I like reading about people whose lives really made a difference. Recently I ran across an article about one such person: Dr. Norman Borlaug, shown above, who would have turned 110 last week. Dr. Borlaug is one of only six people in history to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he is credibly said to have “saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived.”
Dr. Borlaug was an American who was a leader of the “Green Revolution.” He combined extensive agricultural know-how and political savvy to help increase food production in countries that had been struggling with starvation and famine. He focused on developing approaches to food production that could be readily employed in those countries, drawing upon his extensive knowledge of different varieties of seeds, irrigation, plant pathology, genetics and breeding, soil science, fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanization. He also developed a high-yielding, short-strawed, disease-resistant form of wheat that was key to the effort, and that helped produce enormous increases in production. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and his Nobel Prize biography noted that his wheat strain and agronomic practices had produced revolutionary advances in Mexico, Pakistan, and India and had been adopted by other countries in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East.
Interestingly, Dr. Borlaug was not an ivory tower theorist, but a tough, practical farmer who worked in the fields and got dirt under his fingernails. He also had a gift for convincing governmental officials to try his methods. It says something about Dr. Borlaug’s continuing impact that the African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development publishes pages of Norman Borlaug quotes, one of which states: “the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind.”
I’d heard about the Green Revolution but was not aware of the specifics of Dr. Borlaug’s career and accomplishments–which shows, again, how one person can made a profound difference in people’s lives. You wonder how many people like Norman Borlaug are out there in the world right now, working under the radar yet having a huge impact in their communities. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of them.
Webner House 