Feeding the World's Hungry

Cresco, Iowa – The peaceful quiet of the rolling farmland around this small town in northeastern Iowa doesn’t get interrupted much. But today, the breeze brings the sound of busloads of visitors to the boyhood home of Dr. Norman Borlaug.
 
The farm is where Borlaug learned the fundamentals of how farming, and got his first inkling of how it could change the nation and the world. When he was young, the devastation of the Great Depression helped form his beliefs about farming and the world food supply.

Borlaug is now more than 90 years old, but he remembers those times well.  “Some of the best farmers, I saw them ruined. And then the situation got worse: people with their hands out, not ten or a hundred or a thousand, but untold thousands, asking for a nickel to buy bread.”

Borlaug earned a Ph.D. in plant pathology and began doing agricultural research in Mexico in the 1940s. Farmers there were facing serious plant diseases. “They said, ‘We’ve got problems.  Come with us. We want to take you to the old parts of Mexico.’”
It began the scientist’s lifelong odyssey to increase and improve the world’s food supply. Borlaug developed wheat strains that were resistant to disease, and introduced new methods of growing them that eventually turned Mexico into a wheat exporter. 

But the world’s population was exploding, and farming practices weren’t keeping up. During the 1960s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat for use in India and Pakistan.
 
Leon Hesser was already there, working for the U.S. government.
“With Norman Borlaug’s technology we doubled our wheat production in Pakistan in four years,” says Hesser.

By the end of his career, Borlaug had been credited with saving more than a billion lives around the globe with his new crop strains and farming technologies. He won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and he’s been called the father of the “Green Revolution,” marked by dramatic increases in worldwide farm productivity.

Borlaug is acutely aware that the effects of food shortages echo far beyond hunger pangs and even starvation. “Where there is human misery based on hunger, and lack of medical care, and lack of education which affects population growth, there’s bound to be social and political chaos,” he says.

Leon Hesser eventually wrote a biography of Dr. Borlaug. He explains to the Borlaug homestead’s visitors that ironically, Borlaug is far from a household name in his own country. He observes, “He’s much better known in India, Pakistan, Mexico, many other countries than he is in the United States.”

An agriculture specialist visiting from Africa agrees: “In Cameroon, Doctor Borlaug is very, very well known. There’s a program there called ‘Food for Progress.’  And that program is based on Dr. Borlaug’s research.”

In nearby Des Moines, thousands of luminaries in world agriculture are celebrating this year’s Brazilian winners of the World Food Prize, a significant event founded by Dr. Borlaug.  The organization’s president, Ken Quinn, says without Borlaug’s work, “there would be millions of people dead. There would be millions more suffering of hunger, malnutrition and poverty – extreme poverty.  He lifted whole generations out of bare subsidence farming.

“The population is going to close to double on our planet between now and 2050 or 2060.  So 6.3 billion people on the planet now...It can go up as high as 10 billion by that time. Where’s the food going to come from? It has to be produced. So we have to have another green revolution, a sustainable green revolution.”

If there is to be another green revolution, this very well could be the place where it originates.  Besides the annual award ceremony, a symposium gathers world leaders in food production research together.  They exchange ideas for shaping world food production, with Dr. Borlaug overseeing the proceedings.
 
 Borlaug remains passionate about helping the world’s hungriest people.  “The general public in the affluent nations doesn’t have much idea of the conditions in the food-short developing nations; the constant under-nutrition, shortage of food, sometimes being pushed over into epidemics of starvation.”

In attendance at the World Food Prize is Dr. Borlaug’s sister, Charlotte Colbert. She says that in her brother, Iowa may have harvested the most important “crop” in its history.

“I think the values that he used to talk about, this little 168 acre farm… I think he realized that down the road, someday, there will be a shortage of land, and even water.”

For now, at the World Food Prize events, Dr. Norman Borlaug is getting the rock star treatment. And for good reason: he may have played a greater direct role in easing starvation and suffering than any other person in history. 

He’s won the Nobel Prize and is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Not bad for an Iowa farm boy.