WASHINGTON (September 28, 2009)—The U.S. unemployment rate may have reached a 26-year high of 9.6% last month but that didn't stop TIME magazine from running an article laying out the case for, of all things, raising the price that financially-strapped American consumers pay for their food.

In the past year, the U.S. government has had to bail out the financial sector, bail out the auto industry, infuse more than $800 billion of stimulus into the economy (running up a record $1.7 trillion deficit in this year alone), and now it seems to TIME magazine that the timing is right to break American agriculture.

Although unrivaled in history in providing consumers with the safest, most abundant, most affordable food supply in the world, TIME reasons that the system should be scrapped in favor of a new plan that would lead to higher food prices, environmental degradation, and global hunger.

The crux of the story is that America—and the world—must turn to organic food for the sake of human health, with such a move also paying ancillary dividends to the environment and animal welfare—though the reader may legitimately wonder if the tail might just be wagging the dog.

Norman Borlaug, Nobel Laureate and father of the "green revolution" who is credited with forestalling mass global starvation and whose accomplishments were recently celebrated worldwide upon his passing, called assertions such as those made in the TIME article nothing short of dangerous.

In one published interview, Dr. Borlaug said he believed that those who pursue the kind of reasoning employed by Bryan Walsh, author of the TIME article, politicize science. "There's an element of Lysenkoism [a reference to Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin's favorite biologist, Lysenko] all tangled up with…pseudoscience and environmentalism. I like to remind my friends what pseudoscience and misinformation can do to destroy a nation," warned Borlaug.

The man often credited for saving more human lives than anyone in history knew what he was talking about. While environmental activists, such as Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown¹, earned bestsellers, headlines, and, no doubt, lots of money for making doomsday predictions of mass starvation in the 1970s and 80s, Dr. Borlaug successfully worked to stop it and went largely unheard of and unsung.

Yet, as evidenced by the TIME article, the activists are still getting the headlines. But, what can we all learn from somebody who actually had something intelligent to say? What of organic agriculture as the new and sustainable way of feeding the world?

Says Dr. Borlaug: "Even if you could use all the organic material that you have…you couldn't feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests." Borlaug adds: "At the present time [year 2000], approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There's a lot on nonsense going on here."

That's a bit of a setback for the TIME article's grand and, as it happens, equally unsupportable assertions. Not to mention the extra 3.6 billion people currently inhabiting the planet, and the successful, albeit rational, environmental protection.

Even so, there will be those who continue to insist organic food is "better for people" (those who can afford it anyway), and abide by the TIME article's mantra that you got to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

To that line of thinking, the man who, as Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack recently put it, "…saved millions of lives and inspired thousands to dedicate their lives to doing the same" responds: "There's absolutely no research that shows that organic foods provide better nutrition…If some consumers believe that it's better [for] their health to have organic food. God bless them. Let them buy it…But don't tell the world that we can feed the present population without chemical fertilizer. That's when this misinformation becomes destructive."

Dr. Borlaug summed it all up this way: "Our elites live in big cities and are far removed from the fields. Whether it's Brown or Ehrlich or the head of the Sierra Club or the head of Greenpeace, they've never been hungry."

Neither, apparently, has Bryan Walsh or the gang at TIME magazine who could take a cue from their mothers' admonitions and stop playing with their food.

¹Paul Ehrlich proposed sterilization through water supplies and Lester Brown supports China's birth restriction policies as part of their advocacy of population control.