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Norman Borlaug: Father Of Green Revolution And Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

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Norman Borlaug

Norman Ernest Borlaug, (born March 25, 1914, near Saude, Iowa, U.S.—died September 12, 2009, Dallas, Texas), American agricultural scientist, plant pathologist, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1970.

Known as the “Father of the Green Revolution,” Borlaug helped lay the groundwork for agricultural technological advances that alleviated world hunger.

Borlaug studied plant biology and forestry at the University of Minnesota and earned a Ph.D. in plant pathology there in 1942. He began working with the DuPont Company in 1942 but was soon recruited as a research scientist in charge of wheat improvement for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cooperative Mexican Agricultural Program in Mexico, where he worked from 1944 to 1960.

Seeking to assist impoverished farmers who struggled with diseased and low-producing crops, Borlaug experimented with novel varieties of wheat, creating disease-resistant strains that could withstand the harsh climate. That work was founded on earlier discoveries of ways to induce genetic mutations in plants, and his methods led to modern plant breeding.

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The Green Revolution resulted in increased production of food grains (especially wheat and rice) and was in large part due to the introduction into developing countries of new, high-yielding varieties, beginning in the mid-20th century with Borlaug’s work.

At a research station at Campo Atizapan, he developed a short-stemmed (“dwarf”) strain of wheat that dramatically increased crop yields. Previously, taller wheat varieties would break under the weight of the heads if production was increased by chemical fertilizers.

Borlaug’s short-stemmed wheat could withstand the increased weight of fertilized heads and was a key element in the Green Revolution in developing countries. Wheat production in Mexico multiplied threefold owing to this and other varieties.

Norman Ernest Borlaug

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Following Borlaug’s success in Mexico, the Indian and Pakistani governments requested his assistance, and with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Borlaug began his agricultural revolution in Asia.

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With India and Pakistan facing food shortages due to rapid population growth, the importation of Borlaug’s dwarf wheat in the mid-1960s was responsible for a 60 percent increase in harvests there, helping both countries to become agriculturally self-sufficient.

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His work in developing countries, especially on the Indian subcontinent, is estimated to have saved as many as one billion people from starvation and death.

“I realize how fortunate I was to have been born, to have grown to manhood, and to have received my early education in rural Iowa. That heritage provided me with a set of values that has been an invaluable guide to me in my work around the world… These values have been of great strength in times of despair in my struggle to assist in improving the standards of living of rural people everywhere.”

DR. BORLAUG

Borlaug also created a wheat-rye hybrid known as triticale, and his methods were used by others to develop new varieties of highly productive rice. The increased yields resulting from Borlaug’s new strains empowered many developing countries, though their use required large amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

These high-yielding crops raised concerns about cost and potentially harmful environmental effects, though Borlaug argued that uncontrolled population growth had necessitated such production methods.

Although newer varieties of food grains have been developed to be high-yielding and also resistant to local pests and diseases, modern agriculture has yet to achieve environmental sustainability in the face of an ever-growing human population.

Borlaug served as director of the Inter-American Food Crop Program (1960–63) and as director of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, Mexico City, from 1964 to 1979.

In 1986 Borlaug created the World Food Prize to honor individuals who have contributed to improving the availability and quality of food worldwide.

In constant demand as a consultant, Borlaug served on numerous committees and advisory panels on agriculture, population control, and renewable resources. He also taught at Texas A&M University (1984–2009), where the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture was established in 2006.

His numerous other honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), the National Medal of Science (2004), the Congressional Gold Medal (2006), and the United Nations FAO Agricola Medal (2010).

Read More: Changing World Through Green Revolution: An Historical Overview And Impact

Criticism of Techniques

The Green Revolution eventually came under attack from environmental and social critics who said it had created more difficulties than it had solved. Dr. Borlaug responded that the real problem was not his agricultural techniques, but the runaway population growth that had made them necessary.

“If the world population continues to increase at the same rate, we will destroy the species,” he declared.

Traveling to Norway, the land of his ancestors, to receive the award, he warned the Nobel audience that the struggle against hunger had not been won. “We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts,” he said.

Twice more in his lifetime, in the 1970s and again in 2008, those words would prove prescient as food shortages and high prices caused global unrest.

Criticism of Techniques norman

 

His Nobel Prize was the culmination of a storied life in agriculture that began when he was a boy growing up on a farm in Iowa, wondering why plants grew better in some places than others.

His was also an unlikely career path, one that began in earnest near the end of World War II, when Dr. Borlaug walked away from a promising job at DuPont, the chemical company, to take a position in Mexico trying to help farmers improve their crops.

The job was part of an assault on hunger in Mexico that was devised in Manhattan, at the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation, with political support in Washington. But it was not a career choice calculated to lead to fame or honor.

Indeed, on first seeing the situation in Mexico for himself, Dr. Borlaug reacted with near despair. Mexican soils were depleted, the crops were ravaged by disease, yields were low and the farmers could not feed themselves, much less improve their lot by selling surplus.

“These places I’ve seen have clubbed my mind they are so poor and depressing,” he wrote to his wife after his first extended sojourn in the country. “I don’t know what we can do to help these people, but we’ve got to do something.” The next few years were ones of toil and privation as Dr. Borlaug and his colleagues, with scant funds or equipment, set to work improving yields in tropical crop varieties.

He spent countless hours hunched over in the blazing Mexican sun as he manipulated tiny wheat blossoms to cross different strains. To speed the work, he set up winter and summer operations in far-flung parts of Mexico, logging thousands of miles over poor roads. He battled illness, forded rivers in flood, dodged mudslides, and sometimes slept in tents.

He was by then a trained scientist holding a doctoral degree in plant diseases. But as he sought to coax better performance from the wheats of Mexico, he relied on a farm boy’s instinctive feel for the plants and the soil in which they grew.

“When wheat is ripening properly when the wind is blowing across the field, you can hear the beards of the wheat rubbing together,” he told another biographer, Lennard Bickel. “They sound like the pine needles in a forest. It is sweet, whispering music that once you hear, you never forget.”

Norman Ernest Borlaug was born on March 25, 1914, in his grandfather’s farmhouse near the tiny settlement of Saude, in northeastern Iowa. Growing up in a stalwart community of Norwegian immigrants, he trudged across snow-covered fields to a one-room country school, coming home almost every day to the aroma of bread baking in his mother’s oven.

He was a high-spirited boy of boundless curiosity. His sister, Charlotte Culbert, recounted in an interview in 2008 in Cresco, Iowa, that he would whistle aloud as he milked the cows, and pester his parents and grandparents with questions. “He’d wonder why in some areas the grass would be so green, and then over here it wouldn’t be,” Mrs. Culbert recalled.

At the time, most farm boys dropped out of school. But Norman’s grandfather Nels Borlaug, regretting his own scant education, urged his grandson to keep going. Norman worked his way through the University of Minnesota during the Great Depression. More than once in those desperate years he encountered townspeople in Minneapolis on the verge of starvation, which sharpened his interest in the problems of food production.

Tackling a Problem

He first studied forestry but fell under the influence of a legendary expert in plant diseases, Elvin C. Stakman, who encouraged him to switch to the broader field of plant pathology. After earning a doctorate in the field, he took a job with DuPont in 1942 and worked on chemical compounds useful in the war. But Professor Stakman helped persuade him to join the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican hunger project in 1944.

Dr. Borlaug’s initial goal was to create varieties of wheat adapted to Mexico’s climate that could resist the greatest disease of wheat, a fungus called rust. He accomplished that within a few years by crossing Mexican wheats with rust-resistant varieties from elsewhere.

Tackling a Problem

His insistence on breeding in two places, the Sonoran desert in winter and the central highlands in summer, imposed heavy burdens on him and his team, but it cut the time to accomplish his work in half.

By luck, the strategy also produced wheat varieties that were insensitive to day length and thus capable of growing in many locales, a trait that would later prove of vital significance.

The Rockefeller team gradually won the agreement of Mexican farmers to adopt the new varieties, and wheat output in that country began a remarkable climb. But these developments turned out to be a mere prelude to Dr. Borlaug’s main achievements.

By the late 1940s, researchers knew they could induce huge yield gains in wheat by feeding the plants chemical fertilizer that supplied them with extra nitrogen, a shortage of which was the biggest constraint on plant growth.

But the strategy had a severe limitation: beyond a certain level of fertilizer, the seed heads containing wheat grains would grow so large and heavy, the plant would fall over, ruining the crop.

In 1953, Dr. Borlaug began working with a wheat strain containing an unusual gene. It had the effect of shrinking the wheat plant, creating a stubby, compact variety. Yet crucially, the seed heads did not shrink, meaning a small plant could still produce a large amount of wheat.

Dr. Borlaug and his team transferred the gene into tropical wheats. When high fertilizer levels were applied to these new “semidwarf” plants, the results were nothing short of astonishing.

The plants would produce enormous heads of grain, yet their stiff, short bodies could support the weight without falling over. On the same amount of land, wheat output could be tripled or quadrupled. Later, the idea was applied to the rice, the staple crop for nearly half the world’s population, with yields jumping several-fold compared with some traditional varieties.

This strange principle of increasing yields by shrinking plants was the central insight of the Green Revolution, and its impact was enormous.

By the early 1960s, many farmers in Mexico had embraced the full package of innovations from Dr. Borlaug’s breeding program, and wheat output in the country had soared sixfold from the levels of the early 1940s.

Read More: The Agricultural Revolution: Start of Unprecedented Increase In Agriculture

Attention Across Globe

Urgent queries began to pour in from other poor countries, for they were caught in a bind. After World War II, the introduction of basic sanitation in many developing countries caused death rates to plunge, but birth rates were slow to follow. As a result, the global population had exploded, putting immense strain on food supplies.

On the Indian subcontinent, in particular, a crisis developed. The population was growing so much faster than farm output that it was not clear how the masses could be fed. In the mid-1960s, huge grain imports were required to avert starvation.

At the invitation of the Indian and Pakistani governments, Dr. Borlaug offered his advice. He met resistance at first from senior agricultural experts steeped in tradition, but as the food situation worsened, the objections faded. Soon, India and Pakistan were ordering shiploads of Dr. Borlaug’s wheat seeds from Mexico.

Attention Across Globe

One vital shipment through the Port of Los Angeles was delayed by the Watts riots of 1965 in that city, and Dr. Borlaug spent hours yelling on the phone to get it through.

Indian and Pakistani farmers took up the new varieties, receiving fertilizer and other aid from their governments. Just as in Mexico, harvests soared: the Indian wheat crop of 1968 was so bountiful that the government had to turn schools into temporary granaries.

As with the Mexican effort, the Rockefeller Foundation and other donors set up a project in the Philippines to work on rice. It led to the creation of semidwarf varieties that also caused rice yields to soar.

Chinese scientists ultimately followed in the footsteps of Western researchers, using semidwarf varieties to establish food security in China and setting the stage for its rise as an industrial power. And Dr. Borlaug and his colleagues helped spread the new crop varieties to additional countries of Latin America, notably Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, and Brazil.

Confronting the Effects

Dr. Borlaug’s later years were partly occupied by arguments over the social and environmental consequences of the Green Revolution. Many critics on the left attacked it, saying it displaced smaller farmers, encouraged overreliance on chemicals, and paved the way for greater corporate control of agriculture.

In a characteristic complaint, Vandana Shiva, an Indian critic, wrote in 1991 that “in perceiving nature’s limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable agricultural practices worldwide.”

Dr. Borlaug declared that such arguments often came from “elitists” who were rich enough not to worry about where their next meal was coming from. But over time, he acknowledged the validity of some environmental concerns and embraced more judicious use of fertilizers and pesticides. He was frustrated throughout his life that governments did not do more to tackle what he called “the population monster” by lowering birth rates.

He remained a vigorous man into his 90s, serving for many years on the faculty of Texas A&M and continuing to do vital agricultural work. In recent years, he marshaled efforts to tackle a new variety of rust that is threatening the world’s wheat crop.

Dr. Borlaug’s wife of 69 years, the former Margaret Gibson, died in 2007. He is survived by a sister, Charlotte Borlaug Culbert; a daughter, Jeanie Borlaug Laube; a son, William Borlaug; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Gary H. Toenniessen, director of agricultural programs for the Rockefeller Foundation, said in an interview that Dr. Borlaug’s great achievement was to prove that intensive, modern agriculture could be made to work in the fast-growing developing countries where it was needed most, even on the small farms predominating there.

By Mr. Toenniessen’s calculation, about half the world’s population goes to bed every night after consuming grain descended from one of the high-yield varieties developed by Dr. Borlaug and his colleagues of the Green Revolution.

“He knew what it was they needed to do, and he didn’t give up,” Mr. Toenniessen said. “He could just see that this was the answer.”

Source:

  1. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Norman Ernest Borlaug”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 21 Mar. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Norman-Borlaug. Accessed 5 August 2021.
  2. Gerald Jonas and Sarah Wheaton. The New York Times

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