Norman Borlaug, a person and name few people in this country would recognize, passed away this weekend at the age of 95. Born in Cresco, Iowa and educated at the University of Minnesota in plant pathology, he is credited with saving over one billion lives in the poorest and most food-vulnerable parts of the world.
Among his many accomplishments, he helped to create rust-resistance in wheat and a dwarf variety of both wheat and rice (which resisted lodging under heavy fertilization) that could sustain big heads of grain, more than doubling the output of traditional varieties used throughout India, Pakistan, Mexico and Southeast Asia during the 1960’s and 70’s.
During the later part of his career, he joined the faculty at Texas A&M University, where he was a distinguished professor of International Agriculture. He was recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, prior to its politicization, for his work in saving millions from starvation. Later in life he was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 2007 he received the Congressional Gold Medal.
For all of that, he was widely dubbed the “Father of the Green-Revolution,” which described this tremendous time of dramatic yield increases during the 1960’s and beyond for which he was largely responsible. He remains today, the only recipient of the Nobel Prize for work in agriculture. As a means to stimulate recognition for outstanding contributions in agriculture, Borlaug developed the World Food Prize to be a kind of Nobel Prize for path-breaking work in agriculture.
By now, you will hardly be surprised to know there are more than a few folks today who consider his work a net negative for the world. I suspect some major magazine is proof-reading yet another article about the downside of the Green Revolution. In fact, it is already heavily criticized for bringing capitalism and intensive agriculture to subsistence countries.
The arguments are familiar, namely Borlaug’s work in plant breeding, which resulted in dramatic increases in output, lowered the price of staple food stuffs throughout the world and therefore encouraged overpopulation and hiked
up demand on other global resources.
His emphasis on using fertilizers and modern, cost-saving scale is driving small farmers from the land. His contribution to lower cost food has resulted in the rise of an obesity epidemic which now reaches globally to raise health care costs and increase global warming. Yes, increase global warming. We now know from recent “research” that fat people contribute more to global warming since they don’t bicycle around, favoring car travel and demand more carbon-inefficient calories (such as meat) per day.
Borlaug’s work, which was primarily carried out in a research institute located in Mexico (CIMMYT) and funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, has largely been allowed to wither even though it resulted in Mexico becoming a net exporter of wheat during the 1960’s. Moving all that wheat to other countries must have pushed the “food-miles” through the roof and thereby off-loaded private costs on an unsuspecting global public.
He fought for the development, acceptance and expansion of GM grains throughout the world, thereby aligning himself with “Frankenfood.” While he recognized some of the arguments of his critics, he was especially worried about population expansion but his work was in pushing the frontier of food production forward faster than the population explosion.
You really should take a few minutes to “google” his name and read some of the accounts of his story. It’s as inspiring as it is unlikely to be repeated or encouraged in the current milieu where agricultural research has been defunded to provide money for environmental research. The fact that you probably don’t recognize his name belies the fact that he went about his work without fanfare, avoiding personal fame and credit.
Borlaug was deeply missioned in his work from personal experiences of witnessing first-hand the effects of starvation and malnutrition, and it was out of those experiences that he devoted himself to discovery and practical, real-world problem solving. He overcame some significant obstacles, including directing a massive planting project in India right after the outbreak of war between India and Pakistan “with bombs falling in his front yard.”
To his environmentalist critics he is reported to have said, “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 fifty 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.” (New York Times, “Greens and Hunger”, TierneyLab, John Tierney, May 19, 2008).
Many of his critics claim that we produce enough food now, the problem is unequal distribution. He solved this so-called distribution problem by turning food-insecure nations with low production into exporters within a decade or so. Norman Borlaug was perceptive, an action-oriented, quiet leader whose legacy lives on in the countless lives he set free from suffering and hunger.
Editor’s Note: Dr. Dennis DiPietre is a swine consultant in Columbia, Missouri. His monthly commentary is sponsored by Elanco Animal Health. For more information, go to: www.elanco.com
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