Norman Borlaug, saviour of millions, dies

Norman Borlaug, saviour of millions, dies

Agriculture pioneer Borlaug dies

Norman Borlaug, the man known as the father of the Green Revolution in agriculture, has died in the US state of Texas aged 95. Prof Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for agricultural innovation and the development of high-yield crops. The Green Revolution helped world food production more than double between 1960 and 1990 with Asia, Africa and Latin America in particular benefiting.

The Nobel Institute said he had helped save hundreds of millions of lives. Prof Borlaug died late on Saturday evening at his home in Dallas from complications with cancer, said a spokesperson for Texas A&M University, where he had worked.

'A better place'

In the early 1960s Prof Borlaug realised that creating short-stemmed varieties would leave food plants more energy for growing larger heads of grain. His high-yield, disease-resistant dwarf wheat quickly boosted harvests in Latin America, and his techniques were particularly successful in South Asia, where famine was widespread.

Analysts believe the Green Revolution helped avert a worldwide famine in the late 20th century.

A close friend of Prof Borlaug at Texas A&M, Dr Ed Runge, told Associated Press news agency: "He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much... He made the world a better place." The Nobel prize presentation said Prof Borlaug "more than any other single person of his age... has helped to provide bread for a hungry world".

Seems like a heck of a fellow.
He will be missed.

Never heard of him until announced on the tv news.

Norm Borlaug: the man who fed the world

He was a giant of the scientific and technological revolution of the 20th century. He probably saved more lives than the more famous names behind polio vaccines or DNA: Norm Borlaug ended famine in much of the world.

What an epitaph. "I personally cannot live comfortably in the midst of abject hunger and poverty and human misery," Borlaug famously said. Some people go into science thinking they might help save the world. Norm's your proof that it's possible. Of course, there was more scope in his day. In the 1930s, people starved in the US. In the mid-20th century the world's human population soared, and there were widespread food shortages.

The answer was to apply science to increase crop yields. Many people helped do that, but Borlaug was unique. In 1944 the US government sent him to Mexico to fight the age-old enemy of wheat, stem rust fungus, after Mexican outbreaks had rampaged into the US breadbasket. Borlaug devised an ingenious system to accelerate the breeding of disease-resistant wheat and beat stem rust – but he didn't stop in Mexico. His plants went on to vastly boost food production elsewhere, notably India and its neighbours, as famine-wracked then as Africa is now. Hard to imagine? That's why.

Then Borlaug helped convince the big donors of his day that if one scientific advance in crop science could make that much difference, surely we needed more. The donors listened, and the defeat of wheat rust was followed by the green revolution – similar leaps in rice and other crops, with a systematic introduction of irrigation, fertiliser and high-yielding varieties to farms worldwide. Borlaug's lab in Mexico is now CIMMYT, the world centre for wheat and maize research, and part of a worldwide network of labs that continue the revolution.

That's why some think ill of Borlaug. The green revolution was social as well as technological, as changing farming technology meant changing land ownership and social relationships, and inevitably winners and losers. A faction of economists has long charged that the green revolution was wrong because of these ills.

The ills surely need sorting, especially the fact that modern crops' thirst for water and land is not infinitely sustainable. But I have no patience for arguments that the green revolution was a selfish capitalist plot. Famine used to stalk the Indian subcontinent regularly: in 1943 two and a half million people starved to death in Bengal. The green revolution stopped that.

A timely reminder that not all biological engineering is harmful - if only more of it could be done out of altruism and not profit.

(Although the sentence "He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much..." makes my skin crawl...)

Originally posted by johnnysaucepn:

A timely reminder that not all biological engineering is harmful - if only more of it could be done out of altruism and not profit.

I can't say the profit motive of large genetic engineering firms bothers me much. If they make a useful product, everyone wins. What bothers me is the public reaction to the entire concept of genetic engineering (In Europe anyway), that more or less drives any companies wanting to trade in them away. Thus we all lose.

Originally posted by Redem:

I can't say the profit motive of large genetic engineering firms bothers me much. If they make a useful product, everyone wins. What bothers me is the public reaction to the entire concept of genetic engineering (In Europe anyway), that more or less drives any companies wanting to trade in them away. Thus we all lose.

Oh, absolutely - the idea of making a profit out of it isn't repellent to me. But they tend to develop products that are only useful to themselves, i.e. they may have benefits, but give themselves more control over the market. Anyway, this is something of a tangent.

I think that is right on topic, and the basis for the criticism of the green revolution. Then again some of the critics have gone overboard, and it is hard to argue with million lives saved.

Originally posted by jax:

The ills surely need sorting, especially the fact that modern crops' thirst for water and land is not infinitely sustainable.

And, one might add, not without some resort to remediation. Dealing with such problems is what crop engineering is about.