VP of Venture Investments Agriculture

"When I last spoke to [Norman] Borlaug, a few years before he passed away, I asked him about the past criticisms. Critics, he said, never wanted to answer the counterfactual questions: Where would the world be today if we had the same growth in population and affluence but none of the yield increases of the Green Revolution? Overuse of fertilizer, water-logging soils, loading up land with toxic salts from badly run irrigation schemes – these were real issues, he said. But wouldn’t you rather have these for problems than the kind of hunger we had in 1968? He asked me if I had ever been to a place where most of the people weren’t getting enough to eat. 'Not just poor, but actually hungry all the time', he said. I told him that I hadn’t been to such a place. 'That’s the point,' he said. 'When I was getting started, you couldn’t avoid them'" - The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles C. Mann