Borlaug was truly great but the environuts opposing him were/are idiots.

http://tinyurl.com/levxcy
The Man Who Defused the 'Population Bomb'
One of America's greatest heroes remains little known in his home country. By GREGG EASTERBROOK
Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. ...teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II. In 1999, the Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug's efforts ...saved the lives of one billion human beings. ...Green Revolution techniques caused both reliable harvests, and spectacular output. From the Civil War through the Dust Bowl, the typical American farm produced about 24 bushels of corn per acre; by 2006, the figure was about 155 bushels per acre.
...Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer....affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques.... most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels....Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land... Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power...Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was "a fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug's arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals...though streets and buildings are named for Norman Borlaug throughout the developing world, most Americans don't even know his name.****The Ehrlich/Borlaug story is an object lesson in the conflict between those prophesying environmental disaster and human ingenuity and innovation, the latter of which always wins.Note the presence in the Obama administration of many of the former, heedless of the lessons of Borlaug and history.****