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"Green Revolution" scientist Norman Borlaug, celebrated for his work in augmenting crop yields and fending off famine, passed away Sept. 12 at the age of 95.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal for his work in food production and has been credited for saving more people on the planet that any other human in history. Borlaug was actually one of only five people to be awarded those three honors, according to Wikipedia.
Though launched as honorable solutions to food shortages, Borlaug’s successful breeding of disease-resistant wheat varieties has been criticized as the precursor to the development of biotechnology in agriculture that lead to genetically-modified food.
After receiving a Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota, his work began in the 1940s at DuPont and then helping Mexico increase its agricultural development through research on maize and wheat. At that time, Mexico imported about half of its wheat and had a growing population to feed. The Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program, a joint venture by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture, conducted research in genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, agronomy, soil science, and cereal technology.
The term "green revolution" refers to the transformation of agriculture that began in 1945 and was coined in 1968 by former USAID Director William Gaud discussing new technologies such as plant breeding, irrigation and the use of pesticides and fertilizer. By the mid-1960s, Mexico was exporting millions of pounds of wheat.
In the early 1960s, India was going through a famine and Borlaug’s success with wheat breeding in Mexico was transplanted to India and other Asian countries with wheat and rice crops. According to Henery Kindall and David Pimentel, from 1950 to 1984, the green revolution changed food crops around the world, with grain production growing more than 250 percent.
Industrialized agriculture uses an excessive amount of water. Criticism of the green revolution spans many subjects, including biodiversity, politics, overpopulation problems, health issues and environmental impacts.
Since 1984, he taught at Texas A&M University. He acknowledged some of the concerns of his critics but remained focused on hunger being a basic human condition. He has been quoted as saying, "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've 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 fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."
