Historical Figure
Norman Borlaug
1914–2009
American agronomist and Nobel Laureate (1914–2009)
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Biography
Norman Ernest Borlaug was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, one of only seven people to have received all three awards.
In Their Own Words (5)
You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.
From "Eat This!", an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullsh#t!; Quoted in: Gary Beene (2011) The Seeds We So Kindness that Fed a Hungry World. p. 9 , 2011
It is a sad fact that on this earth at this late date there are still two worlds, "the privileged world" and "the forgotten world". The privileged world consists of the affluent, developed nations, comprising twenty-five to thirty percent of the world population, in which most of the people live in a luxury never before experienced by man outside the Garden of Eden. The forgotten world is made up primarily of the developing nations, where most of the people, comprising more than fifty percent of the total world population, live in poverty, with hunger as a constant companion and fear of famine a continual menace.
From his 1970 Nobel Lecture , 1970
Some of the environmental lobbyists of the western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They have 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 would 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.
Reported by Gregg Easterbrook in a January 1997 interview for The Atlantic Monthly. , 1997
There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.
1970 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech , 1970
I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called “organic” methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.
30th Anniversary Lecture, The Norwegian Nobel Institute, Oslo, September 8, 2000; Quoted in: Ronald Bailey (2002) Global warming and other eco-myths. p. 59 , 2002
Timeline
The story of Norman Borlaug, told in moments.
Born on a farm near Cresco, Iowa. Norwegian-American family. His grandfather told him: 'You're wiser to fill your head now if you want to fill your belly later.' He wrestled in high school and nearly became a forestry ranger.
Arrives in Mexico to work on a Rockefeller Foundation agricultural program. The wheat crop is devastated by stem rust. He breeds disease-resistant varieties in the field, shuttling between two growing seasons at different altitudes. Nobody's tried this before. It works.
His semi-dwarf wheat varieties are ready. Shorter stalks mean the plants don't fall over under the weight of heavy grain heads. Mexico, which imported half its wheat in 1944, is now self-sufficient and exporting.
India and Pakistan adopt his wheat varieties during a famine crisis. Indian wheat production doubles between 1965 and 1970. Pakistan's follows. The transformation is so fast that journalists coin a name for it: the Green Revolution.
Wins the Nobel Peace Prize. His wife hears about it on the radio while he's in a wheat field in Mexico. She drives out to tell him. He's credited with saving more human lives than any single person in history. The number usually cited is one billion.
Dies of lymphoma in Dallas at 95. He worked until the end. His last project was adapting crops for Africa. He'd spent 60 years in fields, not laboratories. 'You can't eat potential,' he liked to say.
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