"The greatest human being who ever lived" has died

Does any of that contradict the statement: "When his seeds were used widely in 1963, Mexico instantly went from famine-prone to a wheat-exporter. Their wheat harvest was six times greater after" ?

The seeds may have been capable of increasing the Mexican wheat crop by a factor of six, but not capable of making Mexican wheat production price-competitive with producing it elsewhere and shipping it to Mexico. They may have been a net importer since the 1970s, but presumably that means they were in fact a net exporter in the 1960s.

Why so negative?

It seems that Europe's population is actually declining, so is japan's, and a lot of advanced countries.

If they keep feed themselves right now, they should be so even 100 years from now, given the same condition (unless we have some drastic global climatic change).

it is the poor countries, whose economies are based in subsistence agriculture, that are having a huge population increase.

So, the other question is, do you have to bring all these countries up to the level of western europe/japan/us in order to stop the population boom? if we have to, then there will certainly not be enough resources for everybody (especially if everybody has to live like american do)?

I have a good counter example for this. You don't have to be super developed in order to have a clear stabilization of the population. Even my country's Albania (which has about 6kUSD gpd), population growth has halted (from 2.2 children per woman in 1990, to 1.7 last year).

So, you don't have to get super developed to have a decline of 'overfertility'. It seems that bringing economies out of rural ones, and into more mixed (agriculture/services/technology), will help the population not to increase so much.

It seems that this is a noble goal to achieve for the rest of the world, and this guy helped on it.

And making crops more durable, and farmers more productive, will make people move out of villages and go to cities, and redirect economies to towards services/manufacturing/technologies, where education is more advantage, and having more kids is very expenvie.

Christmas already?

That will NEVER happen. We already have enough food to feed 7 billion people over multiple years. The problem we face now is more related to "distribution of food to the right people" rather than production. What if the population explodes? Earth can sustain more human beings than you can imagine. The only thing we need to be careful about is polluting the atmosphere.

Ad hominem attack completely unexamined by the article's author: """Of his harshest critics Borlaug stated, "some… 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." """

Logical breakdown: 1) My critics are elitist who have not experienced hunger. 2) Therefore, they are wrong.

Relationship to actual argument: nonexistent.

As a note, I do think Norman Borlaug was a remarkable person. But there are lots of interesting questions to ask about his work, and it doesn't make someone an "elitist", or a bad person to ask them. Asking them doesn't mean they think Norman Borlaug was a bad person either. A few that spring to mind...

1) How many have died from malnutrition after crop yield booms resulted in rapidly expanding populations suddenly constrained when the next yield limit was hit?

2) If education expenditures for the third world matched those given for improving agriculture and food aid starting in the 1960's, what would the "third world" look like today? Better? Worse? What if expenditures had been divvied evenly between the two?