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25 March 1914—21 September 2009

Feeding the World

Most of us will never save the life of a single person. Norman Borlaug, the “Father of the Green Revolution,” is credited with saving one billion lives by introducing agricultural methods which immensely increased the world’s food supply.

Borlaug, an agronomist who grew up on a family farm in Minnesota, tackled the problem of world hunger in the 1960s. At the time, impoverished nations like India, the Philippines, and Mexico were in danger of widespread famine because of soil depletion, low-yielding crops, and arid conditions. Borlaug brought modern science to the table in order to do something about the problem. He focused on the hybridization of food crops, especially wheat and rice, to enhance their yield; encouraged the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides to stimulate growth and minimize disease and infestation; and stressed the vital importance of adequate irrigation.

One of Borlaug’s greatest successes was coming up with a variety of high-yielding short-stalked wheat. Wheat is one of the world’s most widely used grains. But older strains of it tended to produce relatively low yields and were easily damaged by bad weather or blight. Borlaug created new varieties that produced more abundant heads of grain on shorter stalks, which meant that the top-heavy wheat was less likely to collapse before harvest from its own weight or from high winds and heavy rains. The new strain also was more disease resistant than earlier ones. In just a few years, Borlaug’s wheat, coupled with increased uses of chemical fertilizers and irrigation, rescued famine-endangered nations. Yields doubled in India, which was the most at-risk country, and by the mid-1960s Mexico was actually exporting grain. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, the Nobel Committee wisely recognizing that making sure people around the world have enough to eat goes a long way towards reducing violence.

Since the heyday of the explosion in food production, quickly dubbed the “Green Revolution,” Borlaug’s farming methods have come under critical scrutiny. Environmentalists worry that the sustained use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides is slowly poisoning the earth, and that increased irrigation is both depleting aquifers and salinating the soil. Public policy makers and human rights activists are concerned that the intensive farming promoted by the Green Revolution tends to focus on exportable cash crops rather than locally consumed food crops, and that this too often encourages already poor countries to neglect feeding their own hungry. Finally, biologists and food activists warn against the trend towards genetically modified food crops that Borlaug especially championed during the last two decades of his life.

These reservations about the Green Revolution deserve to be taken seriously. But the fact remains that the extent of world hunger was so calamitous in the 1960s that something had to be done, and done quickly, to save millions of people from starvation. Borlaug fed them.