De som arbetar för undergången ger inte upp

När jag studerade på Stanford i början av 70-talet var professor Paul Ehrlich universitets kanske mest kände professor. Han blev känd för en bredare allmänhet 1968 med sin bok The Population Bomb. Boken kom ut i svensk översättning 1972 och hette då Befolkningsexplosionen. Ehrlich förutspådde att massvält skulle utbryta någon gång mellan 1970 och 1985, att hundratals miljoner människor skulle svälta till döds under 1970- och 1980-talen.

Så blev det inte. Varför ? En viktig förklaring var den ”gröna revolutionen” med växtförädling och nya jordbruksmetoder. Norman Borlaug var den viktigaste vetenskapsmannen bakom revolutionen.

Men de undergångsfantaster som då – bland annat i Romklubben – kämpade mot den gröna revolutionen har inte gett upp. Idag inriktas kampen igen mot växtförädlingen. Greenpeace går i spetsen.

Wall Street Journal berättar:

Robert Zeigler is an environmentalist, but he is also a plant scientist. And that has led him to question the motives of an environmental movement that opposes genetically modified crops despite overwhelming evidence that they are safe.

As director general of the International Rice Research Institute, Mr. Zeigler is pushing the development of “golden rice,” a genetically modified variety that began in the lab about two decades ago. Geneticists inserted a gene into the rice plant that allows it to produce beta carotene, which makes its grains yellow.

Because the human body converts beta carotene to vitamin A, golden rice has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of millions of people around the world, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, where vitamin A deficiency is an especially common malady that can cause blindness and increases the risk of death from disease. Children are particularly vulnerable: “An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year, half of them dying within 12 months of losing their sight,” according to the U.N. World Health Organization.

Golden rice thus sounds like a godsend—but don’t tell that to activists opposed to anything that falls in the category of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. In August 2013, anti-GMO vandals broke into the International Rice Research Institute’s research facilities and destroyed field trials of golden rice.

More than just golden rice is at stake. Total rice production is stagnant but populations are growing. Asia badly needs a second “green revolution” of increased yields—Mr. Zeigler estimates that the harvest must increase to 550,000 tons of milled rice a year by 2035 from 450,000 tons today.

One important way to achieve that is through genetic modifications that will produce higher-yielding varieties, and the International Rice Research Institute will be central to that effort. Founded in 1960 with funding from governments and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the IRRI was one of the leading institutions in the original green revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. Transgenic technology is becoming an important part of its research arsenal.

Yet the returns to society as a whole from higher-yielding rice varieties are staggering. The IRRI’s semi-dwarf varieties, including the famous IR8, saved India from famine in the 1960s. And they provided good investment opportunities for the World Bank across the region, since they responded well to better growing conditions. Up went dams and fertilizer factories, and up went Asian incomes and living standards.

De som arbetar för att undergången ska inträffa ger inte upp i första taget. De drivs av en antikapitalistisk ideologi, men har lockat in också många icke-kommunister i sina villoläror.