Iain Murray, I think, had a post here the other day — forgive me, I can’t find it. But it shouldn’t matter much. It was on science and entrepreneurship — and the importance of the latter to the former. It reminded me of something I recently read — in a speech by Norman Borlaug, the great agriculturalist whose techniques and determination fed so many.

The speech was given in Oslo on September 8, 2000. This was the 30th-anniversary year of Borlaug’s Nobel peace prize. He said,

Sadly, the twin organizational evils of bureaucracy and complacency have begun to invade many international and national research institutions today. I agree with the late Nobel economist T. W. Schultz that most working scientists are research entrepreneurs and that centralized control is an anathema to progress.

And he goes on in that vein. To read the whole speech — magnificent in wisdom and spirit — go here.

Yesterday on the Corner, Jeff Stier had an item in which he mentioned Borlaug and Borlaug’s distress over the attacks on high-yield agriculture — attacks from the enviro-Left, which have meant that people have gone hungry, needlessly. Borlaug addressed that in his 2000 lecture too:

The current backlash against agricultural science and technology evident in some industrialized countries is hard for me to comprehend. How quickly humankind becomes detached from the soil and agricultural production!

Elsewhere, his words were harsher. Let me give you just two choice quotes: “These people [environmentalist zealots] have never been around hungry people. They’re utopians. They sit and philosophize. They don’t live in the real world.” And this one:

“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 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 [the miserable] these things.”

Can I give you something else? Borlaug was asked what he had to say to advocates of organic farming. He replied,

“God bless you. Use all of the organic matter you want. But don’t deceive the world into believing that we can feed 6.2 billion people with organic matter alone. If we tried to do this, we would plow up all of these marginal lands, cut down much of our forests, and much of that would be productive for just a few years. Without chemical fertilizer, forget it.”

Amen. (By the way, I culled the first and third of these quotes from this article, and the second one from this.)

As I’ve mentioned, Borlaug won his peace prize in 1970. A good thing he did, too: because when high-yield agriculture became uncool — when the green zealots got on top — ain’t no way the Nobel committee would have given him the prize. Very, very seldom has a Nobel peace prize been out of fashion. Very seldom.