Matt Curry and Betsy Blaney, AP, September 13, 2009
Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the “green revolution” who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday in Texas, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said. He was 95.
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The Nobel committee honored 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 over the period.
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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.
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During the 1950s and 1960s, public health improvements fueled a population boom in underdeveloped nations, leading to concerns that agricultural systems could not keep up with growing food demand. Borlaug’s work often is credited with expanding agriculture at just the moment such an increase in production was most needed.
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His successes in the 1960s came just as books like “The Population Bomb” were warning readers that mass starvation was inevitable.
“Three or four decades ago, when we were trying to move technology into India, Pakistan and China, they said nothing could be done to save these people, that the population had to die off,” he said in 2004.
Borlaug often said wheat was only a vehicle for his real interest, which was to improve people’s lives.
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In Mexico, Borlaug was known both for his skill in breeding plants and for his eagerness to labor in the fields himself, rather than to let assistants do all the hard work.
He remained active well into his 90s, campaigning for the use of biotechnology to fight hunger and working on a project to fight poverty and starvation in Africa by teaching new drought-resistant farming methods.
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Norman Ernest Borlaug was born March 25, 1914, on a farm near Cresco, Iowa, and educated through the eighth grade in a one-room schoolhouse.
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He left home during the Great Depression to study forestry at the University of Minnesota. While there he earned himself a place in the university’s wrestling hall of fame and met his future wife, whom he married in 1937. Margaret Borlaug died in 2007 at the age of 95.
After a brief stint with the U.S. Forest Service, Norman Borlaug returned to the University of Minnesota for a doctoral degree in plant pathology. He then worked as a microbiologist for DuPont, but soon left for a job with the Rockefeller Foundation. Between 1944 and 1960, Borlaug dedicated himself to increasing Mexico’s wheat production.
In 1963, Borlaug was named head of the newly formed International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, where he trained thousands of young scientists.
Borlaug retired as head of the center in 1979 and turned to university teaching, first at Cornell University and then at Texas A&M, which presented him with an honorary doctorate in December 2007.
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Norman Borlaug.
Original article
(Posted on September 14, 2009)
Comments
Reminds me of the line from “When Worlds Collide”. The one where the Greedy tycoon tells the astronomer that he`s been “gazing at the heaven`s too long.” Same deal with this guy. He thought he was growing corn and soybeans, but in reality he was raising soldiers against the West, “Perhaps a billion strong.” Forgive me if I don`t feel like fighting rush hour traffic to pick up my Tux for his Man of the Year dinner…
Obviously Borlaug was a genius, but the irony is that there are more non-whites than ever before and that means more people to hate whitey.
Norman Borlaug did the world the worst disservice since Adolph Hitler. The only thing that the green revolution did was to accelerate population growth in the third world.What changed since it started is that there are twice as many people of color starving to death and multiplying as there were to begin with.
A white scientist who is responsible for an additional 1 billion non-whites, along with all the medicines that have made it possible for them to breed uncontrollably and wreak havoc on the west. We were fine and could feed ourselves, his work merely sealed our doom.
In the end he is responsible for creating more hungry people who want to migrate to white countries and he may be responsible for the destruction of Western Europe and America in some degrees.
The world needs stability or regress not growth.
I wish he had become a bus driver…
And we’re supposed to cheer that so many South Asians, East Asians, Middle Easterners, Africans and South Americans can exist on this Earth, straining the natural environments in the places where they live? Forget not that a lot of them would like to move to white countries, and those who run many whites countries are more than happy to let them in.
I’m confused. This guy is a hero, but Octo-mom is not a heroine? Didn’t their accomplishments amount to the same thing?
Borlaug’s work often is credited with expanding agriculture at just the moment such an increase in production was most needed.
On the contrary! his methods of increasing food production were the EXACT reason for the exploding population in countries that should not have been able to sustain a large population. That is no longer the case now and those same exploded populations (especialy in/from Africa) are being brought here to the U.S. A cat or rat with barely sufficient food MAY have one offspring, BUT feed it a lot and it will have litters! as is the case of Africans.
Dr. Borlaug was undoubtedly a great man. Another in a long line of American farmboys whose genius changed the world.
But he should have added some birth control aspect to those disease-resistant, high-yielding crops. Ironically, Dr Borlaug’s work may well lead to the extinction of genius White farmboys. And then what?
All high yield crops did was contribute to severing the link between intelligence/diligence and other positive traits and survival.
His work created an artificial state of wellness that is not sustainable. The Green Revolution depends on massive amounts of petroleum based fertilizers to whip the exhausted soil into fertility. As oil becomes more expensive this method will too. And even without peak oil, we still wouldn’t be able to keep up with the population explosion. But because of his work, people think that there are no limits. But in fact, Mr Malthus’s doom was just delayed not stopped.
The world is changing. The Nobel prize base is much wider now. In the last Nobel prize awards, 5 of the 9 science laureates were Asian.
I hate to say ill of the recently deceased but saving 1 billion people who cannot feed themselves isn’t something we should be ecstatic about. With the population boom that was feed through food aid we saw wars, disease and more famine as the people who were saved had on average eight children, forcing their children to fight over the ever dwindling resource pile created by a decaying infrastructure that simply could not maintain their numbers.
In my personal opinion food aid must go hand in hand with contraceptives because we can ill afford another India or China added to our already oversized world population.
During the 1950s and 1960s, public health improvements fueled a population boom in underdeveloped nations, leading to concerns that agriculture could not keep up with growing food demand. Borlaug’s work is often credited with expanding agriculture at just the moment such an increase in production was most needed.
Unfortunately, the long term results of his efforts are proving to be the very opposite of his well meant desire to improve people’s lives. The amplified harvest of food has produced in turn an amplified harvest of humanity which is now overflowing its homelands and invading all the countries of the Western world, threatening their stability, their demographics, their culture, and the very underpinnings of their civilization.
The moral from this story is that nothing less than A COMPREHENSIVE OVER-ALL PLAN is adequate to handle the population problem. It must encompass everything from food to birth control. Nothing less than everything will do. Tackling the population problem piecemeal is disastrous.
It’s like a mathematical equation: whatever you subtract or add to one side you must do the same to the other. To feed one side while ignoring the other is sheer insanity!
If these Third Worlders just keep increasing their numbers, consuming the increase in grain production, Mr Borlaug will have saved a billion lives, only to be the cause of three billion of their descendants starving. I understand that Burmese and Sri Lankan and Indonesian couples want to have children and love and cherish them, but who will feed them? Will agricultural productivity triple again in the next 20 years?
The population of Pakistan in 1950 was 36 million.
Because of women having six or more children, the population in 2009 is now more than half the size of the United States (165 million to the United States’ 300 million). It is estimated the population will continue to grow, catching up to the United States’ 300 million by 2050.
This is an extremely nationalistic Third World country, which is straining to cast its diaspora onto the Western world. They’ve already claimed permanent ownership of parts of Britain, colonizing it with over a million Pakistanis, mainly concentrated in the West Midlands. This includes the city of Birmingham, scene of recent race riots between indigenous whites and Pakistanis.
Containing them within their borders is the only way for them to come to terms with their overpopulation and food supply troubles. Otherwise, they will continue to come for our land and food, overtaking us with their birthrates.
We have two choices: legislate an end their migration now, or, a second, less gentle option, which involves a future clash of races on Western soil.
As Schoolteacher says, “Mr Borlaug will have saved a billion lives, only to be the cause of three billion of their descendants starving.” Exactly so!
So what kind of “humanitarian” is that? Is it better to save one life but condemn three? That’s no humanitarian who’s concerned about helping people. That’s a well meaning do-gooder who hasn’t thought his actions through and who is causing more harm than good in the long run.
There should be no food aid (or medicine, or emigration) without birth control. If they won’t practice population limitation at home, then let stew in their own juice and deal with it on their own. They shouldn’t be allowed to dump their surplus population on others and expect us to take them.
Yes, I know someone will point out that the US accepted surplus population from other countries and that “we’re a nation oif immigrants”. But that was another century, another era. It was long ago when the world was much less populous and we had vast, open spaces to fill. No longer. It’s another world today.
The moral from this story is
“no good deed goes unpunished” The only green thing going to come of this whole mess is “Soylent Green”!!! and some of the talk which involved aging people on the OBAMASTER’s health plan remind me of Edward G. Robinson’s role of an elderly man giving up his life for the good of the “collective?”
Many posters here somehow ‘blame’ Norman Borlaug for the third world population explosion and subsequent mass immigration into the White west.
All he did was ensure the third world would have more people and thus make more trouble for the west. What did he do for his fellow westerners? Zilch.
I’m going to have to agree with #20.
Don’t blame a great man for his achievements being abused by lesser men.
“Many posters here somehow ‘blame’ Norman Borlaug for the third world population explosion and subsequent mass immigration into the White west.
That is a fair assessment. Certainly, Mr. Borlaug was not alone in culpability. He did not bring this present situation upon us by himself. But he had a hand in it. I don’t exempt him from all blame. Did he not see how everything ties in together? Did he ever speak out? He could have used the public podium that his fame gave him to draw attention to the subject. He could have been a spokesman for the cause. If he truly wanted to do good for the world and “improve people’s lives”, there was his great chance. He could have insisted on tying food and medical aid to both birth control and limited immigration, and making the latter two a condition for the former.
Very possibly that would have ruined his career and made him a pariah with both the Left and the Right; but having the courage to speak out and take that risk is the measure of a truly great man. As we have repeatedly seen, with one disappointment after another, there are very few who meet that criterion,
Nearly all of the commenters here are fully correct — Borlaug was a scientific genius, but his discoveries have had catastrophic results in that they have allowed non-White 3rd Worlders to breed out-of-control and begin to ‘swamp’ the world and pour in to White nations by the tens of millions as “immigrants” or “refugees.”
Frankly, the White Western world would’ve been better off had Borlaug never made his discoveries.
A classic case of the laws of unintended consequences. He probably meant well but I don’t think he did the west any favours here at all.
The story and many of the comments here made me remember the debacle that was “We Are The World,” back in 1985. There was a famine in Ethiopia, so many of the top name vocal artists of the time decided to get together and cut a record to tell us that they were opposed to starvation in Ethiopia. Almost everybody had to run out and buy it, so of course there was a lot of money raised to feed Ethiopians.
The result? In 1985, there were 26 million starving Ethiopians. Today, there are 78 million staving Ethiopians. And that’s not a fair comparison b/c Eritrea spilt away from Ethiopia some time after 1985 and before now.
“Frankly, the White Western world would’ve been better off had Borlaug never made his discoveries.” —- WP
Many poster here and elsewhere have said: “Green is the new Red”.
How true. Borlaug’s “Green Revolution” has helped spawn explosive population growth in Third World countries. Many have come to the shores of the USA.
Ironically, many people in this country want it to “go green”. They build giant windmills that resemble toilet bowl brushes. They also speak wistfully of trying to harness the power of the sun.
Exactly how are wind power and solar power supposed to meet the energy needs of a population that is increasingly made up of Third World dross? How are we supposed to go green and expect Third World peoples, who care nothing for the environment in their own countries of origin (i.e., Haiti is a good example)?
I think it won’t be long before this madness of “going green” will clash headlong into the reality of unchecked immigration. When that happens, the outlook won’t be pretty.
I remember the false promises of how nuclear power was supposed to meet all of the world’s energy needs. I remember reading in school science textbooks about the wonders promised by the International Geophysical Year; about how untapped reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas under the ice sheets of Antarctica were going to solve the world’s energy needs.
Yeah, right.
Errata: In a previous post, I said “How are we supposed to go green and expect Third World Peoples…” I should have added, …”expect Third World peoples…to also go green?”
Though I’m sure that this man never had a clue (and I’m sure that many other people still don’t), he was one of the main authors, the principal culprits, in causing much of the overpopulation and immigration disaster that is facing the world today.
Yes, his intentions were good; I don’t question that. And I also agree that our governments are the ones fundamentally responsible for allowing the immigration mess. But there would be no overpopulation or immigration mess without his enablement in the first place. He helped create it. The Third World is now teeming with tens of millions dreaming of getting to the West, soon to be hundreds of millions. Those teeming millions of “wretched refuse” yearning to reach our shores would not be there at all if it had not been for the unthinking, short-sighted, naive altruism of persons such as this. In that light, he could be considered to have done us more harm than the worst of spies have ever done. Ironic, but true. Yet we laud him.
If only he had read “Camp of the Saints”! He would have gotten a glimpse at the future results of his work. Did he never hear of Malthus? He is gone now, but coming generations will suffer for his shortsightedness and misplaced altruism. And he thought he was relieving human suffering! Life is full of cruel ironies.
Lets try to reverse the situation. Imagine an African scientist creating something that would add a billion White people to the world’s population. Pretty hard to conceive of isn’t it? The White race is its own worst enemy.
“Lets try to Imagine an African scientist creating something that would add a billion White people to the world…”
Now that is a stretch! My imagination won’t go that far.
Norman Borlaug.