Norman Borlaug
Criticisms and his view of critics

Borlaug's name is nearly synonymous with the Green Revolution, against which many criticisms have been mounted over the decades. Throughout his years of research, Borlaug's programs often faced opposition by nonscientists who consider genetic crossbreeding to be unnatural, and therefore those that inherently dislike the unnatural criticized such crossbreeding. These farming techniques, in addition to increasing yields, often reaped large profits for U.S. agribusiness and agrochemical corporations and were criticized by one author in 2003 as widening social inequality in the countries owing to uneven food distribution while forcing a capitalist agenda of U.S. corporations onto countries that had undergone land reform.

Other concerns include the crossing of genetic barriers; the inability of a single crop to fulfill all nutritional requirements; the decreased biodiversity from planting few varieties; the environmental and economic effects of inorganic fertilizer and pesticides; the side effects of large amounts of herbicides sprayed on fields of herbicide-resistant crops; and the destruction of wilderness caused by the construction of roads in populated third-world areas.

Borlaug refuted or dismissed most claims of his critics but did take certain concerns seriously. He stated that his work has been "a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia". Of environmental lobbyists opposing crop yield improvements, he stated, "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." Borlaug cautioned, "There are no miracles in agricultural production. Nor is there such a thing as a miracle variety of wheat, rice, or maize which can serve as an elixir to cure all ills of a stagnant, traditional agriculture."

The journalist John Vidal, writing in The Guardian, commented that the plaudits and honors heaped on Borlaug present him as a "saint or even the god of American farmers", but that the technology was far from perfect. The Green Revolution promised to end hunger and poverty, and to benefit rural societies everywhere. Instead, its long-term effects included what the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva has called "rural impoverishment, increased debt, social inequality and the displacement of vast numbers of peasant farmers". Vidal further cites the political commentator Alexander Cockburn, who wrote that Borlaug was "aside from Kissinger, probably the biggest killer of all to have got the peace prize", given that his wheat "led to the death of peasants by the million".
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