Despite his Nobel Prize, the name of Norman Borlaug, who died recently aged 95, is relatively unknown. This is also despite the fact that he was described recently by Gregg Easterbrook in The Wall Street Journal as arguably having “saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived”.
Born in the USA, Borlaug spent most of his life in impoverished nations, teaching governments and farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the modern agricultural techniques which brought about what came to be known as The Green Revolution.
It was this that prevented the global famines which were widely predicted when the world’s population increased rapidly after World War II.
In 1943, Borlaug went to work in the black-blocks of Mexico, researching on new high-yield, low-pesticide “dwarf wheat”.
Today, this forms a substantial portion of the wheat which feeds the world.
Borlaug stepped up this work in 1950, when the world was producing 692 million tons of grain for 2.2 billion people.
Easterbrook says: “By 1952, with Borlaug’s concepts becoming common, production was 1.9 billion tons of grain for 5.6 billion men and women: 2.8 times the food for 2.2 billion people. Global grain yields more than doubled during the period, from half a ton per acre to 1.1 tons; yields of rice and other foodstuffs improved similarly.
“Hunger declined in sync: From 1965 to 2005, global per capita food consumption rose from 2,798 calories daily from 2,063, with most of the increase in developed nations.
“In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation declared that malnutrition stands ‘at the lowest level in human history,’ despite the global population having trebled in a single century.”
Biologist Paul R Ehrlich wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now.”
Ehrlich continued that: “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971,” and: “India couldn’t possibly feed 200 million more people by 1980.”
Even as this was being written. Borlaug’s techniques had multiplied India’s crop production and were spreading all over the undeveloped world. India was becoming a food exporter.
Famines remained in certain parts of the world, such as parts of Africa, but they were the result of bad government, not the failure of agricultural science.
Borlaug was scornful of trendy Western environmentalists who stated that it was somehow culturally “inappropriate” for Africans, Indians and East Asians to use modern farming techniques.
Of environmental lobbyists he stated: “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 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertiliser and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
He served for six years as a trustee for the Christian non-profit organisation Bread for the World.
Science philosopher Denis Dutton said recently that for the catastrophist, India becoming a food exporter was disturbing.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen. They blame Borlaug for spoiling the fun.”