Norman Borlaug: Father of the Green Revolution who saved a billion lives from starvation
Population Explosion
In the mid-1900s, the end of war finally brought global peace, leading to runaway population growth.
The term “Baby Boom” refers to the post-war generation. After the big wars came to an end in 1950, the population of 2.5 billion rose by 20% to 3 billion in 10 years.
The world’s food production could not keep pace with the growing number of mouths to feed. American biologist Paul R. Ehrlich in his book The Population Bomb argued stridently for the need to regulate the growing population. Food production and development could not keep up with the thriving human wave, and in the 1970s it was predicted that starvation and famine would kill millions of people. At that time, there was a widespread social sarcasm that took issue with the burgeoning baby boom generation, so Ehrlich’s Population Bomb became an overnight bestseller.
Paradoxically…
1960s: Global Average Mortality Rate: 1.3%
1980s: Global Average Mortality Rate: 1.0%
1970s: Global malnourished population: 33%
2000s: Global malnourished population: 16%
As time passed, it became clear that Ehrlich’s prophecy had not come to pass.
Global population has increased, yet the number of malnourished people has decreased significantly.
The factor that made his predictions erroneous [Green Revolution]
The Green Revolution was a breakthrough that dramatically increased food production by developing excellent varieties through cross-breeding from the mid-1960s.
6,000 species of wheat accelerate plant evolution
Nature is mysterious, but sometimes harsh. Creatures have evolved through adaptation to survive and reproduce in the environment of each region. So, up to now, mankind has been very limited by climate and region in our food production capacity. Even seemingly identical wheat, when planted in different regions with different climates, died from diseases and pests or did not thrive as expected. Because of this, people living in barren areas have always been resigned to starvation as their fate. The person who overcame the essential problems of agriculture and opened the doors to agricultural modernization in the Third World was Norman Borlaug, the champion of the Green Revolution.
A two-year plague of wheat disease (stem rust) of unknown origin in Mexico began in 1939.
Concerned about the famine, the Mexican government turned to the United States for help, and Norman, who excelled in the field of plant pathology, was dispatched to Mexico to support Mexico’s technical assistance program.
The average term for cultivating wheat is 10 months. So this length of time is required for any experiment in developing an excellent wheat variety. Moreover, there were other hurdles that made the project more challenging, such as:
- Lack of skilled staff
- Farmers refuse to grow wheat
- Uncooperative local officials
- Diseases, floods, landslides, etc.
For 16 years, they experimented with wheat cultivation and educating Mexican farmers at the same time under these unfavorable conditions. As many as 6,000 varieties of wheat alone were produced in this way.
They developed a collection of wheat breeds with the ability to adapt to regional differences, immunity to pests and diseases, and abundant yield. In 1963, Borlaug’s wheat variety had grown 95% of that of Mexican wheat, producing six times more wheat than the year in which Borlaug first came. Borlaug’s wheat was enough to feed all the starving Mexicans, and now it is even being exported abroad.
South Asia and the Green Revolution
In the 1960s, Asia was experiencing a population explosion, and farmers could not produce enough food. Pakistan and India were on the verge of war, and the region of South Asia was suffering prolonged famine and hunger.
The United States urgently sent a fifth of its wheat crop in aid, yet still millions of people starved to death. Western experts predicted that hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation in Asia lacking significant improvements in food production.
Governments of India and Pakistan tried to introduce the newly popular Mexican wheat, but local officials and local farmers resisted, because it required unfamiliar cultivation techniques and due to an instinctive rejection of foreign wheat varieties.
Late in 1965, Norman Borlaug visited India and heralded the start of the Green Revolution. In a single year, India and Pakistan got a wheat harvest yield never seen before.
Seeing these miraculous results, all the bureaucrats and peasants were rushing to request the wheat seed, even smuggling it from Mexico.
In the second year, all wheat fields in India and Pakistan were sown with Mexican wheat. What’s even more surprising is that Pakistan goes from being a wheat importer to an exporter in five years and India in nine years. The prediction that hundreds of millions of people in Asia would die of starvation in less than 10 years was overturned. All thanks to Borlaug’s Green Revolution.
Peace Prize but no “Food” Prize
In 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded him the Peace Prize, apologetic that there was no ‘Food’ category among the awards.
Reason for Award: “Contribution to saving 1 billion lives from starvation and malnutrition by supplying food to the world with new agricultural techniques.”
The Green Revolution dramatically increased crop yields, but with its advent, it also finds itself in the midst of political controversy. It caused a wider gap between large-scale farmers quick to implement new methods and small-scale farmers who are not, and the environmental destructive issue of polluting groundwater with excessive chemical fertilizers and pesticides has surfaced.
He responded to these criticisms of environmental activists as follows:
“Most western environmentalists are elites who have never felt the physical pain of hunger. As I have seen through poverty in developing countries for 50 years, if they go to that country and live in poverty for a month instead of in a comfortable office, they will never say those words.”
Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, put it this way:
“Whoever doubles the harvest of corn or grass that was previously grown ought to be honored for benefiting mankind more than the entire class of politicians.”
Here is a person who changed the history of mankind by saving 1 billion people through his efforts touching each human being. For that fact alone, Norman Borlaug is a great figure who deserves to be honored more than anyone else.
