Country Corner
By Steve Fairchild

Accolades roll in and Norman Borlaug’s revolution rolls on

AT A SPRY 93, NORMAN BORLAUG HAS NO plans to retire. Recently, Borlaug, the celebrated plant scientist, received the Congressional Gold Medal for his lifetime work of tackling world hunger. He adds that honor to a Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Nobel Peace Prize to become one of only five people to have ever achieved all three. He is now peer to Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Holocaust survivor and author, Elie Wiesel.

Borlaug is the only person to have received a Peace Prize for work in agriculture. He took that honor in 1970 after years of work with wheat breeding to develop and adapt high yielding semi-dwarf wheat varieties in Mexico, Pakistan, India and China. From that work, Borlaug is credited with saving more than 1 billion people from famine and starvation. His advancements in crop production helped him become known as the “father of the green revolution” in the 1960s and 1970s.

Borlaug, a farm boy from Cresco, Iowa, was born in 1914 and was of an impressionable age when depression hit the United States in the 1930s. He saw forfeiture sales, poverty and rural hunger. And it made an impression. “I saw all that unfold. And I think that had something to do with how things turned out,” he told a Dallas Morning News reporter in an interview about his career.

While Borlaug may not be traipsing through wheat fields in Mexico anymore, he still works hard to push for food security. By his tenacious nature and trading on his great credibility, Borlaug now champions wise use of biotechnology as the second round of the Green Revolution.

I was in the room a few years ago at the World Agriculture Forum in St. Louis when Borlaug opened the meeting. The forum, as these things typically are, was filled with a mix of scientists, visionaries and bureaucrats. They had flown in from various far-flung countries to discuss the world’s agriculture and food needs. Of course, questions about biotechnology were raised, and there was a great gnashing of teeth about its proper place in the world.

Norman Borlaug took the podium to vigorous applause, stood before the crowd and, without apology or reservation, admonished all of us for wavering on biotechnology. He shook his finger. He said it was time for more than talk.
That’s a tall order for a conference filled with politicians and bureaucrats. But Borlaug’s worldview reaches beyond today’s real politick. He speaks from the experience of hot dusty days in Mexican wheat fields and war-ravaged Pakistan.

Right now he believes African agriculture has potential to undergo a productive revolution of its own. But that’s why he wags a finger at the crowd. He says you can’t eat potential. It takes the reality of grain and other food to relieve misery. To help Africa, there must be some true reconciliation among food politics partisans.

At a July ceremony to deliver the medal, President Bush said, “Norman Borlaug’s life has taken him from laboratories in America and Mexico to dusty villages throughout the developing world. He’s helped inspire students at Texas A&M, where an institute bearing his name is dedicated to completing his life’s work.”

But Borlaug’s life work isn’t over. There is more work to do in the revolution. Ask him if he will ever retire and Borlaug will tell you his plan is to die with his boots on—working.

Here’s to those boots walking many a mile more.

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