The real life Green Giant

Norman Borlaug, who was born on a farm in Iowa 110 years ago this week, is reckoned to have saved more lives than any man in human history — certainly hundreds of millions, perhaps even a billion.

Over the course of his long life (he died at 95 in 2009) he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the Congressional Gold Medal, and Mexico's highest civilian honor. Numerous universities conferred honorary degrees upon him. A statue of Borlaug stands in the US Capitol; there is another in New Delhi, India.

Yet were you to stop 1,000 people at random on the street and ask them about Borlaug, odds are 998 of them wouldn't know his name.

Borlaug was the father of what came to be called the Green Revolution. He went to the University of Minnesota in the 1930s to study forestry, but those plans changed because of a lecture he attended in 1937. The lecturer was plant pathologist Elvin Charles Stakman, and his topic was the fungus varieties known as rust — or, as Stakman called them, "The Shifty Little Enemies that Destroy our Food Crops."

Borlaug, a onetime team leader in the Civilian Conservation Corps, had worked with young men who were malnourished because they had no money for food and their visible hunger, as he later said, "left scars on me."

Stakman's lecture galvanized in Borlaug's mind the idea of combating hunger by defeating plant diseases. He abandoned his plan to pursue a career in forestry and enrolled instead in the university's plant pathology program, earning a PhD in 1942.

Doctorate in hand, Borlaug first went to work as a microbiologist for DuPont. When his lab was converted to focus on wartime research for the US military, he jumped to the Rockefeller Foundation, which was active in efforts to boost wheat production in Mexico.

Moving his family to Mexico City, Borlaug went to war against those "shifty little enemies" — the different forms of rust fungus that kept ruining Mexican crops. He and his team of researchers embarked on a marathon of agricultural experimentation, crossbreeding more than 6,000 varieties of wheat over the course of a decade. He developed a technique called "shuttle breeding" that made it possible for the first time to grow and harvest more than one crop per year. Eventually he hit upon the crucial insight that unleashed the Green Revolution.

Through years of scientific experimentation, Norman Borlaug perfected grain cultivation techniques that vastly increased the planet's food production. (Photo: Achievement Academy) New to Arguable? Click here to subscribe.

That insight was to breed tall tropical wheat varieties, which responded well to chemical fertilizer but tended to fall over from the weight of their seed heads, with short-stalked "dwarf" wheat sturdy enough to support the large and heavy kernels Borlaug's improved strains were producing. The results were phenomenal: Wheat output could be tripled or even quadrupled without needing to plow more land.

Within a few years of adopting Borlaug's methods, Mexico had achieved self-sufficiency in wheat. By 1963, Mexico's wheat output was so abundant — nearly six times what it had been when Borlaug first arrived — that the country was exporting grain abroad.

Building on his remarkable success in Mexico, Borlaug turned to the Asian subcontinent, where growth in population was far outstripping food production and where there seemed to be no way to avoid widespread starvation. Yet what Borlaug's methods had accomplished in Mexico, they accomplished on an even greater scale in India and Pakistan.

"The Indian wheat crop of 1968 was so bountiful," The New York Times observed, "that the government had to turn schools into temporary granaries." By 1970, India was producing 20 million tons of wheat, up from 12.3 million just five years earlier. The 2024 harvest is estimated at more than 110 million tons.

"This extraordinary transformation of Asian agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s nearly banished famine from the entire continent," writes Alexander C. R. Hammond in a new book, "Heroes of Progress: 65 People Who Changed the World." "Today, food production in India and Pakistan has increased faster than population growth, and both countries produce about seven times more wheat than they did in 1965." Borlaug's innovations didn't just preserve human lives on a vast scale, they preserved wilderness as well. Hammond notes that the use of high-yield farming in India kept roughly 100 million acres of wilderness, an area roughly the size of California, from being converted into farmland.

Like most visionaries, Borlaug was plagued by critics and naysayers. It is often the case that those who can, do, while those who can't, write passionate manifestos explaining why it's impossible. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," doomsayer Paul Ehrlich proclaimed in "The Population Bomb," his fearmongering 1968 bestseller. Hundreds of millions of people were going to starve to death, Ehrlich warned, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it.

"He was one of the worst critics we had," Borlaug recalled in a 2000 interview with science writer Ronald Bailey. "He said, ‘You aren't going to make any major impact on producing the food that's needed.' " Such relentless pessimism might have been comical if it hadn't been so influential. Under pressure, some of Borlaug's funders backed away. Environmental critics faulted his embrace of chemical fertilizers or genetic modification. Others accused him of failing to respect the earth's natural constraints on food production.

Borlaug was never dissuaded by such censure. The complaints of his well-fed Western detractors would vanish, he said, were they to live for just one month — as he had for 50 years — among the world's poorest people. Man may not live by bread alone, but he has no hope of living without it. Borlaug devoted his years to ensuring that humankind need never lack for bread. He did so not by establishing sweeping social-welfare programs to hand out loaves but by working tirelessly to develop better strains of wheat, then teaching farmers to grow it.

The father of the Green Revolution did something greater than feed people: He enabled them to feed themselves. On the 110th anniversary of his birth, Norman Borlaug's name may be unknown to most of the public. But few Americans achieved so much.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."