Dr. Norman E. Borlaug
March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009

Dr. Norman Borlaug’s remarkable lifetime efforts to feed millions of less fortunate around the world will continue to inspire all those concerned with hunger and malnutrition. His legacy includes billions of lives saved from the misery of starvation and the education of thousands of scientists worldwide who carry on his work today.

Borlaug spent his life on the borders of traditional agriculture and biotechnology and stood at the centre of the greatest and most dramatic success stories in world farming — the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1960s.

But Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” was not “green” in the modern sense. High yields demanded artificial fertiliser, chemical pesticides and new soil technology. As a result of this he was vilified by many in the environmental movement in the securely affluent West, some of whom argued that higher food production sustains more people and thus poses a threat to the natural environment.

Norman Ernest Borlaug was born in the small Norwegian-American farming community of Saude, near Cresco in Iowa on March 25 1914. He grew up on his father’s small grain and livestock farm and, after graduating from Cresco High School, studied at the University of Minnesota where he gained a degree in Forestry and was a member of the university’s wrestling team.

After graduation, he worked for a time in the forestry service in Massachusetts and Idaho, but the job fell through.

In 1968, the administrator for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) wrote in his annual report that the phenomenal improvement in food production in the subcontinent looked like “a Green Revolution” – which was how it came to be known.

In the 1980s, the “Green Revolution” spread to China, which is now the world’s biggest food producer, but by the time Borlaug began to turn his energies to Africa, where Malthusian mass starvation was still a plausible threat, a backlash had set in.

The opposition to Borlaug’s intensive farming methods was exacerbated by the negative publicity surrounding genetic engineering. Borlaug’s work was not, properly speaking, in genetic modification. He used so-called natural methods of plant breeding and was wary of the monopolistic agenda of big agribusiness.

But he saw genetic modification as only a refinement of old plant breeding methods and became a strong advocate of its possibilities, both to enable more mouths to be fed and to help the environment. By producing more food from less land, Borlaug argued, high-yield farming would help preserve Africa’s wild habitats from further depletion by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture.

In 1984, at the age of 71, Borlaug was drawn out of retirement by the Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa who, with former American president Jimmy Carter, was working to improve African agriculture.

In 1986, Borlaug became president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, and leader of the Sasakawa-Global 2000 agricultural programme in sub-Saharan Africa, which has worked with several million farmers in 15 countries to increase food production.

Borlaug remained Senior Scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation and, in 1984, joined the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University as a Professor of International Agriculture.

In 1985, he was the driving force behind the establishment of the World Food Prize, which is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding achievement in the fields of food production and nutrition.

Borlaug held numerous honours and awards, including the American Medal of Freedom, which he received in 1977; the Vannevar Bush Award for lifetime achievement in science (2000); and the Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (2002). He held 50 honorary doctorates and belonged to the academies of science in 12 nations.

He served on two Presidential Commissions: on World Hunger (1978-79) and on Science and Technology (1990-92). He was also a member of the American Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Norman Borlaug married, in 1937, Margaret Gibson, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

The Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation extends its condolences to daughter Jeanie Borlaug Laube and her husband Rex; son William Gibson Borlaug and his wife Barbie; five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Filed under Home, Obituaries

Sunday, September 13, 2009

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