Where are Today's Norman Borlaugs?

"Though barely known in the country of his birth, elsewhere in the world Norman Borlaug is widely considered to be among the leading Americans of our age."
--- "Forgotten Benefactor," by Gregg Easterbrook, The Atlantic, January 1997

Norman Borlaug, who died Saturday at age 95, saved the lives of one billion people. Literally saved their lives. As in prevented them from dying from starvation, or starvation-driven war.

Norman Borlaug was not a politican or diplomat. He was not a general or war strategist. He was not a preacher of salvation.

Norman Borlaug was a scientist. Not a nuclear scientist, or a computer scientist, or even a medical research scientist. He was a plant scientist. An agriculture nerd.

He was working in the Wilmington, Del., laboratories of chemical giant DuPont Co. in 1944 when his university mentor, wheat-disease expert Elvin Charles Stakman, recommended him to the Rockefeller Foundation, which was sending a team of U.S. scientists to Mexico to fight widespread hunger by helping its farmers.

Yes, children, within living memory American companies used to donate the time and expertise of their scientists to American charities for the purpose of helping people - poor, non-white, non-protestant, non-english-speaking and non-capitalistic people - in other countries grow enough food to live on.

To make a long and fascinating story far too short, (for the details, read Easterbrook's great profile of Borlaug here.) Borlaug used laboratory breeding techniques to create strains of wheat that would produce grain-heavy heads that would not break off their stalks but would resist common diseases.

At the time, many experts were predicting that by 1970 at the latest, overpopulation in the Third World would outstrip the region's ability to grow food, resulting in mass starvation.

It never happened, because Norman Borlaug's special wheat, augmented with massive amounts of expensive and toxic chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides replaced the dreaded "population bomb" with a "food explosion." It launched the famous Green Revolution, more about the unintended consequences of which in a later post.

Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution did much more than save a billion poor, dark-skinned, mostly un-christian, foreign, socialistic people in Mexico, Pakistan and India from starving to death. It prevented the wars over food and arable land that would have killed far more than a billion people, spread far beyond the Third World and forced planet-wide deforestation and desertification as desperate people struggled to extract calories from land unable to produce it.

He did it without armies, without riches, without divine intervention.

He did it with the unbeatable strength of scientific fact and human reason, the bottomless wealth of human compasssion, and the limitless power of human ingenuity.

Where are the Norman Borlaugs today? I believe they are here among us, in the laboratories and research libraries and experimental plots of universities and corporations and philanthropic foundations.

But the public and political environment is no longer conducive to the way Norman Borlaug worked. Rather than encouraged to use their talents to help others (albeit profiting their employers later), they are bound by secrecy pledges and for-profit contracts and promises of fame.

If the DuPont of 1944 had had the same selfish, anti-social, criminal, profits-at-all-cost attitude of today's pharmaceutical giants and health insurance corporations and Big Oil/Big Coal, Norman Borlaug would have never developed dwarf wheat and today we would be struggling to survive the aftermath of a nuclear World War Three fought over food.

If we don't find a way to free today's Norman Borlaugs from corporate selfishness to find solutions to global warming and rising health care costs and intractable poverty and sectarian hatred and the toxic residue of the Green Revolution itself, then Norman Borlaug's achievement will have been nothing but a momentary pause in our rush to self-destruction.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....