Norman Borlaug: The Greatest Man You Never Heard Of

How the Founder of the Green Revolution Saved a Billion People from Starvation

Recently the greatest human being living received a special Congressional Gold Medal in recognition of his achievements. This man has previously been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is very likely responsible for saving the lives of over a billion people in the Third World from starvation. Yet his name is unknown to the general public. His name is Norman Borlaug, an American agricultural scientist and father of what has become known as the Green Revolution.

To understand the affect that the life and career of Normal Borlaug has had on the world, one has to look back at what the world was like in the early to mid 1960s. Periodic famine was a fact of life in many countries in the Third World. In the mid 1960s, the Indian subcontinent was being ravaged by famine and starvation. One year, the United States was obliged to dispatch a fleet of six hundred grain ships containing one fifth of the annual wheat crop of the country to save India from a humanitarian disaster.

The opinion of many experts was that over population had basically doomed the Third World to famine and mass starvation. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich, in his best-selling book The Population Bomb predicted that no matter what was done hundreds of millions of third world people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ironically, Ehrlich confident prediction was already being disproven, thanks to the efforts of Norman Borlaug. Norman Borlaug had already spent a number of years in Mexico developing strains of wheat that were not only resistant to disease but higher yielding than anything hitherto grown on farms. And this feat was accomplished in an era before genetic engineering, using cross pollination methods that were slow and painstaking. Borlaug also championed the use of inorganic fertilizers to increase crop yields. In less than twenty years, from 1944 to 1963, Mexico's wheat crop had increased six times over. Today Mexico is a net wheat exporting country.