Norman Borlaug was known for starting the “Green Revolution.” His work likely saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. His work in agriculture was so significant that it earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. On Saturday, September 12, 2009, Norman Borlaug died in his home in Dallas, Texas. He was 95.Perhaps the importance of Dr. Borlaug’s work is best summed up by the Nobel Committee, that stated in 1970 when Borlaug won the award that ‘“[m]ore than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world . . . Dr. Borlaug has introduced a dynamic factor into our assessment of the future and its potential.”’
According to today’s article by Joe Holley and J.Y. Smith in the Washington Post, Dr. Borlaug died from cancer. Since 1984 Dr. Borlaug spent his time as a distinguished professor of international agriculture at the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M University. It was Borlaug’s work that made him a hero to many in the third world “susceptible to hunger and famine [.]”
Dr. Borlaug earned his bachelor’s degree, masters degree, and doctoral degrees in plant pathology in the late 1930s and early 1940s from the University of Minnesota. Dr. Borlaug combined his plant pathology knowledge with his passion over human hunger issues and the growing planet population—a passion that developed in the young scientist while he witnessed the struggles of the American population during the Great Depression and read about Thomas Malthus. The combination of his knowledge and his passion lead to the development of plant breeds that helped feed the world.
In his lifetime, Dr. Borlaug developed high yield varieties of wheat, corn, soy beans, and rice resistant to disease. These developments helped fight famine in Mexico, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. His work is responsible for the start of the Green Revolution in Southeast Asia. The Washington Post has a nice synopsis of Dr. Borlaug’s work and its importance:
Dr. Borlaug's career was defined on the one hand by the ability of science to increase food production at an exponential rate and on the other by the Malthusian nightmare of an exploding population outstripping its ability to feed itself. His work took him from the Iowa farm where he grew up to the primitively cultivated wheat fields of Mexico in the 1940s, the rice paddies of Asia in the 1960s and 1970s and to the savannas of Africa in the 1980s.Or as the Los Angeles Times described it, Borlaug’s work is,
widely credited with saving millions of lives by breeding wheat, rice and other crops that brought agricultural self-sufficiency to developing countries around the world . . . In 1960, before his techniques were widely adopted, the world produced 692 million tons of grain for 2.2 billion people. By 1992, largely as a result of Borlaug's pioneering techniques, it was producing 1.9 billion tons for 5.6 billion people -- using only 1% more land. India and Pakistan are now agriculturally self-sufficient as a result of his intervention.In addition to the Nobel, Dr. Borlaug was also the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that is bestowed by the United States government. Additionally, Time magazine listed Dr. Borlaug as one of the 100 most influential minds of the 20th century back in 1999. Dr. Borlaug also received the Congressional Gold Medal. According to the Los Angeles Times, the only other people who have been awarded the Nobel, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal are Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel.
Interestingly, Dr. Borlaug was not a fan of environmentalists and sustainable agriculture. Dr. Borlaug felt the desires of these groups of advocates, namely to reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, did not reflect the reality of a growing world population that is difficult to feed. ‘"They claim that the consumer is being poisoned out of existence by the current high-yielding systems of agricultural production and recommend we revert back to lower-yielding, so-called sustainable technologies,’ he said in a speech in New Orleans in 1993.”
Dr. Borlaug told Atlantic Monthly magazine the following:
"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations 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 50 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."
In Dr. Borlaug’s opinion, maintaining an “adequate supply of food is ‘the first component of social justice . . . Otherwise there will be no peace.’” Further, Dr. Borlaug recognized that there will always be efforts to improve food production to feed the world, and his efforts were actually very ecologically friendly in that he increased crop yield dramatically without dramatically increasing the amount of land needed to raise these crops. As South Dakota Senator George McGovern put it, ‘" [Borlaug's]scientific leadership not only saved people from starvation, but the high-yield seeds he bred saved millions of square miles of wildlife from being plowed down. He is one of the great men of our age."’
Dr. Borlaug was born Norman Ernest Borlaug on March 25, 1914, on a farm near Cresco, Iowa. He is survived by his wife, his two children, five grandchildren, and six great-grand children.
To read the Washington Post article on Dr. Borlaug click here.
To read the Los Angeles Times story, which provides a synopsis of Dr. Borlaug’s life and work, click here.
Posted: 09/14/09
