma" (pseudo scientific economic ideologies) insist that we can. In other words, you should not conclude that I am FOR the "green revolution" --- but that doesn't mean that I am on "your side" of the debate.

> In other words, you should not conclude that I am FOR the "green revolution" --- but that doesn't mean that I am on "your side" of the debate.

I don't quite understand what you mean by this - in what way are you not on the side of the previous posters?

I don't think anyone denies that the Green Revolution did increase crop yields per acre significantly, the point is that the side effects mentioned above are very bad. It's a Big Business / Big Government technofix, which always tend to end badly for everyone except those at the very top. And with populations continuing to rise, it just postpones the inevitable crash, which now has the potential to involve far more people starving to death.

If it was just breeding of more hardy varieties of crops, then fine, but it came with all the baggage of chemical fertilisers and pesticides as well.