Entries for October 2009
Norman Borlaug
In many ways I'm a beneficiary of Norman Borlaug's work. A dedicated scientist whose work was a main ingredient in fighting food shortfall and hunger in India during my childhood. I remember long ration lines for rice and trucks carrying cooked rice across state lines because there was a ban on interstate movement of rice, during periods of food shortfall.
Together with his peer agricultural scientists, India was pulled back from starvation and avoided becoming an example of Malthusian prophecy. Unfortunately, in India the gains he made are not permanent. Social changes, human greed, and ever increasing demands on land for economic development are eroding the gains made. In places like Punjab state of India, preference for male child and subsequent division of family owned agricultral land has reduced farm size below the size required for economic farming. Farmers who made gains thru scientific advances depleted the farm by overuse. Agriculture land is coming under severe pressure to be used for non agriculture purpose to support the India's economic growth
This negative development is not confined to India, it is true for many countries where intensive agriculture is done.
Norman Borlaug passing away comes in the shadow of recent Food and Agricultural Organization report that world has to increase by 70% from today's levels by 2050
With challeneges of climate Change, diversion of food for bio fuels, erosion of good soil and continued explosion of population, it will be a tough task to meet the challenge ahead
McNamara, Cronkite
As a not so serious blogger who doesn't have a compulsion to push views out regularly, I realized how some topics freezes my thinking as the world passes by.
I have been trying to blog on former Secy. of Defense McNamara passing away, who was much reviled for going to Vietnam. Vietnam war was not a war of deceit, there was no WMD used or mushroom cloud threat thrown. What started as a US support operation for South Vietnam slipped into a war after a North Vietnamese attack on US destroyers in what is called Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Many years later it was revealed that the North Vietnamese attack was ordered by a local commander, whereas US thought it was decision of the North Vietnamese top leadership. This was revealed in a conversation by McNamara and North Vietnamese leadership of the time, much after the war, this conversation much more can be found in McNamara's book Argument Without End In Search Of Answers To The Vietnam Tragedy .
It is difficult to say the war was necessary or not, Vietnam came soon after Korea. US being a nation of ideas and ideals instead of nation based on ethnicity had to make hard decisions like Vietnam. When time came McNamara took decisions based on convictions, his decisions might not have won him friends, but he did an honest public service. McNamara was not a Donald Rumsfeld.
Cronkite who passed away soon after McNamara was an outstanding journalist rarely seen these days, he made a prescient call that US has lost the war much before it lost. We don't too many people of this kind these days, 24 hour news cycle make me sick.
I am ambivalent about the opinion that Vietnam was an unpopular war, for the following reasons.
1) Loss of antiwar candidate McGovern's loss due to his opposition to Vietnam war among many other things.
2)Change of heart in many Americans after looking at the way South Vietnamese were treated by the North Vietnamese after the end of War, in fact support for the war grew after the end of Vietnam war. A book I read recently details it.