Originally posted September 13, 2009
Norman Borlaug has died. Who you may ask? You should ask because this scientist is one of the great men of the 20th century.
From a 1997 Atlantic Monthly article by Greg Easterbrook.
Borlaug is an eighty-two-year-old plant breeder who for most of the past five decades has lived in developing nations, teaching the techniques of high-yield agriculture. He received the Nobel in 1970, primarily for his work in reversing the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted -- for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine -- 1975! The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.
Borlaug was the 1970 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. From the presentation address.
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. We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.
Who is this scientist who, through his work in the laboratory and in the wheat fields, has helped to create a new food situation in the world and who has turned pessimism into optimism in the dramatic race between population explosion and our production of food?
Norman Borlaug, a man of Norwegian descent, was born on March 25, 1914, on a small farm in Cresco, Iowa, in the United States, and originally studied forestry at the University of Minnesota. It was as an agriculturalist, however, that he was to make his greatest contribution.
Here are selections from his Nobel lecture - The Green Revolution, Peace and Humanity.
Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply. Yet food is something that is taken for granted by most world leaders despite the fact that more than half of the population of the world is hungry. Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.
Man's survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply. During the long, obscure, dimly defined prehistoric period when man lived as a wandering hunter and food gatherer, frequent food shortages must have prevented the development of village civilizations. Under these conditions the growth of human population was also automatically limited by the limitations of food supplies.
In the misty, hazy past, as the Mesolithic Age gave way to the Neolithic, there suddenly appeared in widely separated geographic areas the most highly successful group of inventors and revolutionaries that the world has ever known. This group of Neolithic men and women, and in all probability largely the latter, domesticated all the major cereals, legumes, and root crops, as well as all of the most important animals that to this day remain man's principal source of food. Apparently, nine thousand years ago, in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, man had already become both agriculturist and animal husbandry-man, which, in turn, soon led to the specialization of labor and the development of village life. Similar discoveries and developments elsewhere soon laid the groundwork from which all modern agriculture and animal industry and, indeed, all of the world's subsequent civilizations have evolved. Despite the tremendous value of their contributions, we know none of these benefactors of mankind by name. In fact, it has only been within the past century, and especially within the last fifteen years - since the development of the effective radio-carbon dating system - that we have begun even vaguely to understand the timing of these epochal events which have shaped the world's destiny.
The invention of agriculture, however, did not permanently emancipate man from the fear of food shortages, hunger, and famine. Even in prehistoric times population growth often must have threatened or exceeded man's ability to produce enough food. Then, when droughts or outbreaks of diseases and insect pests ravaged crops, famine resulted.
...
In my dream I see green, vigorous, high-yielding fields of wheat, rice, maize, sorghums, and millets, which are obtaining, free of expense, 100 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare from nodule-forming, nitrogen-fixing bacteria. These mutant strains of Rhizobium cerealis were developed in 1990 by a massive mutation breeding program with strains of Rhizobium sp. obtained from roots of legumes and other nodule-bearing plants. This scientific discovery has revolutionized agricultural production for the hundreds of millions of humble farmers throughout the world; for they now receive much of the needed fertilizer for their crops directly from these little wondrous microbes that are taking nitrogen from the air and fixing it without cost in the roots of cereals, from which it is transformed into grain...
Then I wake up and become disillusioned to find that mutation genetics programs are still engaged mostly in such minutiae as putting beards on wheat plants and taking off the hairs.
If we are to capitalize fully on the past biological accomplishments and realize the prospective accomplishments, as exemplified in my dream, there must be far greater investments in research and education in the future than in the past.
Norman Borlaug was a man who led a revolution that was not destructive, but constructive. Through his efforts millions of men, women and children have food to eat today. He is worthy our respect and honor as one of the great leaders of our time.
Photo courtesy of the Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation
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