Whatever epitaphs mark the graves of great men and women, few can compare with the singular achievement of a little-known American who died two days ago.
Norman Borlaug saved more people from starvation, as many as a billion in developing countries, than anyone else in history. The son of an Iowa farmer and the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Borlaug died Saturday of cancer-related complications at his home in Dallas. He was 95.
A self-described “dirty-handed scientist,” Borlaug developed a high-yield strain of dwarf wheat in Mexico after experimenting with a native variety and a Japanese strain in the early 1950s. Within a decade, Mexican wheat production nearly doubled, and the Green Revolution was born.
As Borlaug continued his work in the world’s poorest countries until the time of his death, it put him at odds with notable “doomsayers,” as he called them, including Paul Ehrlich, author of the since-discredited 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb.”
Norman E. Borlaug
While Ehrlich predicted that overpopulation would cause the starvation of hundreds of millions of people in the 1970s and ’80s no matter what was done, Borlaug’s work doubled, tripled and continued to increase crop yields in India and Pakistan, outstripping their population explosions during those decades and the time since. Superstition, political disinformation, and ethnic wars were overcome to accomplish those gains, but continue to block similar advancements in Africa.
Because Borlaug’s methods rely on genetically altered plants and the use of chemical insecticides and fertilizers, they’ve been the targets of the organic foods movement and those troubled by the impact on biodiversity. This opposition began with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” a treatise on the dangers of indiscriminately using pesticides that led to banning DDT in the U.S. 10 years later.
Borlaug’s insistence on the “proper use of genetic engineering and biotechnology,” however, was based on the lesser of evils. If biodiversity is to be preserved, he said, existing forests and jungles must not be cleared, and only land already suitable for farming can be used.
Given that, production on existing farmland has to be maximized using genetically altered crops – which he said mimicked natural mutations in wheat over centuries – and prudent use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. On balance, the loss of biodiversity on existing farmland would be far less than the effects of clear-cutting forests to use traditional methods.
Borlaug traced his life’s work to experiences as a young group leader of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps when he saw firsthand the effects of the great Dust Bowl that wiped out croplands on the American plains. Speaking of its victims, Borlaug said, “I saw how food changed them, and this left scars on me.”
By that time, George Washington Carver, the agricultural genius who was the first black instructor hired by Iowa State University, had befriended 11-year-old Henry A. Wallace, son of an ISU dairy scientist. Influenced by Carver’s work with corn hybrids, Wallace did his own research until becoming Roosevelt’s agriculture secretary and later vice president. After vacationing in Mexico, he decided to create an agricultural research station there to address its troubled corn yields. Borlaug was one of the first scientists to join the project.
While Borlaug’s work put him in conflict with such high-profile environmentalists as Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown – who said in 1994 that the “world’s farmers can no longer be counted on to feed the projected additions to our numbers,” even as Borlaug had dramatically proved otherwise – it also led to unlikely alliances.
In 2002, he joined several environmentalists, including Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, in signing a declaration supporting “high-yield conservation.” For this alliance, leaders of the neo-environmental movement he helped create scorned Moore as a Judas. Borlaug called those who trashed his science elitists and Utopians who have “never experienced the physical sensation of hunger.”
Late in his career, Borlaug joined peanut farmer, fellow Peace Prize laureate, and former president, Jimmy Carter, in leading the Sasakawa-Global 2000 initiative to improve crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa.
Carter and former senator George McGovern were among those who gathered to honor Borlaug on his 90th birthday. “Dr. Norman Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution that transformed much of the hungry Third World,” McGovern said. “Dr. Borlaug’s scientific leadership not only saved people from starvation, but the high-yield seeds he bred saved millions of square miles of wildlife from being plowed down. He is one of the great men of our age.”
Only two years ago, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, although the honor was tinged with the political opportunism that he had long scorned. “Dr. Borlaug has saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived,” the proclamation declared, “and likely has saved more lives in the Islamic world than any other human being in history.”
Whatever the intent, it’s an unparalleled epitaph.
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