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The Man Who Saved Billions

September 14, 2009

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Dr. Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, helped strengthen technology in agriculture.

By Katie Sauer, Produce More Conserve More Staff

Some people lived through it. Some people studied it in history classes. Some people might not even know what it is.

It’s the Green Revolution. Not today’s greenwashing movement, but the original one of the 1950s and 60s—the one that allowed countless farmers to avoid devastating famines.
What most people don’t know is there was one man behind this revolution. He’s Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the man who saved the lives of billions of people around the world—and did it through agriculture.

“Though barely known in the country of his birth, elsewhere in the world Norman Borlaug is widely considered to be among the leading Americans of our age,” Gregg Easterbrook wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1997. “Norman Borlaug has already saved more lives than any other person who ever lived.”

Borlaug is one of five people in history to have been awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and the Nobel Peace Prize. The others to receive these accolades were Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel, Mother Teresa and Dr. Martin Luther King. All four of these people are known as great humanitarians around the world and are household names to many.

But what about Norman Borlaug? Does your family know his name? Do your neighbors know he’s responsible for the Green Revolution they learned about in school? Do your colleagues know he’s largely to thank for the sandwich they eat at lunch? Probably not, yet Time magazine named him one of the most influential minds of the 20th century.

Humble Beginnings

Borlaug was born in northeast Iowa in 1914 and grew up on a small, mixed-crop and livestock farm there. His parents moved to the U.S. from Norway years before to escape major food shortages in the country.

He attended the University of Minnesota and earned a degree in forestry. Afterward, he accepted a job with the U.S. Forest Service, but because of budget constraints, they had to delay his employment six months. To pass the time, Borlaug decided to participate in extra classes at the university, and during this time his life—and eventually the lives of billions of people around the world—changed forever.

One evening he attended a lecture by Dr. Elvin Stakman, the head of the university’s plant pathology program. At the end of the class Stakman said science would “go further than has ever been possible to eradicate the miseries of hunger and starvation from this earth.” After hearing these words Borlaug needed to hear more and wanted to do more, so he enrolled in the school’s doctoral program for plant pathology. Borlaug graduated from the program in 1942.

The Fields of Mexico

After graduating, Borlaug worked as a microbiologist for two years, but in 1944 he joined the Rockefeller Foundation and agreed to go to Mexico to work to improve wheat production in the country. Upon his arrival he found poverty-stricken farmers who were barely able to sustain themselves because of numerous poor harvests.

Borlaug immediately saw the need for implementing agricultural innovations for these farmers. He began using a technique known as shuttle breeding to speed up the development of dwarf wheat, a shorter wheat plant. Having a shorter stalk allowed the plant to use less energy to grow the stalk and transfer that energy to growing more grain. In addition, the shorter stalk supported the kernels better than tall-stalked wheat, which could bend from the weight of the kernels at maturity. Having a crop that still stood up at maturity made reaping easier on the farmers.

With Borlaug’s advances in wheat varieties, combined with fertilizers and irrigation techniques, Mexican farmers became self-sufficient in 1956.

The Green Revolution

Because of Borlaug’s success in Mexico, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Rockefeller Foundation asked him to focus on Southern Asia and the Middle East, which were also struggling. Borlaug visited leaders in India and Pakistan and convinced them to try farming with these new varieties and techniques, a task many doubted he could achieve.

With Borlaug’s new approach to agriculture yields in Pakistan and India increased four-fold—leading these two traditionally food-starved countries to self-sufficiency and saving hundreds of millions of lives.

After Pakistan and India witnessed the benefits, Borlaug’s wheat achievements spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa, saving millions more lives along the way. By the early 1960s, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, Libya, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria and Saudi Arabia were using Borlaug’s approach to wheat and increasing yields.

Following in Borlaug’s path, other scientists replicated his successes in other grains—largely rice. These scientists, combined with Borlaug, helped save much of the developing world from famine in the late 1900s. This time period has become known as the Green Revolution.

He’s known as the Father of the Green Revolution. He’s known as the man who has saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived. He’s Norman Borlaug.

This revolution saved the lives of millions of hungry people and taught farmers in these developing countries how to be self-sufficient. But Borlaug’s work was far from complete.

The Nobel Peace Prize of 1970

His successes in India, Pakistan and the rest of the developing world, led to Borlaug winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

“This year the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament has awarded Nobel’s Peace Prize to a scientist, Dr. Norman Ernest Borlaug, because, more than any other single person of this age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world,” Aase Lionaes, chairman of the Nobel Committee, said in the 1970 award presentation speech. “We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.”

Borlaug ironically accepted his award for his work to increase the world’s food supply and feed a hungry world in Oslo, Norway, the country his parents left decades before because of a lack of food.

To this day, Borlaug remains the only agricultural scientist to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Onward to Africa

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug maintained his active role in making agriculture more productive in the developing world, and in 1984, his attention turned to Africa.
At the age of 71, Borlaug joined Ryoichi Sasakawa and Jimmy Carter to advance African agriculture and defeat malnutrition and poverty on the continent. While reluctant to start such a venture at his age, once he saw the conditions on the continent, he began working immediately. Soon Borlaug had projects going in seven countries, where corn yields quickly tripled, and yields of wheat, cassava, sorghum and cow peas increased as well.

The World Food Prize

In 1986, while conducting his work in Africa, Borlaug created the World Food Prize, which some consider one of his most lasting contributions.

After winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug approached the Nobel Committee and encouraged them to create an award for agriculture. When they disagreed, Borlaug established his own award, the World Food Prize.

According to the World Food Prize Web site, this annual award has become the “foremost international award recognizing—without regard to race, religion, nationality or political beliefs—the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world.”

Reflections from a Pioneer

During an interview with Reason magazine in 2000, when asked if the Green Revolution was a success, Borlaug responded:

“Yes, but it’s a never-ending job. When I was born in 1914, the world population was approximately 1.6 billion people. It has just turned 6 billion. We’ve had no major famines any place in the world since the Green Revolution began. If you look at the data that’s put out by the World Health Organization and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), there are probably 800 million people who are undernourished in the world. So there’s still a lot of work to do.”

And when asked what will be needed to tackle this work, Borlaug replied,  “Biotechnology will help us do things that we couldn’t do before, and do it in a more precise and safe way. Biotechnology will allow us to cross genetic barriers that we were never able to cross with conventional genetics and plant breeding.

“If we grow our food and fiber on the land best suited to farming with the technology that we have and what’s coming, including proper use of genetic engineering and biotechnology, we will leave untouched vast tracts of land, with all of their plant and animal diversity.”

Maybe he didn’t leave his forestry degree too far behind after all.

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