January 1997 Issue Technology Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity Norman Borlaug, the agronomist whose discoveries sparked the Green Revolution, has saved literally millions of lives, yet he is. Borlaug found that some foundation managers and World Bank officials had become hopelessly confused regarding the distinction between pesticides and fertilizer. 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.". He displayed remarkable personal stamina in his research, working 12-hour days in harsh field conditions, and challenged younger researchers with the physical prowess he had developed through championship wrestling in his high school and university years. Ideas being tested in Iowa around the time of his boyhood would soon transform the American Midwest into "the world's breadbasket," not only annually increasing total productionso methodically that the increases were soon taken for grantedbut annually improving yield, growing more bushels of grain from the same amount of land or less. "We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and Boy, he worked probably 10, 12 hours a day every day while he was in Mexico. Dr. Borlaug with his wife, Margaret, after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Borlaug died from cancer complications in Dallas, Texas, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M University said. Norman Borlaug: Controversial father of the Green Revolution Borlaug. Facts Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive. After the end of the Great Depression, the economy reformed and the United States was able to feed the hungry mouths across the country. Borlaug, meanwhile, turned his attention to Africa and found it difficult to achieve success there. Finally the seed ship sailed. -----END REPORT-----. Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of. He then worked as a microbiologist for DuPont, but (CNN)-- Nobel laureate Norman E. Borlaug, an agricultural scientist who helped develop disease-resistant wheat used to fight famine in poor countries, died Saturday. He met resistance at first from senior agricultural experts steeped in tradition, but as the food situation worsened, the objections faded. Borlaug made progress even in Sudan, near the dry Sahel, though that project ended with the onset of Sudan's civil war, in 1992. The Committee on Sustainable Agriculture, a coalition of environmental and development-oriented groups, has become somewhat open to fertilizer use in Africa. Bred for short stalks, plants expend less energy on growing inedible column sections and more on growing valuable grain. YWI3Njk1YTkwMzY3ZmQ5YTc4ZDYwYmM1NDlhYmIwZjYzODc2N2M1MWY3ODg5 Norman has been right about this all along." Borlaug's Africa project is a private-sector effort run by an obscure Nobel Peace Prize winner and a former American President whose altruistic impulses are made sport of in the American press. Borlaug says, "I went to bed thinking the problem was at last solved, and woke up to the news that war had broken out between India and Pakistan.". the moment such an increase in production was most needed. chairman Aase Lionaes said in presenting the award to Borlaug. OTlmNWNhZWY5YTMwODM3NTJlMzFlZGNlNDcyNWVjNDY4MmFlZjZiYzU2N2My This strange principle of increasing yields by shrinking plants was the central insight of the Green Revolution, and its impact was enormous. While there he earned himself a place in the university's wrestling hall of fame and met his future wife, whom he married in 1937. That was September 12, 2009; he passed away at his Dallas, Texas home after a battle with lymphoma. "Three or four decades ago, when we were trying to move technology into India, Pakistan and China, they said nothing could be done to save these people, that the population had to die off," he said in 2004. 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. In the mid-1960s, huge grain imports were required to avert starvation. We keep our content available to everyone. In this debate the moral imperative of food for the world's malnourishedwhether they "should" have been born or not, they must eatstands in danger of being forgotten. MWY2MDAzZmVmZmE3NmUzZGU1NmY0ZTY3MWIyOGUwM2EyYmNjNTAwOWUzYjFm Practical problems, however, make Bongaarts think that rapid African yield increases are "extremely unlikely in the near future." Although you will Even with the unprecedented amount of media coverage demanded by these most troubled times, I feel that an injustice done to aspects of the . Norman Borlaug - News, sport and opinion from the Guardian's US edition experiential learning activities at Texas A&M or other land grant of 95. International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) When Norman Borlaug set out after World War II to develop an. In the early 1900s, newlyweds Cathy and Cappy Jones left Connecticut in the US to start a new life as farmers in north-west Mexico's Yaqui Valley, a little-known dry and dusty place, a few hundred. Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug dies at 95 - Breaking News, Latest News Yields of corn quickly tripled; yields of wheat, cassava, sorghum, and cow peas also grew. We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.. Since then American farming has become far more technological, and no Dust Bowl conditions have recurred. Norman Borlaug, the agronomist whose discoveries sparked the Green Revolution, has saved literally millions of lives, yet he is hardly a household name. Yet his work had a far-reaching impact on the lives of millions of people in developing countries. He was frustrated throughout his life that governments did not do more to tackle what he called the population monster by lowering birth rates. Yet although he has led one of the century's most accomplished lives, and done so in a meritorious cause, Borlaug has never received much public recognition in the United States, where it is often said that the young lack heroes to look up to. Such developments have begun to sway some of Borlaug's opposition. Rex; son William Gibson Borlaug and his wife Barbie; five Editors As director of its worldwide wheat improvement programme, he trained more than 2,000 young scientists from nearly 20 countries. PBS misses the boat on Norman Borlaug | MinnPost Sasakawa was dumbfounded that a Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn't get backing for a philanthropic endeavor. He and others later took those varieties and similarly improved strains of rice and corn to Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa. nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain This prevented general wartime starvation in the region, though famine did strike parts of India. iReport.com: Tour Borlaug's boyhood farm. President George Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid present the Congressional Gold Medal to Norman Borlaug. It helps students from In Mexico, Borlaug was known both for his skill in breeding plants and for his eagerness to labor in the fields himself, rather than to let assistants do all the hard work. Soon Borlaug was in Mexico as the director of the wheat programa job for which there was little competition, backwater Mexico in the 1940s not being an eagerly sought-after posting. Think Again: The Green Revolution - Foreign Policy Norman Ernest Borlaug was born on March 25, 1914, in his grandfathers farmhouse near the tiny settlement of Saude, in northeastern Iowa. And though Borlaug's achievements are arguably the greatest that Ford or Rockefeller has ever funded, both foundations have retreated from the last effort of Borlaug's long life: the attempt to bring high-yield agriculture to Africa. (modern), Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel peace prize. The Nobel Prize-winning agricultural scientist has died in Texas at age 95. With a global reach of over 10 million monthly readers and featuring dedicated websites for science (Phys.org), 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. of Texas A&M University's Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and The new seeds did not in themselves produce greater yields, but were highly responsive to chemical fertilisers and other inputs. Today Borlaug divides his time among CIMMYT, where he teaches young scientists seeking still-more-productive crop strains for the developing world; Texas A&M, where he teaches international agriculture every fall semester; and the Sasakawa-Global 2000 projects that continue to operate in twelve African nations. However, we do not guarantee individual replies due to the high volume of messages. Waggoner calculates that India's transition to high-yield farming spared the country from having to plough an additional 100 million acres of virgin landan area about equivalent to California. From 1965 to 1990 the globe's daily per capita intake grew from 2,063 calories to 2,495, with an increased proportion as protein. MLA style: The Nobel Peace Prize 1970. Cresco, Iowa, and educated through the eighth grade in a one-room A memorial service will be held at the university at a later date. Soon Borlaug was running projects in Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, and Togo. He also helped found and served This would have been impossible were India still feeding itself with traditionally cultivated indigenous crops. Despite the institutional resistance Borlaug stayed in Pakistan and India, tirelessly repeating himself. CHARLES: Borlaug never saw that happen, but he did live to see a fresh wave of interest in African agriculture. university teaching, first at Cornell University and then at Texas This, and his later introduction of high-yield rice in Asian countries, are credited with averting a predicted international crisis in food production that would have starved an estimated one billion people worldwide. Quick Facts Also Known As: Norman Ernest Borlaug Died At Age: 95 Family: Spouse/Ex-: Margaret Gibson father: Henry Oliver mother: Clara Borlaug siblings: Charlotte and Helen, Palma Lillian Nobel Peace Prize Agricultural Scientists Died on: September 12, 2009 place of death: Dallas, Texas, United States Cause of Death: Lymphoma His opponents may not know it, but Borlaug has long warned of the dangers of population growth. have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also "If the high natural multiples of maize could be transferred by gene engineering to wheat or rice, there could be a tremendous world yield improvement," Paul Waggoner, of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, says. ODE4MjVhMjRlMDJkZDE5Yzc4Yjk2NjUxNTcyOTAwMGI1ZmYwYmU1Y2JmNjgw "We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability," Borlaug said in May 2006 at an Asian Development Bank forum in the Philippines. The project, undertaken when the existence of the jet stream was not yet known, established that rust-spore clouds move internationally in sync with harvest cyclesa surprising finding at the time. 2007. returned to the University of Minnesota for a doctoral degree in Anthony King, Running Scared; Akhil Sharma, Cosmopolitan; Corby Kummer, The World as Your Oyster; Alexander von Hoffman, Urban Affairs: Good News!; and much more. In Pakistan, wheat yields nearly doubled, from 4.6m tonnes in 1965 to 7.3m tonnes in 1970; in India, from 12.3m tonnes in 1965 to 20.1m tonnes in 1970. "More than any other single person of his age, he has helped to That was it. ZTI5YzljZWUyNTFjZjc4OGU3ZWQzMTg1ZDEzMDVlMGY3ZmNmOTAyZjZkM2Yx "Human A 1970 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug was a distinguished professor of international agriculture at the university. 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. Borlaug started at Texas A&M in 1984, after working as a scientist in a program that introduced scientific techniques for preventing famine in Mexico, according to the university. In 1984, at the age of seventy-one, Borlaug was drawn out of retirement by Ryoichi Sasakawa, who with Jimmy Carter was working to get African agriculture moving. 2009 The Associated Press. He acknowledged that his Green revolution had not "transformed the world into Utopia", but added that western environmental lobbyists were often elitists. Norman Borlaug dies at 95; revolutionized grain agriculture and won to produce disease-resistant varieties of wheat that produced much As with the Mexican effort, the Rockefeller Foundation and other donors set up a project in the Philippines to work on rice. Pierre Crosson, an agricultural analyst for the nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future, calculates that sub-Saharan Africa needs to increase farm yields by 3.3 percent annually for the next thirty years merely to keep pace with the population growth that is projected. His area of work has been making a larger food supply for the world. Global grain yields rose from 0.45 tons per acre to 1.1 tons; yields of corn, rice, and other foodstuffs improved similarly. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2006, according to the university's Web site. Sun 13 Sep 2009 14.49 EDT In the 1990s, several environmental writers began describing the agriculture scientist Norman Borlaug, who has died aged 95, as the saviour of "more lives than anyone. The Nobel committee honored Borlaug in 1970 for his Question: When Did Norman Borlaug Create Wheat Varieties? "We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.". As the former Indian diplomat Karan Singh is reported to have said, "Development is the best contraceptive." Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, became, he says, "a tar baby to them politically, because all the ideas the greenies couldn't stand were sticking to me. 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. A miserable term, he said, characteristically shrugging off any air of self-importance. Borlaug was horrified by the Dust Bowl and simultaneously impressed that its effects seemed least where high-yield approaches to farming were being tried. The program's initial goal was to teach Mexican farmers new farming ideas, but Borlaug soon had the institution seeking agricultural innovations. Population Bomb" were warning readers that mass starvation was Indeed, on first seeing the situation in Mexico for himself, Dr. Borlaug reacted with near despair. 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. NmM1YmU2OTU5YjYzMTE5MmQ2ZjFlMTZjZjdmYWFiY2UyOTUxNzM3MDRhNGE5 of the "green revolution" who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his 95 Where was Norman Borlaug born? 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. "Norman E. Borlaug saved more lives than any man in human history," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the U.N. World Food Program. The farmers of the Global Farmer Network are indebted to Dr. Borlaug and inspired to tell their stories as a tool to uphold the legacy of Norman Borlaug and continue his life's mission as partners committed to feeding the world. He accomplished that within a few years by crossing Mexican wheats with rust-resistant varieties from elsewhere. In 1963 the Rockefeller Foundation and the government of Mexico established CIMMYT, as an outgrowth of their original program, and sent Borlaug to Pakistan and India, which were then descending into famine. more grain than traditional strains. Borlaug's work often is credited with expanding agriculture at just the moment such an increase in production was most needed.
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