The Man Who Fed The World
Dubbed the father of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug helped to create high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties around the world. He is attributed with saving over one billion lives from starvation worldwide. As just one example of the profound changes he made in agriculture, between 1965 and 1970 wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India.
He has earned the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal for his successes. The Nobel Peace Prize was given to him in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply. The urge to debilitate the scourge of hunger began when he took his first job in 1935 with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He worked with the unemployed on federal projects and saw first hand how hunger affected the people working for him. A lot of them were essentially starving. He later recalled, “I saw how food changed them … All of this left scars on me.”
Indeed, Borlaug had started out studying forestry, but switched to plant pathology when he considered the effect of crop disease on hunger. After graduating he began his career as a microbiologist at DuPont studying industrial and agricultural bacteriocides, fungicides, and preservatives then came the war and with it his lab was transformed to perform governmental research for the United States armed forces. They made some pretty cool stuff.
After the war, Borlaug declined DuPont’s offer to double his salary and left for Mexico to join the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program–a joint project between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. His project in Mexico was the archetype of his future work in other countries. He and his team studied genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, agronomy, soil science, and cereal technology to make Mexico more self-sufficient in feeding its population.
His success in manipulating genetics and plant breeding made him a target for anti-genetically modified food campaigns. It has also led some to complain about the disruption to traditional farming and claimed his processes would lead to pervasive monocultures across the world:
Mr Borlaug called them naysayers and elitists, who had never known hunger but thought, for the health of the planet, that the poor should go without good food. Higher yields, he pointed out, saved marginal land and forest from farming. Inorganic fertiliser just replaced natural nutrients, and more efficiently than manure. As for cross-breeding, Mother Nature had done it first, cross-pollinating different wild grasses until they produced a grain that could eventually expand into modern bread…
Genetic engineering of plants greatly excited him. The risks, he said, were rubbish, unproven by science, while the potential benefits were endless. The transfer of useful characteristics might now take weeks, rather than decades. More lives would be saved.
Borlaug taught and researched at Texas A&M University from 1984 until his death. He was the Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at the university and held the Eugene Butler Endowed Chair in Agricultural Biotechnology. Â Clearly, though, his most important lessons were found in his own life’s work and in his own motto, “Get the plow, start growing now.”
October 2, 2009
Tags: agriculture, change, education, farmers, heroes, innovation, nutrition Posted in: Health, Science & Technology
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