A Nobel Peace Prize win­ner who is cred­ited with expand­ing food pro­duc­tion and fight­ing world hunger has passed away. Dr. Nor­man Bor­laug died Sat­ur­day night at the age of 95.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press story that we found at North Jersey.com we read more of Dr. Borlaug’s con­tri­bu­tion to the world.

The Nobel com­mit­tee hon­ored Mr. Bor­laug in 1970 for his con­tri­bu­tions to high-yield crop vari­eties and bring­ing other agri­cul­tural inno­va­tions to the devel­op­ing world. Many experts credit the green rev­o­lu­tion with avert­ing global famine dur­ing the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tury and sav­ing per­haps 1 bil­lion lives.

Thanks to the green rev­o­lu­tion, world food pro­duc­tion more than dou­bled between 1960 and 1990. In Pak­istan and India, two of the nations that ben­e­fited most from the new crop vari­eties, grain yields more than quadrupled.

Equal parts sci­en­tist and human­i­tar­ian, the Iowa-born Mr. Bor­laug real­ized improved crop vari­eties were just part of the answer, and pressed gov­ern­ments for farmer-friendly eco­nomic poli­cies and improved infra­struc­ture to make mar­kets acces­si­ble. A 2006 book about Mr. Bor­laug is titled “The Man Who Fed the World.”

“He has prob­a­bly done more and is known by fewer peo­ple than any­body that has done that much,” said Dr. Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M University’s Depart­ment of Soil and Crop Sci­ences and a close friend who per­suaded Mr. Bor­laug to teach at the school. “He made the world a bet­ter place — a much bet­ter place. He had peo­ple help­ing him, but he was the dri­ving force.”

Mr. Bor­laug began the work that led to his Nobel in Mex­ico at the end of World War II. There he used inno­v­a­tive breed­ing tech­niques to pro­duce disease-resistant vari­eties of wheat that pro­duced much more grain than tra­di­tional strains.

He and oth­ers later took those vari­eties and sim­i­larly improved strains of rice and corn to Asia, the Mid­dle East, South Amer­ica and Africa.

“More than any other sin­gle per­son of his age, he has helped to pro­vide bread for a hun­gry world,” Nobel Peace Prize com­mit­tee Chair­man Aase Lion­aes said in pre­sent­ing the award to Mr. Borlaug.

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