Norman Borlaug
Norman Ernest Borlaug (born 25 March 1914) is an American plant pathologist and breeder, considered by many to be father of the Green Revolution. His efforts in the mid-20th century to introduce crossbred wheat varieties into agricultural production in Mexico, Pakistan, and India saved over a billion people from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contribution to world peace by preventing hunger.
Early life, education, and family
Borlaug was born the eldest of three children to Norwegian immigrants (Henry and Clara Borlaug) on a farm in the small Norwegian-American community of Saude, near Cresco, Iowa, USA. As a child, he worked on the family farm, planting crops and raising livestock. He attended the one-room New Oregon #8 rural school in Howard County up through 8th grade (the school is now owned by the Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation as part of "Project Borlaug Legacy" Template:Mn. In high school, he played baseball and wrestled. His wrestling coach always encouraged him to "give 105%."
He attributes his decision to leave the farm and pursue further education to his grandfather, Nels Borlaug, who strongly encouraged education, once saying, "You're wiser to fill your head now if you want to fill your belly later on." Template:Mn
After high school he attended the General College at the University of Minnesota after failing his university entrance exam. After two quarters, he transferred to the College of Agriculture's forestry program. While at the University of Minnesota he was a member of the varsity wrestling team, and helped introduce the sport to Minnesota high schools by putting on exhibition matches around the state. "Wrestling taught me some valuable lessons ... I always figured I could hold my own against the best in the world. It made me tough. Many times I drew on that strength. It's an inappropriate crutch perhaps, but that's the way I'm made"Template:Mn. Borlaug is currently a member of the Collegiate Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Periodically, Borlaug had to drop out of school and get a job to pay for room, board, and the USD $25 quarterly tuition. One of these jobs was as a leader in the Civilian Conservation Corps, working with the unemployed on federal projects. From 1935 to 1938, before and after receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in 1937, Borlaug worked for the United States Forestry Service at forestry stations in Massachusetts and Idaho. He spent one summer at Cold Mountain, near Idaho's Salmon River— the most remote station in the Forest Service.
At the end of his undergraduate education, Borlaug attended a lecture by Elvin Charles Stakman that changed his life. The subject of the lecture was rust disease in cereal crops. Stakman, who headed the plant pathology group at the University, discovered that special plant breeding methods created plants resistant to rust, a parasitic fungus that feeds off plant nutrients. This research greatly interested Borlaug, but two weeks later his job at the Forest Service was eliminated due to budget cuts. He asked Stakman if he could go into forest pathology. Stakman replied, "Forest pathologists starve to death ... You should go into plant pathology"Template:Mn. He returned to the University to study plant pathology, and received his Master of Science degree in 1940 and Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics in 1942.
Borlaug met his wife, Margaret Gibson, while in college, waiting tables at a Dinkytown coffee shop where she also worked. They would go on to have two children, Norman Jean "Jeanie" (Laube) and William Borlaug. The Borlaugs currently have five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Career
From 1942 to 1944, Borlaug was employed as a microbiologist at DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware. During his time with the company, he was to lead research on industrial and agricultural bacteriocides, fungicides, and preservatives, however following the attack on Pearl Harbor his lab got converted to work for the Armed Forces. He was offered the position of head the newly established Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico, however he declined, finishing his war service at DuPont Template:Mn. In July 1944, after rejecting Du Pont's offer to double his salary, and temporarily leaving behind his pregnant wife and 14-month-old daughter, he flew to Mexico City to head the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program as a geneticist and plant pathologist.
Wheat research
The Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program, a joint venture by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture, involved research in genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, agronomy, soil science, and cereal technology. The goal of the project was to boost wheat production in Mexico, which at the time was importing a large portion of its grain. He would remain with the project for 16 years. During this time he bred, a remarkably successful high-yield, disease-resistant, semi-dwarf wheat.
Borlaug spent the first 10 years breeding wheat cultivars resistant to disease, including rust. In that time, his group made 6,000 individual crossings of wheat. By 1956, the rust-resistant varieties had helped double Mexican wheat production and allow the country to become self-sufficient in grain for the first time in historyTemplate:Mn.
Borlaug's work had been concentrated in the central highlands around Mexico City, where the problems with rust and poor soil were most prevalent. He realized, however, that he could speed up breeding by taking advantage of the country's two growing seasons. In the summer he would breed wheat in the central highlands as usual, but then immediately take the seeds north to the Yaqui Valley research station near Ciudad Obregón, Sonora. The difference in altitudes and temperatures allowed more crops to be grown each year.
Borlaug's boss, George Harrar, was against this expansion. Besides the extra costs that would be incurred from doubling the work, Borlaug's plan went against a then-held principle of agronomy that has since been disproved. It was believed that seeds needed a rest period after harvesting, in order to store energy for germination before being planted, whereas Borlaug's new plan left no time between harvest and planting. Harrar vetoed his plan, causing Borlaug to resign. Elvin Stakman, who was visiting the project, calmed the situation, talking Borlaug into withdrawing his resignation and Harrar into allowing the double wheat season. Wheat would then be bred at locations 700 miles (1000 km) apart.
As an unexpected benefit of the double wheat season, the new breeds didn't have problems with photoperiodism. Normally, wheat strains couldn't adapt to new environments, due to the changing periods of sunlight. "As it worked out," Borlaug later recalled, "in the north, we were planting when the days were getting shorter, at low elevation and high temperature. Then we'd take the seed from the best plants south and plant it at high elevation, when days were getting longer and there was lots of rain. Soon we had varieties that fit the whole range of conditions. That wasn't supposed to happen by the books"Template:Mn. This meant that the project wouldn't need to start separate breeding programs for each geographic region of the planet.
To significantly increase yield in nutrient-poor soil, Borlaug needed to use fertilizer. However, the cultivars he was working with had long thin stalks that collapsed under the weight of the extra grain—a trait called lodging. In 1961, he aquired a Japanese dwarf variety of wheat called Norin 10 that had been crossed with a high yielding American cultivar called Bervor 14. Dwarfing is an important agronomic quality for wheat; dwarf plants produce thick stems and do not lodge. Norin 10-Bervor is short and produces more stalks and thus more heads of grain per plant. Borlaug crossbred the semi-dwarf Norin 10-Bervor 14 cultivar with his disease-resistant cultivars to produce wheat varieties that were adapted to tropical and sub-tropical climatesTemplate:Mn.
The wheat was extremely successful in Mexico and Borlaug started to look for other places where he could start programs similar to the project in Mexico. Rather than return to the United States, Borlaug turned his attention to regions of the world plagued with chronic hunger and famine. He decided that his work would have the greatest impact in India and Pakistan. During the mid-1960s, the Indian subcontinent was at war, and experiencing widespread famine and starvation, even though the United States was making emergency shipments of millions of tons of grain to the region. The Indian and Pakistani bureaucracies and the region's cultural opposition to new agricultural techniques initially prevented Borlaug from fulfilling his desire to immediately plant the new wheat strains there. Eventually, the famine became so bad that the governments stepped in and allowed his projects to occur.
In 1964, he was made the director of the International Wheat Improvement Program at El Batán, Texcoco (on the eastern fringes of Mexico City), as part of the newly-established International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo, or CIMMYT), an autonomous international research training institute jointly undertaken by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the Mexican government. He stayed with the program until his retirement in 1979.
Effect of his work
In the late 1960s, most experts believed global famines in which billions would die were imminent. 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 programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "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 two hundred million more people by 1980."
Borlaug's "crash program", however, was proved otherwise. The semi-dwarf wheat strains that were developed resisted a wide variety of pests and diseases, and could produce two or three times more grain than common varieties. Borlaug arranged to put these new cereal strains into extensive production to help end starvation in India and Pakistan. Despite the Second Kashmir War raging around him and his "tough group of hunger fighters", they planted their first crop. Yields more than doubled, helping avert the immediate crisis in the area. As he later described the high yields in India, "There was this huge harvest, mountains of grain by the railroad sidings waiting to be shipped, unthreshed grain on the threshing floors, and finally it was so bad, they had to close the schools and store the grain." Template:Mn
The use of this wheat has also had a substantial positive effect in six Latin American countries, six countries in the Near and Middle East, and several others in Africa. By 1968, when Ehrlich's book was released, the United States Agency for International Development was hailing Borlaug's achievements as a "Green Revolution".
Effect on yields and population
In Pakistan, wheat yields nearly doubled, from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million tons in 1970; yields were over 14 million tons by the early 1990s. In India, yields increased from 12.3 million tons in 1965 to 20 million tons in 1970. By 1999, India was harvesting a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, an increase of 11.5 % from 1998. Significant yield increases reduced the need for food aid, improving food security.
Nobel prize
For his contributions to the Green Revolution Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. In his Nobel Lecture, Borlaug speculated on his award "When the Nobel Peace Prize Committee designated me the recipient of the 1970 award for my contribution to the "green revolution", they were in effect, I believe, selecting an individual to symbolize the vital role of agriculture and food production in a world that is hungry, both for bread and for peace"Template:Mn.
Winning the Nobel Prize politicised the Borlaugs work. Despite many successes fighting hunger, Borlaug and the Green Revolution more generally, have been criticized for bringing large-scale monoculture, input intensive farming techniques to the countries that previously had relied on subsistence farming, and widening social inequality. Borlaug is widely dismissive of such criticisms. He describes envoronmentalists as "fat-bellied philosophers" and says that critics of the Green Revolution are "the halves are telling the have-nots that they should stay with their impoverished rural life-styles, since greater material well-being leads to environmental destruction." To the assertion that his wheat benefits large farmers at the expense of small farmers he replies "the wheat plant is pretty apolitical. It doesn't care whether it is growing on a big farm or a small farm." He alo notes that the Green Revolution "is a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia."
Current roles
Following his retirement, Borlaug has continued to actively participate in teaching, research and activism. He spends much of the year based at CIMMYT in Mexico, conducting research, and four months of the year serving at Texas A&M University as a distinguished professor of international agriculture, teaching one semester each year.
World Food Prize
The World Food Prize is an international award recognizing the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world. The prize was created in 1986 by Norman Borlaug, as a way to recognize personal accomplishments, and as a means of education by using the Prize to establish role models for others. The World Food Prize Foundation also conducts youth outreach.
Sasakawa Africa Association
In 1984, during the Ethiopian famine, Japanese billionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa, chairman of the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation (now the Nippon Foundation), contacted the semi-retired Borlaug, wondering why the successful methods used in Asia were not extended to Africa, and hoping Borlaug could help. Borlaug replied that he was too old to start such a large project. The next day, Sasakawa replied, saying, "Young man, I'm 13 years older than you are— it sounds like we should have started yesterday. It's time to get to work." Template:Mn
Since 1986Template:Mn, Borlaug has been the President of the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA). The SAA is a research and extension organization, that aims to increase food production in African countries that are struggling with food shortages. The Sasakawa-Global 2000 is a joint progam between the SAA and Global 2000, initiated by Jimmy Carter, which focuses on food, population and agricultural policy. At present, program activities are under way in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Currently, he is participating in experiments with triticale, a cross between wheat and rye, which promises to be superior to either wheat or rye in nutritional quality and productivityTemplate:Mn.
Biotechnology advocacy
Borlaug has always supported the efforts of biotechnology to decrease world famine. Throughout his years of research, his programs often faced opposition by those who see genetic cross-breeding as unnatural or having a negative impact on the environment. He believes these views are a result of not educating the general public about the importance and complexities of such work. He has pointed out that Mother Nature has crossed genetic barriers numerous times. For example, using his words, "today's modern red wheat variety is made up of three groups of seven chromosomes, and each of those three groups of seven chromosomes came from a different wild grass. First, Mother Nature crossed two of the grasses, and this cross became the durum wheats, which were the commercial grains of the first civilizations spanning from Sumeria until well into the Roman period. Then Mother Nature crossed that 14-chromosome durum wheat with another wild wheat grass to create what was essentially modern wheat at the time of the Roman Empire." Template:Mn
In many cases, genetically modified plant varieties also require less spraying of chemicals. The use of Round-up Ready Soybean seeds, for example, has cut chemical use in half. Template:Mn
In Borlaug's view, it is easy for environmentalists to oppose changes that don't affect their lives. "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 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." Template:Mn
Honors
In 1968, he received an especially satisfying tribute when the people of Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, where some of his earliest experiments were undertaken, named a street in his honor.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Borlaug has also received the 1977 Presidential Medal of Freedom and the 2002 Public Welfare Medal from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
As of January 2004, Borlaug has received 49 honorary degrees from as many universities, in 18 countriesTemplate:Mn.
Publications and lectures
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- Variation and variability of Fusarium lini. 1945. Technical bulletin, University of Minnesota, Agricultural Experiment Station. ASIN B0007GQTBG
- The Impact of agricultural research on Mexican wheat production. 1958. Transactions of the New York Academy of Science, 20, 278-295. ASIN B0007JYK82
- Wheat breeding and its impact on world food supply. 1968. Australian Academy of Science. ASIN B0007JKBAI
- Mankind and civilization at another crossroad. 1971. Agricultural Equipment Division of Allis-Chalmers Corporation ; Madison : Distributed by the Wisconsin Agri-Business Council. ASIN B0006WF6M4
- The green revolution, peace and humanity. 1972. CIMMYT reprint and translation series. ASIN B0007AG2CI
- Agricultural science and the public . 1973. Paper, Council for Agricultural Science and Technology. ASIN B00071TWJC
- The destiny of man and world civilization. 1974. Winthrop Rockefeller distinguished lecture series, University of Arkansas. ASIN B0006W5WNM
- Food production in a fertile, unstable world. 1978. World Food Institute lecture, Iowa State University. ASIN B0006Y04W4
- Exploiting plants to meet world food needs. 1979. ASIN B0007AYX1K
- Civilization will depend more upon flourishing crops than on flowery rhetoric. 1979. Alfred M. Landon lectures on public issues, Kansas State University. ASIN B0006XCZCM
- A choice for mankind: Adequate food production with equatible [sic] distribution or hunger and poverty for millions. 1981. ASIN B0006XTZKW
- Wheat in the Third World. 1982. Authors: Haldore Hanson, Norman E. Borlaug, and R. Glenn Anderson. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press. ISBN 0865313571
- Land use, food, energy and recreation. 1983. Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. ISBN 0940222078
- Accelerating agricultural research and production in the Third World: A scientist's viewpoint. 1985. York distinguished lecturer series, University of Florida. ASIN B00070VM5A
- Feeding a human population that increasingly crowds a fragile planet. 1994. Mexico City. ISBN 9646201343
- Feeding a World of 10 Billion People: The Tva/Ifdc Legacy. 2003. ISBN 0880901446
- Prospects for world agriculture in the twenty-first century. 2004. Norman E. Borlaug, Christopher R. Dowswell. Published in: Sustainable agriculture and the international rice-wheat system. ISBN 0824754913
Quotation
- "Some credit him with saving more human lives than any other person in history." — Bruce Alberts, President, National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A.
References
Template:MnbState Historical Society of Iowa. 2002. FY03 HRDP/REAP GRANT APPLICATION APPROVAL
Template:MnbMartha McFarland, M. 2003. Sowing Seeds of Peace.
Template:MnbUniversity of Minnesota. 2005. Borlaug and the University of Minnesota
Template:MnbDavidson, M.G. 1997. An Abundant Harvest: Interview with Norman Borlaug, Recipient, Nobel Peace Prize, 1970, Common Ground, August 12
Template:MnbUniversity of Mimnesota. 2005. Borlaug's Work in Mexico
Template:MnbHedden, P. 2003. The genes of the Green Revolution. Trends in Genetics, 19:5-9 PMID 12493241
Template:MnbBorlaug, N. E. (1972). Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1970. From Nobel Lectures, Peace 1951-1970, Frederick W. Haberman Ed., Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972
Template:MnbDr. Norman E. Borlaug's Curriculum Vitae
Template:MnbNorman Borlaug: A Billion Lives Saved
External links
- The Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation
- Biography and Nobel Peace Prize Lecture
- Interview with Reason Magazine, April 2000
- Norman Borlaug: The Legend (agbioworld.com)
- Detailed essay on Norman Borlaug
- The World Food Prize
- Sasakawa Africa Association
- International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CYMMIT)
- Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellows Program
- Norman E. Borlaug Center for Southern Crop Improvement