Lomborg on the next Green Revolution

Bjorn Lomborg author of The Skeptical Environmentalist is an excellent speaker, a virtuoso statistician and a thorough and precise researcher. So when I say you should read his article in City Journal about The Next Green Revolution, then you know it is well worth the effort.

Such opposition to GM is particularly counterproductive now. In 2008, malnutrition in mothers and their young children claimed 3.5 million lives. Global food stocks reached historic lows last year, and food riots erupted in West Africa and South Asia. Consumers in transitional economies like China and India are demanding more than subsistence diets, and drought has hindered Australian crop production. Progress is distressingly slow on the United Nations’ goal of halving the proportion of hungry people by 2015.

Of course, before we adopt genetically modified foods, we should always test them rigorously for their potential impact on the environment and on people’s health. But it would be criminal to disregard the hope that biotechnology offers to the world’s most malnourished people. “Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists,” Borlaug once memorably said, referring to critics squeamish about the tools that he used during the Green Revolution. “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 50 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