Quick—name someone who has saved lives. I’ll give you a minute or two to come up with a name. Now, how many lives has that person saved? One? Two? Ten? A hundred? Cresco is home to someone who has saved at least a billion lives, and that’s a conservative estimate.
Meet Norman Borlaug, who is the agricultural scientist who ended world hunger. If you grew up in the 1980s, you may have heard about the world hunger problem, and how places like India and Africa were going to be coping (poorly) with massive famines and the resulting shortage of food was going to claim millions of lives. Plenty of people talked about it, plenty of people in the United States government held several meetings where they discussed what could be done about it, and made grave remarks, which is after all why we elected them.
Then there was Norman Borlaug, who got his start in 1944 with the Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program, which was supposed to boost wheat production in Mexico. Norman Borlaug got the Mexican farmers to quadruple their output of wheat, both through implementing advanced farming methods and by developing hardier strains of wheat that were more resistant to changes in temperature and didn’t need as much water to survive. Think about that for a second—by the time Norman Borlaug was done, which took about 16 years to do, Mexico was generating four times the wheat they had originally. Which means four times the people could eat.
Afterwards, Borlaug went to work kickstarting something called “The Green Revolution,” which is an ad-executive created slogan for the fact that Borlaug started developing rice and wheat that could withstand the climates of India and Africa, not to mention be more resistant to disease. Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production by 1968, India became self-sufficient in wheat and rice production in 1974, and Africa…well, it’s getting there.
For anyone who thinks Norman Borlaug introduced “Frankenstein Foods” into the world, I should point out—he did genetically modify the crops, but he DIDN’T go in and tinker with their DNA directly. He got started back in 1945, remember? What he did instead took a lot longer and required a lot more patience—he bred strains of wheat that had the characteristics he wanted until he got a strain that had all of them. Think about how patient he must have been, especially since he and his team had to pollinate entire wheat fields by hand to make sure the breeding was successful. On a related note, there are times I get frustrated when a webpage won’t open after five or ten seconds, and I realize that perhaps I need to relearn the virtue of patience.
Norman Borlaug also has his critics. One of the big criticisms is that since he helped introduce these new strains of wheat and rice and introduced new agricultural methods to third-world and second-world countries, then he is responsible for the massive deforestation that has resulted as humankind has raced to create new large farms that utilize these strains of crops. This is like blaming automobile accidents on Henry Ford, or pornography on George Kodak. The bottom line is that these critics are nitwits.
Besides, Norman Borlaug thought that increased crop production was a wonderful way to cut down on deforestation, no pun intended. The Borlaug Hypothesis states that “Increasing the productivity of agriculture on the best farmland can help control deforestation by reducing the demand for new farmland.” So Borlaug critics can suck it.
Norman Borlaug is also famous, or at least he should be, for getting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for agriculture. Seriously. Agriculture. It sounds funny to award someone for being a good farmer until you realize how many lives being a good farmer saved. But that’s the way farming goes—it’s a quiet little industry, and most farmers aren’t exactly the loud, boisterous types. It seems only fitting somehow that someone who researched agriculture should save the world by being quiet and meticulous.
As an added bonus, Norman Borlaug is also a member of the Iowa Wrestling Hall of Fame. Seriously. They have a picture of him as a middle-aged man, then a picture of him apparently in high school or college, dressed in headgear and a singlet, posed in the standard wrestling position with the “I’m gonna rip off one of your arms” look on his face that the other members of the wrestling hall of fame have. He also made it into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, and let’s face it, he deserves it. I’m trying to think of any other wrestler that can say he also won the Nobel Prize, and I can barely get through the sentence with a straight face. Call me cynical, but I think Norman Borlaug’s induction was more for being a Nobel Prize winner than for any significant contributions to the sport of wrestling itself. Personally, I think a good inscription for his entry should be “Norman Borlaug, first wrestler to win the Nobel Prize…we’re waiting for the second one.”
Regardless, Norman Borlaug died in 2009. He died without the fanfare of other notable 2009 deaths, such as Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, or Patrick Swayze. In fact, he died silently, like a thief in the night. No outcry, no mourning masses…he did get a nice editoral cartoon from Chip Bok though (http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=38741), which doesn’t seem nearly enough.
I just want to point out that we give a lot of attention to celebrities. We pay pro athletes millions of dollars each year, we tune in to the endless stream of talk shows where hosts schmooze with movie stars and musicians, and I do think there is a lot of value in making people happy. But I think that Norman Borlaug day should be more than just a weekend of activities in Cresco, Iowa. I don’t think I’m out of line in thinking a national holiday would be a good start. I think a billion lives the world over is worth that.
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