The recent pass­ing of Dr. Nor­man Bor­laug was prob­a­bly the first time many Amer­i­cans heard of one of their coun­try­men. How­ever Dr. Borlaug’s life work was so impor­tant that it resulted is sav­ing over one bil­lion lives.

From the Wall Street Jour­nal, com­men­ta­tor Gregg Easterbrook tells us how impor­tant Dr. Bor­laug was.

In the mid-1960s, India and Pak­istan were excep­tions to the trend toward more effi­cient food pro­duc­tion; sub­sis­tence cul­ti­va­tion of rice remained the rule, and famine struck. In 1965, Bor­laug arranged for a con­voy of 35 trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los Ange­les dock for ship­ment to India and Pak­istan. He and a coterie of Mex­i­can assis­tants accom­pa­nied the seeds. They arrived to dis­cover that war had bro­ken out between the two nations. Some­times work­ing within sight of artillery flashes, Bor­laug and his assis­tants sowed the Subcontinent’s first crop of high-yield grain. Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book “The Pop­u­la­tion Bomb,” in which he claimed that global star­va­tion was inevitable for the 1970s and it was “a fan­tasy” that India would “ever” feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug’s arrival, Pak­istan was self-sufficient in wheat pro­duc­tion; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the pro­duc­tion of all cereals.

After his tri­umph in India and Pak­istan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Bor­laug turned to rais­ing crop yields in other poor nations espe­cially in Africa, the one place in the world where pop­u­la­tion is ris­ing faster than farm pro­duc­tion and the last out­post of sub­sis­tence agri­cul­ture. At that point, Bor­laug became the tar­get of crit­ics who denounced him because Green Rev­o­lu­tion farm­ing requires some pes­ti­cide and lots of fer­til­izer. Trendy envi­ron­men­tal­ism was catch­ing on, and afflu­ent envi­ron­men­tal­ists began to say it was “inap­pro­pri­ate” for Africans to have trac­tors or use mod­ern farm­ing tech­niques. Bor­laug told me a decade ago that most West­ern envi­ron­men­tal­ists “have 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 fer­til­izer and irri­ga­tion canals and be out­raged that fash­ion­able elit­ists in wealthy nations were try­ing to deny them these things.”

Envi­ron­men­tal­ist crit­i­cism of Bor­laug and his work was puz­zling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agri­cul­ture, the world would by now be defor­ested. The 1950 global grain out­put of 692 mil­lion tons and the 2006 out­put of 2.3 bil­lion tons came from about the same num­ber of acres three times as much food using lit­tle addi­tional land.

“With­out high-yield agri­cul­ture,” Bor­laug said, “increases in food out­put would have been real­ized through dras­tic expan­sion of acres under cul­ti­va­tion, losses of pris­tine land a hun­dred times greater than all losses to urban and sub­ur­ban expan­sion.” Envi­ron­men­tal­ist crit­i­cism was dou­bly puz­zling because in almost every devel­op­ing nation where high-yield agri­cul­ture has been intro­duced, pop­u­la­tion growth has slowed as edu­ca­tion becomes more impor­tant to fam­ily suc­cess than mus­cle power.

In the late 1980s, when even the World Bank cut fund­ing for developing-world agri­cul­tural improve­ment, Bor­laug turned for sup­port to Ryoichi Sasakawa, a mav­er­ick Japan­ese indus­tri­al­ist. Sasakawa funded his high-yield pro­grams in a few African nations and, pre­dictably, the pro­grams suc­ceeded. The final tri­umph of Borlaug’s life came three years ago when the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion, in con­junc­tion with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foun­da­tion, announced a major expan­sion of high-yield agri­cul­ture through­out Africa. As he approached his 90s, Bor­laug “retired” to teach­ing agron­omy at Texas A&M, where he urged stu­dents to live in the devel­op­ing world and serve the poor.

Often it is said Amer­ica lacks heroes who can pro­vide con­struc­tive exam­ples to the young. Here was such a hero. Yet though streets and build­ings are named for Nor­man Bor­laug through­out the devel­op­ing world, most Amer­i­cans don’t even know his name.

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