Accidental Blogger

Norman Borlaug died of cancer last Saturday. Despite being the recipient of numerous national and international honors, the Nobel Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal among them, through his long and productive life Borlaug remained quiet, unassuming and mostly unknown to the public.  But the impact of his life's mission on the world is extraordinary. A tireless crusader against world hunger, he was better known in some developing countries whose agricultural methods he helped revolutionize, than in his own homeland. An excerpt from an obituary - a brief account of Borlaug's life, his achievements and the Green Revolution:

Norman Borlaug has, in the opinion of many experts, saved more human lives than any other individual in history. He was the grandfather of the “Green Revolution” in which, between 1961 and 1980, wheat crop yields doubled, tripled and sometimes quadrupled around the world. His experiments with hybrid wheat strains and nitrogenous fertiliser created strains of the staple food impervious to pests, bad weather and poor soil, enabling the world to support a far greater human population than many thought possible after the Second World War. Yet his methods and message fell out of favour, to the detriment of millions — especially in Africa.

In the mid-1950s Malthusian doomsayers saw the contrary trajectories of population growth and food production in South-East Asia and the Indian sub-continent and predicted catastrophic worldwide starvation, the denudation of forests and seas followed by an inevitable population crash. The reversal in the Third World’s agronomic fortunes was so sudden and so miraculous that many have since forgotten the holocaust forestalled — especially, in Borlaug’s view, the trendier sections of the green lobby which seek to impose organic food and “natural” production methods on the world’s poorest countries.

Norman Borlaug was born in 1914, the grandson of Norwegian immigrants, in Saude, near Cresco, Iowa. He worked on the family farm until 19, when he signed up for the National Youth Administration, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s “alphabet agencies” set up to combat poverty and despair during the Great Depression. His commitment secured him a place at the University of Minnesota in 1933, but he ran out of money. He transferred to the College of Agriculture’s forestry service and then joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the US Forestry Service. As a group leader with the CCC he was in charge of many recruits who were emaciated and starving; refugees from the great Dust Bowl that had laid waste to the plains of America from Texas to South Dakota. He said: “I saw how food changed them, and this left scars on me.” 

….

In April 2002 Borlaug signed a declaration with several environmental experts, including Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace, in favour of “high-yield conservation”. The movement against trendy agricultural primitivism has since gained pace, yet the lack of respect paid to Borlaug’s teachings in recent years is astonishing in relation to his impact on human society. Many of those who rubbished his acheivements as a “brown revolution”, he said, were Utopians and elitists who had “never experienced the physical sensation of hunger”.

He won many international awards, but his own country was slow to give him credit. In July 2007 he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, although the wording of the law by which it was awarded sought political mileage from his acheivements: “Dr Borlaug has saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived,” it stated. “And likely has saved more lives in the Islamic world than any other human being in history.”  

Here is the long list of honors and awards bestowed upon Norman Borlaug from all around the world. 

(Blogger's note: The posting here has been infrequent of late.  I have some ideas brewing but haven't had the time to flesh them out in blog posts due to travel and other pressing tasks. I have another trip coming up next week. Will try to get something out before that. Hopefully, other authors will find the time to write also in the midst of their busy schedules. Thanks for your patience.)