Very few people have changed the world. Some have changed lives. Some have even changed entire communities. But few are the ones who have affected the entire course of history, and fewer even are those who did it from non-political positions. Norman Borlaug was one of those men.
Dr. Borlaug died late Saturday night at his home from complications of cancer, said Kathleen Phillips, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman.
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Julie Borlaug said her grandfather had time in recent weeks to say goodbye to his children, grandchildren and close friends. One of his last visitors was former Texas A&M president Elsa Murano, who assured him that his colleagues would continue his efforts to combat world hunger.
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The Nobel committee honored Dr. Borlaug in 1970 for his contributions to high-yield crop varieties and bringing agricultural innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.
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Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine.
Thanks to the revolution, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 1990. In Pakistan and India, two of the nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain yields more than quadrupled over the period.
“More than any other single person of his age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world,” the Nobel committee chairman, Aase Lionaes, said in presenting the award to Borlaug.
Equal parts scientist and humanitarian, Borlaug realized that improved crop varieties were just part of the answer to world hunger, and pressed governments for farmer-friendly economic policies and improved infrastructure to make markets accessible. A 2006 book about Borlaug is titled The Man Who Fed the World.
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“He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much,” said Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M’s department of soil and crop sciences, who persuaded Borlaug to teach at the school.
Here is the eulogy from the Wall Street Journal in its entirety:
On the day Norman Borlaug was awarded its Peace Prize for 1970, the Nobel Committee observed of the Iowa-born plant scientist that “more than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world.” The committee might have added that more than any other single person Borlaug showed that nature is no match for human ingenuity in setting the real limits to growth.
Borlaug, who died Saturday at 95, came of age in the Great Depression, the last period of widespread hunger in U.S. history. The Depression was over by the time Borlaug began his famous experiments, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, with wheat varieties in Mexico in the 1940s. But the specter of global starvation loomed even larger, as advances in medicine and hygiene contributed to population growth without corresponding increases in the means of feeding so many.
Borlaug solved that challenge by developing genetically unique strains of “semidwarf” wheat, and later rice, that raised food yields as much as sixfold. The result was that a country like India was able to feed its own people as its population grew from 500 million in the mid-1960s, when Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” began to take effect, to the current 1.16 billion. Today, famines—whether in Zimbabwe, Darfur or North Korea—are politically induced events, not true natural disasters.
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In later life, Borlaug was criticized by self-described “greens” whose hostility to technology put them athwart the revolution he had set in motion. Borlaug fired back, warning in these pages that fear-mongering by environmental extremists against synthetic pesticides, inorganic fertilizers and genetically modified foods would again put millions at risk of starvation while damaging the very biodiversity those extremists claimed to protect. In saving so many, Borlaug showed that a genuine green movement doesn’t pit man against the Earth, but rather applies human intelligence to exploit the Earth’s resources to improve life for everyone.
UPDATE 9/16/2009: The Wall Street Journal has a much more thorough article on Norman Borlaug up. Two quotes stand out. One from the article:
Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America’s Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture.
The second is a quote from Norman Borlaug himself:
“[Western environmentalists] 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 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”
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Written by Jean Valjean
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Sep 27 2009